Cemetery Sunday took place on the first Sunday of November. Dressed in our best we accompanied our parents to the town cemetery. I, as eldest, sometimes had to explain to the current youngest that our paternal grandparents and Auntie Josie were buried in Omagh, a far-away town.
Clad in an ornate black chasuble, our Parish Priest, preceded by a server carrying aloft a tall brass crucifix, led the procession of Mass servers and parishioners into the bleak stone chapel built on the highest point of the cemetery. A single bell tolled the same mournful note which heralded the arrival of a funeral to the cemetery. The Rosary was prayed. The choir sang a dirge-like hymn about the suffering souls in Purgatory.
The Parish Priest spoke at length on the brevity of life, the grief and the honour we were paying to our dead. The chill of early Winter seeped into the marrow. People wept and shivered. There was an incongruity about the bright wreaths and flowers lying on the graves.
For us Cemetery Sunday was not particularly harrowing. We had as yet no special grave to visit. If our father’s thoughts were with his family in Killyclogher Cemetery on that day, he never said so, but our gentle mother never left his side on those Sunday afternoons.
Then came the terrible Cemetery Sunday when we stood around a six-month grave. The wooden cross bore the name of our father. This, too, was the first Cemetery Sunday for our new Parish Priest. The procession duly made its way to the cemetery chapel. Tears rolled down as the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary were prayed and the choir sang at its most mournful.
The Parish Priest began his homily. He spoke of the love that had brought us to the cemetery that day. We had loved them in life. In our remembering we were honouring them and expressing our love for those who had gone before us. Mary his mother, the disciple John and the women disciples had wept inconsolably for Jesus when he died on Calvary. Mary Magdalen wept at the tomb on that first Easter Sunday. Soon the tears were dried. Jesus had returned to them in his glorious Resurrection as those who lay here, as we in our turn, would rise again in the glory of Christ. The November breeze dried the wet faces. Hands squeezed on Rosary beads; not a grasp of despair but a gesture of hope that we were not parted forever from our beloved dead.
In later years the Parish Priest changed the date of Cemetery Sunday to a Sunday in August. November was too bleak a month. The bare trees spoke of death and in the Winter chill it was all too easy to despair. In the warm and mellow month of August maybe those who mourned would somehow experience the warmth of the Divine Love in the promise of the Resurrection.
Of late my November pilgrimage of honour to my beloved dead is a pilgrimage to the cemetery of the SMA order in Cork, where our Uncle Peter lies with those other SMA priests and brothers who offered their lives so willingly and joyfully to God as missionaries. Praying the Mass and standing by the grave I was usually assailed with loneliness at the loss of my parents who died too young, and all dear to me who are gone.
In the 150th anniversary year of the founding of the SMA order, their Cemetery Sunday took place in June. I made my way to Uncle Peter’s grave, placed on it a single white Rose and felt my face breaking into a smile. Crowding into my mind came images of happy times. We as children asking our uncle if their father had really bathed his sons in the river Shrule? Chuckling with delight as his formidable sisters spoke to our father as if he were a small boy. Our mother stepping lightly around our kitchen, looking after our visitors; the jingle of coins in our pockets; the delicious taste of strange sweets from Up North.
The concept of an afterlife is a difficult one. For me Heaven is our enormous kitchen with currant bread and sponge cake cooling on wire racks on the table, the kettle whistling on the Stanley range and gathered there, talking, laughing, yarning are the people l loved in life. I no longer mourn for them as they are still with me in spirit.
This November, may you too, when you stand at the grave of a loved one, find yourself smiling as you remember them in the happy times you shared, and know that those whom we loved in life remain very near to us even as they sit at the right hand of God.