Living With The Death Woman by Simon Collison

Most families have one, apparently.

A person who is concerned with the visits, upkeep and well being of the family graves.

In our family it's my wife, Lynn who does the visits to the cemetery.

Just the other day Lynn was due to go to a party and she said she’d go early to tidy up the graves of her auntie, grandmother and my nan, because in her words,

  “I’m the Death Woman.”

  I never knew that Lynn was a “Death Woman”, until after we were married, some time after the weddings, christenings, confirmations and graduations gradually gave way to sickness, death and funerals. With each new grave came a new addition for my wife, “The Death Woman”, to take care of. And I’d get dragged along as some mumbling, shambling sidekick who did all the lifting, carrying and pulling out weeds.

  I wondered if when my wife became, “The Death Woman”, if there were some shimmering spirit, who came down from the heavens in the form of Glenn Ford to give her a trowel, a mallet and a pair of sensible shoes, telling her gruffly, “With grave power, comes grave responsibility”. Is that when she also got her Death Woman name, “Lynn Reaper”?

  If they made a film out of “The Death Woman” they’d get some stellar actress to play Lynn. Someone like Meryl Streep or Anjelica Houston. My part? They’d get that guy who played Gollum to do my scenes. She’d get all the best lines. I’d be there for comedic relief, lolloping around in the background like some buffoon's prat.

  But that's Hollywood. In real life guardians of the grave aren’t chosen; they emerge like the weeds that weep around a freshly planted gravestone.

  So when Lynn’s father said he wanted to find his long lost family grave, it was a task undertaken by my wife, “The Death woman”. Her sister, I suppose the “Enjoy Life to the full Woman” took care of the birthdays, parties, trips, concerts, meals out, cinema, holidays and looked after his bank account.

  My wife got what was left and dealt with doctors and death.

The task of finding the lost family grave was difficult because the cemetery was  huge.  There were thousands of graves. All we had to go on was a piece of paper that Lynn’s dad had in his big bundle of papers. This had a number, a plot number. It was owned by Mrs Bennet, a friend of the family in the old days. Lynn called for help from her cousin Sally aka, “Cemetery Sally” who was another “Death Woman”.

  Eventually with lots of phone calls and a cemetery map the long lost grave was found. It lay a couple of rows from Cilla Black's grave. “The Death Woman” jumped into the family car aka “The Death mobile” and drove recklessly fast, towards the cemetery, like a bat out of…

  Lynn’s dad was overjoyed, but when we first saw it was just a plain slab overgrown with grass and weeds. It hadn't been touched for decades.

Now began the task of clearing the plot of weeds, trimming the grass and cleaning the stone slab. Lynn cut her hand on the stone. She was jagged by the thorns. As I dug out the weeds the thought occurred to me that I was getting close up to the final resting place of the dead.

Too close…

  Each strike of the trowel would send the dead stirring and screaming at me. At any moment the angry and indignant dead would swarm out  smothering and strangling me in a malodorous miasma. I feared that if I dug too deep I’d be waking them up and they'd be grabbing my hand and dragging me down to join them. I was an extremely squeamish sidekick in this macabre and morbid mission.

  Visiting and working on the graves made me feel uneasy and nervous. I had this idea in my head that I’d better tread softly in the cemetery, for to disturb the dead never ends well for the disturber.

After several visits the grave was looking decent. Lynn’s dad came to visit and she took photos of her dad smiling by the restored family grave. We came in all seasons. The most memorable on a wet day as we struggled to push Death Woman’s dad’s mobility scooter over the mud.

This was a grave with more than its fair share of our blood, sweat and tears, not forgetting the skin scraped off as we cleaned and scrubbed the gravestone.

  Each new visit saw additions to the grave. Flowers and ornaments, a large black marble slab to keep the weeds at bay, a little fence to make it more private. We got a plaque made to give names to the family buried there and as Lynn’s dad’s family came from Sweden, he wanted a Swedish badge placed on the grave.

We stuck it down with strong glue to make sure it wouldn’t be knocked off. We put glue under the black slab to make sure that it didn’t move out of place.

  We took lots of pictures of the found grave with Lynn’s dad beaming over a well kept plot. Each family visitor was treated to a trip to see the newly found family grave to have their photograph taken next to it and it was added to the collection.

  But then Lynn’s dad died. He wished to be buried near his family.

The deadly duo were once more called back into action to sort this out. I did wonder if some special sign was sent up in the sky like a giant black scythe as a signal for Lynn Reaper and Cemetery Sally to leap into action and get to work as ” Women of Death”. As Lynn had a lot to do with her dad’s funeral, it was Sally who did most of the work. Getting buried there was expensive, but as his family were buried there already, he would get a large discount.

After the funeral Sally said she needed to speak to Lynn. There was a problem.

Sally had found out that Lynn’s dads family were not buried in the grave we thought it was. Someone else was buried there. The grave we had visited in all weathers, had weeded and tidied up for the past eight years, had cut and scraped our skin and bled for, was someone else’s grave.

  Sally found out Lynn's dad's family were buried on the other side of the cemetery, nowhere near Cilla Black.

  So once again the grave guardians, Lynn Reaper and Cemetery Sally set about finding the right grave. That was the easy part.

The hard part was removing all the items from the stranger's grave to the newly found family grave. Along with the usual graveyard equipment, we also took crowbars and our sons. What any passerby would have thought of the sight of a grave that was being stripped of everything, as a group of adults were hammering and chiseling away. It was like an act of desecration and defilement, as we all were frantically and furiously working away to dislodge the additions to the stranger’s  grave, pulling and lifting with all our might, wrenching away the burdens and weight of eight years of mourning.

  We were like latter day Burke and Hares risen in the morning to carry out their morbid missions in the afternoon.

  There was me anxiously asking. “Is it right what we’re doing, Is it legal? What will Cilla say?” and the Death Woman replied, “Shut up, keep prising, just get that slab removed”.

  For the Death Woman knew no incertitude and liked to get a job done. I used to say to her, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and she’d reply, “It would have been if I'd been in charge”.

  I think that if Lynn had been put in charge of HS2 the whole project would have been done and dusted, ahead of time and under budget. There certainly is an air of a grim determination about Lynn. Which isn’t surprising, after all she’s the Death Woman.

Those badges and plaques we had glued on took ages to shift. That black slab had to be lifted with crowbars.  Like a party of sappers we got to work to shift and strip the grave. Removing all signs of our remembrances, save one, a solitary bouquet of dead flowers.

  It seemed fitting she was the Death Woman after all.