There are more people buried in Glasnevin Cemetery than there are alive in Dublin today. Naturally, this makes sense, but we don’t like to speak about death these days. The Victorians embraced the subject more, carrying their memento mori and commissioning fantastical headstone whimsies. Glasnevin has embraced columbaria but has remained shy of ossuary towers, although the O’Connell Tower could be viewed as a gesture to a tower of silence albeit hewn through an Irish round tower reference. Walking beneath the arching yews, the headstones and monuments cast long shadows from the waning light. Each stone, font, wording is carefully considered. The great, the good, the bad and the unremarkable are buried cheek by jowl under stones smattered with blood red seeds dripping from the cemetery yews. All facing the rising sun, except the buried clergy who face west that they may lead their risen flock on the ‘Last Day’.
De Valera’s grave has no flowers and Joseph Mary Plunkett’s is understated. Maud Gonne’s is low and wide; whilst that of Michael Collins is festooned in petrol station bouquets. There were carved Hallowe’en pumpkins left on a recently dug grave for twin baby boys who died a day apart and an elaborate private chapel erected over the wealthy Boland family vault. This cemetery holds the feet that walked our streets before us, the people who looked through the windows of our homes before we did, the elderly who used the same post offices as us and the children that spent day trips at the same beaches as we do now. These are the dead of our neighbourhoods, the dead of our history books; the humanity that came before us. Where and how shall we be remembered? What memorial, what font, what wording, will be chosen for us and by whom?