I sat down on a large and perfectly angled gravestone at Garratt Lane Old Burial Ground in London. While sipping my Starbucks coffee I thought about a phrase that one of my best friends once told me.
“When I am very happy, I go to the cemetery. I also go to the cemetery when I am too upset. Cemeteries are great places to remind myself to appreciate life. It reminds me that I turn into 21 grams of ashes after a few years of death. What matters at the end is how many hearts I captured with my kindness, and how many I hurt with my asshole-ness.”
I’ve been taking early morning meditation walks every day for the last 12 years. As habits go, I couldn’t leave my walks behind during my trip to London. Every morning after the prayer, I took my prayer beads and left my apartment. London’s fresh air in the morning was uplifting. Starbucks was the only place open in those wee hours of the morning. I grabbed my coffee to go either to King George’s Park or Garratt Lane Old Burial Ground.
The Garratt Lane Old Burial Ground was established around 1830 to support the overflowing cemetery of St. Mary’s Church in Wandsworth, a southern district of London. During the 17th and 18th centuries French Protestants, or Huguenots, escaped the persecution of the French Catholic government to settle in Wandsworth.
The old burial ground contained several listed tombs commemorating the Huguenots. Later, the grounds were repurposed to become a public garden serving the neighborhood.
It was a chilly and quiet morning. I sat down on a large gravestone that was dedicated to the Barker family. Many people including Robert Barkar (died 1818), William Henry Barkar (died 1827), Sarah Barkar (died 1939), and five more people from the Barkar family were either buried there or mentioned on the gravestone. You could see a short video of the grave, and the cemetery itself on Peace Talk With Sara’s TikTok account.
I couldn’t help but imagine that the Barkar family could have been one of the French who fled France during the violent period of the 18th Century to adopt an English last name and run a large hat shop, or hat wholesale at Wandsworth.
There was a long stretch between 1818, when Robert Barkar died, and Britain’s entry into World War II in 1939 when Sarah passed away. “Did Sarah die during the bombing? Did she have kids? How did she die? How about her family members?” I wondered.
I recited the surah of “Fatiha” while thinking about life and death at Garratt Lane Burial. In the Islamic tradition, we believe that the dead, in the other world, are at the mercy of our prayers. We believe that their sins become lighter, or their goodness becomes more pronounced if we recite God’s words back to them.
The Fatiha surah is the most important surah in the Quran. We usually recite surah Fatiha and three of the surah start with “tell them” for the dead. “I wish a stranger would pray for me when I am gone,” I thought.
The air was pleasantly chilled. I felt heavy, quiet, and calm. I was breathing deeply. My teeth were unclenched; my mind was free; my body was light; the smell of coffee surrounded me; my eyes were shut; my soul was flying. I was in the presence of the holy spirit.
The sound of silence was abruptly shattered by a loud city truck emptying trash cans. “Damn it,” I whispered “Asshole.”
But even a few moments in ecstasy are worth a lifetime of business, aren’t they?
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