In a sense, every cemetery is virtual, because we bury cadavers in graveyards, not people. As Mary Roach says of her experiences after her mother’s death, “My mom was never a cadaver; no person ever is. You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. My mother was gone. The cadaver was her hull.”

As we walk the paths of a cemetery, we interact with the dead through our personal cognitive interface with the person. The site is merely a liminal space that allows us to step out of our everyday lives and into the world of that relationship. All the same, the Internet abounds in all kinds of opportunities to wander through a graveyard, for all the complicated reasons that people do so.

In 1947, Evelyn Waugh lauded Forest Lawn cemetery as reversing a trend in the treatment of the departed. “The wish to furnish the dead with magnificent habitations, to make an enduring record of their virtues and victories, to honour them and edify their descendants, raised all the great monuments of antiquity, the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, St. Peter’s at Rome, and was the mainspring of all the visual arts. It died, mysteriously and suddenly, at the end of the nineteenth century.” The Internet has endowed us with Forest Lawns for everyone. In fact, if you don’t mind that your plot is a tiny one, you can even memorialize your dead on the iPhone.

I’ve been thinking about our interface with death for a variety of reasons. I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and I’ve also been teaching my Young Adult Fiction class about zombies. Oh, yes, and I was so intrigued that I picked up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you think that I’m going through a morbid spell, you may be unaware that these days we have reconfigured the dead, the undead and the post-dead to be charming and interesting.

Not Your Mother’s Vampire explains that with Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, the representation of the undead and their little friends has changed. In Rice’s work, vampires are three-dimensional individuals, each with his and her own character and morals, not just generic bogeymen with a marginal role, jumping out once or twice to scare the humans. The undead are front and center in newer vampire novels, and their most important roles are motivated by their complex interactions with human beings.

Our modern vampires are also rich and powerful, and their lives seem attractive and desirable, notably in Stephanie Meyer’s incredibly popular Twilight series. Bella, Meyer’s heroine, spends the better part of four thick books wheedling a way to be made a vampire. In effect, the vampire is our new superhero, all the hero we can stand in our violent, cynical age. It seems, paradoxically, that these stories about death give us the courage to be alive.

The Graveyard Book works much the same way. Gaiman wrote it as a version of The Jungle Book, so his cemetery is the functional equivalent of Rudyard Kipling’s jungle. In fact, when the foundling is delivered to the graveyard, the dead agree to care for it and give it “Freedom of the Graveyard,” the ability to share the powers of the dead. As the residents of the cemetery work out the complicated tasks involved in taking in baby Bod, one says, “It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will … take a graveyard.”

The dead raise the baby, but the effect of Gaiman’s book is not ghoulish, it is, in a sense, freeing to see death as a positive force in our lives. One Internet commenter notes, “… your perception of cemeteries will likely be altered by the Graveyard Book.” Originally Christians buried their dead in graveyards attached to their churches, and so churchgoers at least would interface with them regularly. But as the hosts of the dead became vaster, we park them ever farther from our usual circuit, and commune with them less.

Some Christians hear on Ash Wednesday, “Remember man that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return,” but the smudgy thumbprint they receive is pretty abstract as a memento mori, when you can take a walk in atmospheric Highgate Cemetery West, courtesy of YouTube. This cemetery inspired Gaiman’s depiction of his graveyard. I found two wonderful YouTube journeys through it, a lyrical one accompanied by the music of Danny Elfman from Edward Scissorhands. This one had some great comments that well represent the complexity of visiting the dead (all sic):

• I went to Highgate in the early 1990s and it’s an amazing place, such incredible atmosphere. Hammer Films used the West part of the cemetery in some of their horror movies.
• i h8t this vidio who likes death thats dum fuck sake thats fukin dred blud
• What a beautiful cemetery. I don’t know why I love cemeteries so much. I think it’s because of my connections with the angel of death.

The other Highgate West tour I liked on YouTube was rather creepier, done with a hand-held camera and sporting a soundtrack of “Masked Ball” by Jocelyn Pook. That’s the ominous music from the climactic scene of Eyes Wide Shut.

Of course, if your interest in the dead is specific and you’re not just looking for the atmosphere of a cemetery, you can visit Highgate West on Find a Grave, a fine resource for touring cemeteries, and leaving “flowers,” as comments are known, on individual graves. Michael Faraday and Christina Rossetti are buried at Highgate West, and you can find Charles Dickens’ family there, but the author himself is in Westminster Abbey which has rather siphoned off the crème de la crème. On a family trip to London, it was there that we found Dickens, and my son, no fan of Great Expectations, executed a sprightly soft-shoe on his grave. The website does not as of yet have a virtual way of doing that.

Still, I have had some fine times on Find a Grave, visiting the graves of some of my heroes, including Judy Garland (the “flowers” include: “Some where over the rainbow ~ I hope you are resting in Heavenly peace. Thank you for your beautiful music”) and Walt Whitman, who designed his own memorial. If you become a real devotee (I have not gone this far), you can also buy a Find a Grave t-shirt at the website’s store. You can’t make this stuff up.

The Highgate West cemetery reminds me of the one in the Great Wood of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. My father was laid to rest there in a small grave rather crowded with our relatives. He is under great old trees near atmospheric statues of angels and impressive obelisks. I haven’t yet added his grave to the Find a Grave database, but I did look up the cemetery on Wikimapia, and though it is only a blurry aerial view, I find looking at it comforting, a way of thinking myself onto the pebbled lanes so far away, clutching a bunch of carnations and thinking back on times worth remembering.

And I am not alone. Radio Prague has provided a virtual cemetery to honor the ages-old custom of visiting the dead on All Souls’ Day for those who are far from the resting places of their loved ones on November 1st. On that site, there is streaming audio which characterizes the paradoxical nature of the event in the Czech Republic as follows:

In communist, atheist Czechoslovakia there was virtually a cult of the tombstone, especially in villages, with families vying with each other for the biggest, most monumental, and best kept grave. With the fall of communism the Christian element of All Souls’ has made a comeback, and attempts by some would-be Czech Celts to introduce the rather more pagan festival of Hallowe’en have also met with some success. So just like Christmas or Easter the feast survives here as a quirky mixture of the religious, the secular and the pagan.

In the treatment of the dead you can see in microcosm the history of a people. The dead are the ultimate other, what we are not, and in this view cemeteries are a way of forging connections between the living and the dead, and making contact with our ultimate humanity. Liminal spaces. At least that is how I have always thought of them.

Gaiman seems to agree, as he has a scene called the “Dance Macabray” in which the living find true peace in dancing with the dead:

They took hands, the living with the dead, and they began to dance. … The music filled Bod’s head and chest with a fierce joy, and his feet moved as if they knew the steps already, had known them forever. … He saw the living dancing with the dead. And the one-on-one dances became long lines of people stepping together in unison, walking and kicking (La-la-la-oomp! La-la-la-oomp!) a line dance that had been ancient a thousand years before.

I have a cousin Sanyi whose line of work is the investigation of Jewish heritage, largely for those who lost relatives in (WARNING: don’t click the next link unless you are able to deal with gruesome material) the Holocaust. He will track down the records of a family, go to the cemetery and bring back pictures of the gravestones, where they exist. He also takes pictures of other remnants of Judaica. My cousin is not yet on the Internet, but Israel Pickholtz, who is, has produced a Virtual Family Cemetery in which he has been able to reunite his family. In microcosm, the history of a people.

In fact, genealogists of all sorts have found the Internet a useful resource, for researching and sharing representations of their own families and those of others. You could say that this is the semi-pro and professional end of Find a Grave. I don’t think you can be a community on the Internet without having your own memes, and theirs include Tombstone Tuesday (it can also be Tombstone Thursday) which was actually the inspiration for this piece, although you’d never know it.

The idea is that on the given day, genealogists post a picture of a gravestone from their research, with or without a narrative to accompany it. I found this meme and began to think about how we all have our own Tombstone Tuesdays, whether we want to or not. Although I lack the genealogical impulse, it is actually kind of comforting to think about all those tombstones we are connected to.

I have to say, though, that my favorite of all the Internet cemeteries have been the ones where owners can honor their pets. The “flowers” there are often quite wonderful. Here is a nice one by the Harbur family lamenting the loss of a parakeet, “A Poem for Emerson“:

Emerson, you silly bird…you’ve left us in the lurch!
You only lasted three days before falling off your perch!
At first it was a crushing blow (though now we are much calmer),
And still we have your cage-mates: the feathered “Lake” and “Palmer”.
So Emerson you leave behind this simple legacy:
a deep appreciation for the “Pet Smart” Guarantee!

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