Remembrance at Père-Lachaise

2020 has been a very strange year. In the wake of the corona virus, it feels like the grim reaper has been closer than usual. Today is the day of remembering the dead. I recently visited a cemetery in my home town, where I found some structures that reminded me of the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

A few years ago, I was walking across Père-Lachaise on a sunny autumn day. Père-Lachaise isn’t just a graveyard for the famous names like Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. It’s a city of stone and memory, sprawling and relentless.

Raspail family grave.

The family grave of François-Vincent Raspail gained extra recognition when it was used on the cover of the 1987 album Within the Realm of a Dying Sun by Dead Can Dance. It can be found near the roundabout Casimir Perier, but easy to miss if you’re not looking for it.

Grave of Jim Morrison.

Mark Twain visited the cemetery in 1867 and described it in his book The Innocents Abroad:

“One of our pleasantest visits was to Pere la Chaise, the national burying-ground of France, the honored resting-place of some of her greatest and best children, the last home of scores of illustrious men and women who were born to no titles, but achieved fame by their own energy and their own genius. It is a solemn city of winding streets and of miniature marble temples and mansions of the dead gleaming white from out a wilderness of foliage and fresh flowers. Not every city is so well peopled as this, or has so ample an area within its walls. Few palaces exist in any city that are so exquisite in design, so rich in art, so costly in material, so graceful, so beautiful.”
— Mark Twain (1867)

Chemin Lauriston.

It’s like a city within a city, replacing traffic noise with solemn silence. The high rise at Avenue Feuillant offers glimpses all the way to Notre Dame, Montparnasse tower and the Eiffel Tower.

Avenue Principale, Père-Lachaise.

While walking along the lanes, surrounded by bones and dust, some may feel a sense of dread, or even impending doom. The thought of mortality can be a heavy burden to bear in death’s shadow. But I prefer to see it in another light. Death is the sharp edge that slices away vanity, fear and hesitation. In the words of Steve Jobs:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
— Steve Jobs (2005)

Let the dead remind you of the living. Embrace what matters. Focus on the truly important.