Cemetery Walking

I know this is likely a weird topic to start the new year off with, but I come from a morbid family. This is how we roll.


My family has a weird thing for cemeteries. We like to walk in them and take pictures of them and speculate as to how the people in them died. Dad takes his two puppies out for walks through the graveyard on the other side of the field behind their house. We’ve gone that way the last couple of days for puppy walks, and I think it’s just the most interesting place.

In the Ukraine, people take care of their families’ graves. Fresh flowers get put on them fairly often, the grass gets tended, and food and vodka sometimes gets left for the dead. The puppies apparently LOVE when that happens. Each grave, or sometimes the family plot, is surrounded by a fence, and the gate is always left open. Dad’s not sure why, and neither am I. There are benches and little picnic tables all over the graveyard, for family to come sit at and visit their loved ones.

A typical grave with an open gate and a bench out front

There aren’t many graves for people that are over 70 or 80, and if there are it’s usually women. Most of the graves seem to be for people who died in their 50s and 60s. There are also a lot of graves for people in their 20s and 30s.

Grave for a set of twins that died. Age 28, I think.

A very Ukrainian thing is to have a picture of the dead person on their gravestone. Sometimes it’s an actual photograph behind glass and sometimes the picture is cut into the gravestone like below. I assume that’s some sort of laser work, but I’m not sure.

Yesterday while Dad and I were walking, we came across two ladies who were visiting a grave. They stopped us and gave us candy, which is a tradition in the Ukraine. You give candy to people walking by in remembrance of the person you’re there to mourn. I wish I could have understood the poor woman better, because she was crying so hard. It just broke our hearts. Dad thinks she was there to visit her 17-year-old grandson. There are words that you’re supposed to say to someone when they give you candy in honour of their loved one, but Dad didn’t know them, so he told them to me in English. He figures she understood just the same.

Dad beside the graveyard.