FRAY
As a child, a regular outing with my mother and grandmother involved visiting the graves of deceased family members at Fawkner cemetery in Melbourne. During these excursions I would be met by an array of ‘fresh’ artificial flowers embellishing most of the graves in the Italian section of the cemetery. The often elaborate and imposing dark marble tombstones together with these vivid floral arrangements seemed to me quite garish. I also thought it comical and ironic that perhaps the fake flowers could even defy mortality.
More recently, I have found myself spending a lot of time walking through the Melbourne General Cemetery situated close to my house. Once again, I notice the artificial flowers but this time I am drawn to the abundance of discarded, displaced and disintegrating flowers blown by the wind, now lost.
Irvin D. Yalom suggests that we die twice. "Someday soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory”.[i]There is a beauty in the fragile, pale patina of these flowers that for me reveals the story of time and possibly exposes the extent to which other’s memories of the deceased have also faded.
[1] Irvin D. Yalom: Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, Basic Books, 2012
