#17 GOOD GRIEF NEWS
What if cemeteries disappeared?
Own image (cemetery in Oban, Scotland)
I have a strange relationship with cemeteries. I love how they provide a sense of calm and serenity in busy cities, and I enjoy wandering around them and absorbing the stories of a culture when travelling. In fact, for the past few years I’ve lived around the corner from a beautiful little cemetery where I often go for evening walks. And yet: I can’t quite imagine being buried in one.
It feels impersonal to me. The thought of lying forever among strangers is weird. It's not a community I chose, but one that has been imposed on me. And I’m not alone: many friends and family members feel no pull towards cemeteries either. Some dislike the religious connotations. Others live far from 'their' family plot. Some instead look to natural burial grounds, scattering ashes in beloved landscapes or keeping memories close through objects, rituals or digital spaces.
As a trend researcher, I’m often asked: Are cemeteries still relevant today? But perhaps the sharper question, raised recently in a newsletter by DeathLab Afterfin, is:
👉 What would we lose if cemeteries disappeared altogether?
Their answer: “More than a practical place to bury bodies. We lose ritual, memory, a sense of continuity. The Etruscans built necropolises – cities of the dead that mirrored the living, a reminder that death is part of the city’s story, not just its endnote. Without cemeteries, would we forget to remember? Maybe we’d find new ways to mark absence. Digital memorials. Forest groves. Names etched into city walls. Or maybe we’d just keep moving, never pausing, never looking back.”
This question inspired me to think about my perspective on this. Here are my reflections on what cemeteries hold for us:
Continuation of community
A cemetery is a reminder that grief is not solitary. Standing among many graves makes visible that also others have lost, loved, and mourned. For the dying, it can be comforting to imagine resting not in isolation but within a community of the dead. In Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, cemeteries become vibrant gathering places where the dead are not just remembered but welcomed back. Without such spaces, our mourning risks becoming increasingly private, invisible, and unshared.
Meditating on temporality
Cemeteries encourage us to pause. They serve as visual reminders of impermanence, prompting us to reflect on the briefness and value of life. In Japan, the tradition of visiting ancestral graves during Obon is as much about the living reaffirming their place in the cycle of generations as it is about honouring the dead. Without cemeteries, we might lose these quiet encounters with mortality. While a digital memorial page can connect mourners across time zones, it cannot recreate the sensation of autumn leaves crunching underfoot while reading the name of someone who died 200 years ago.
Own image (cemetery in Broek in Waterland, The Netherlands)
Visiting the ancestors
Gravestones are family archives in stone. They tell stories of wars, epidemics, personal tragedies, and migration, the inscriptions of children who died in infancy whisper resilience and heartbreak. In the Merry Cemetery in Săpânța, Romania, the graves are painted in bright colours and each one is decorated with a carved image and a short verse that captures the essence of the deceased's life, often with a humorous twist. Without cemeteries, we lose a form of storytelling rooted in the land itself.
Heritage preservation
Cemeteries are time capsules. They preserve art, architecture, and social memory. Think of Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Tomb in Italy, a masterpiece of modernist architecture, or consider the 'talking stones' of Amrum and Föhr, which tell the stories of seafaring lives through symbols as well as words. Today, TikTok’s “grave cleaning” creators show us how even neglected stones can carry voices from the past. To erase cemeteries would mean erasing a vast archive of cultural identity.
Valuing every life
Even the most modest graves carry a radical message: that every life deserves recognition. Cemeteries often hold plots for the poor, the homeless, or the unidentified. This tradition, especially consolidated in the 19th century, reflects the belief that “everyone has a right to her or his own little box for decay.” (Foucault) In erasing cemeteries, we might erase the public acknowledgment that every life counts, no matter how it ended.
Picture about the ‘Lonely Funerals’ in The Netherlands by The Happy Broadcast
Spiritual support & rituals
Burial grounds serve not only as practical storage for bodies, but also as spiritual anchors and thresholds. In Japan, where family structures are changing and urban space is limited, high-rise columbaria house ashes in illuminated lockers, and priests offer daily prayers on behalf of families. In Muslim and Jewish traditions, graves remain sacred points of contact where prayers and rituals are performed long after burial. Cemeteries mark a transition into a space where silence and ritual influence how we move, speak and think. Without cemeteries, where would these practices take root?
Cemeteries as cultural spaces
Increasingly, cemeteries are reimagined as places of culture and art. Mount Auburn in Boston has an artist-in-residence program. The Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., hosts yoga, film screenings, even dog-walking groups. These events may feel unusual, but they also echo older traditions when cemeteries were among the first public parks, places for carriage rides and picnics. Without cemeteries, we might lose a vital hybrid of mourning space and cultural commons.
Preserving nature
Many cemeteries are surprisingly biodiverse. They safeguard green space in dense cities, hosting birds, insects, and plants that would otherwise vanish. In some European cities, cemeteries are among the last refuges for endangered species. If we paved over cemeteries, we would not just erase memory, but also ecosystems.
👉 So, what if cemeteries disappeared?
Cemeteries are not universal. In Bali, cremation rituals dissolve the body back into cosmic cycles. In parts of Tibet, sky burials return the body directly to birds and sky. We might not always need a physical space to remember loved ones.
But without cemeteries we’d lose cultural heritage, historical archives, habitats, and rituals. More importantly, we’d lose a mirror. Cemeteries show us who we are by revealing who came before us. They are as much about the living as the dead.
And maybe that’s the point: cemeteries demand something from us. Visiting them is inconvenient; it takes effort and disrupts daily life. But in that friction lies their meaning. Through stone, silence and space, they remind us that memory is important and that life is precious. By remembering, we keep them and ourselves alive in the story.
Own image (ancient cemetery on the island of Paros, Greece)
✨ Further Reading, Watching & Wondering
1. Nature burial in The Netherlands
In the latest Eternity Magazine I wrote an article about the success of nature burial grounds here in the Netherlands, inspired by research from Brenda Matthijssen. The article highlights various reasons and explains that sustainability is often not the issue at all.
👉 [German article] (p.12 onwards) + [English study]
2. Poetic gravestones
Stones that tell stories: Andreas Magera designs gravestones that are personal, playful, and full of love for detail. Some even invite interaction. They are proof that memorials can be alive with imagination.
👉 Atelier Magera on Instagram
3. Singing stones
In San Sperate, Sardinia, the artist Pinuccio Sciola created a garden of sound stones. They’re not gravestones, but I can’t help imagining how magical it would be if they were.
👉 Giardino Sonoro
4. Film: Cemetery
A hauntingly beautiful 2019 film that follows an elephant and his mahout to a mythical elephant graveyard. What begins as documentary slowly drifts into dream, a meditation on death, rebirth, and immortality.
👉 Trailer
5. Campus Vivorum
An experimental “cemetery of the future” in Germany. A living lab for rethinking spaces of death, grief, and remembrance.
👉 Campus Vivorum
6. Graveyards as ancestral villages
Death doula Dr. Sarah Kerr reminds us that graveyards are not just places of loss but portals of connection, where the dead and the living remain in relationship.
👉 Watch here
7. Book: Cemeteries of the World
A visual journey across some of the most fascinating cemeteries worldwide. A reminder that remembrance can take countless forms.
👉 Book link
Gravestone by Aterlier Andreas Magera
Thanks for reading!
> Thanks for reading GOOD GRIEF NEWS, a monthly newsletter on trends and fresh perspectives around death, grief and remembrance. You can see more of my work at goodgrief.me or stefanieschillmoeller.com and feel free to follow me on Instagram.
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02.09.2025