Memorials are important to those left behind. They act as a focal point for remembering, they perform a function in us publicly marking someone’s death and they raise the hope and expectation that we ourselves will be similarly commemorated when the time comes.
Churches, having been the purveyors of all things after-life for so long, are the obvious favourites for somewhere to place a token of someone’s time on this earth. They offer the sense of having gone somewhere better as well as protection of the soul and a decent shot at permanence. For those not really dedicated to church life, there are alternatives of course. Football grounds, pub gardens, beauty spots and so on are all decent resting places for someone’s ashes. They’ll all mean something to somebody.
Choosing a place to become a memorial usually means picking somewhere which you shared with the person you are attempting to commemorate. A shared house, a school, a place of work or just somewhere you both loved. It has to be somewhere you can come back to year after year.
But the march of progress seems to render permanence a rare quality these days. Unless you’re lucky enough to have a permanent memorial inside another permanent memorial - a flagstone inside Westminster Abbey for example - you’re always going to be at the mercy of life just moving on.
So it was with my sister. The lovely cottage maternity unit in which we were born in Weston-super-Mare is no longer there. Our mutual primary school in Bristol is currently being renamed thanks to its associations with the wealth and wishes of the slave trader Edward Colston - no bad change at all but not exactly what you’d look for in a place of tranquil rest. A similar change of name appears to have hit the comprehensive school we shared, this time entirely due to its failing performance statistics and the fact that huge tracts of its playing fields are now given over to housing.
We were not great churchgoers but we did like music. My sister and I both sang in the closest church to our first home in Bristol. Last time I walked past the church of St Saviours, it had become some sort of designer office space.
There was a second church we liked, the school’s official church just down the road. St Mary’s in Henbury was well-known locally and further afield as being the resting place of one Scipio Africanus whose double headstone (or probably more accurately its terrible message of gratitude for being made a Christian) has in the last week or so been smashed in the row and counter-row over Bristol’s deeply-embedded slave trade past. I’m glad I didn’t choose there then.
In the end we chose a place where she’d probably been happiest - Warwick University - and a specific spot unlikely to be built on despite the university’s seemingly insatiable appetite for new blocks. She rests on the bottom of the nature reserve lake having been launched from a spot on the bank I can usually find as I walk past.
It’s a bit of a challenge to get through the nettles at the moment but it’s always good to spend a few moments thinking about the daftness of trying to say something to someone who’s no longer there. This time around she’d have been 60. Perhaps, then, the purpose of memorials is to make those of us left behind uncomfortably aware of the fact that, even in times of repose and contemplation, time marches on.
