What spending 25 years in the world's graveyards has taught me

Mariana Enriquez never intended to turn her lifelong fascination with burial grounds into a book until a friend in Argentina discovered her mother’s ‘disappeared’ body.

“I come from Argentina that had many dictatorships but had one in the ‘70s and early ‘80s that was very cruel and very violent, and left approximately... 30,000 dead,” the writer told RNZ’s Saturday Mornings.

The mother of Enriquez's friend was found in an unmarked mass grave. When the woman decided to give her a real burial, Enriquez realised where her interest in burial grounds came from.

“And I decided that my fascination with graves was clearly coming from the fact that I grew up in a country where having a grave was something lucky,” she says.

Her latest book,Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, documents over 25 years of visiting some of the world's most famous cemeteries, and some of the world's forgotten ones too.

For a writer, cemeteries are a place of life and of stories, she says.

“They are like a machine of stories. But I think what's weird is admitting to it, because many people think it's morbid, it's not, it's a place of remembrance.”

The Tasmanian-based writer sees cemeteries as beautiful places.

“But if you think about it, it's a place of stories, of the stories of the people, of what we do with our dead, what we don't do, which are the important dead, who are the dead that nobody cares about.

“It's a reflection of us. And of course, most of them are beautiful, very beautiful.”

It is only recently in human history that we have become uncomfortable with death, she says.

“Death became not something that happens to us, but some kind of a tragedy, which it's not.

“It's something painful, and it's something sad, but it's what happens and somehow we rejected that.”

There is a modern fixation with longevity, she says.

“In the last few years I sometimes feel like I'm in some kind of, generated reality where there's constant messages telling me, you don't have to die, or if you drink collagen, you won't die.

“And this fight against death is very disturbing. I mean, it's so anti-human in a way.”

This denial of death, she believes, is only going to get worse.

"I'm very realistic that way. So in some way, I want to kind of rescue these places...be someone that remembers these places."

While the writer, whose The Dangers of Smoking in Bed was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, has visited hundreds of graveyards, she’s never experienced a ghostly presence, she says.

“Maybe I'm not sensitive to that kind of thing. Maybe I am very rational. Maybe my fascination is so intense and so related to narrative and to literature that I don't want it contaminated with a real visceral experience or being scared of it.

“What I can say is that I believe people when they tell me a story about seeing the dead or being visited by a spirit or whatever, I don't think they're lying, but it never happened to me.”

Somebody is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential books of the last year.