I never looked my grandfather in the eye. I missed him by a measure of months—a passing of the torch where his flame went out just as mine was sparking. But even though I never knew the man, I know where he lies.
And that is where the questions begin.
He was not buried in the village where he was born. He was not returned to the soil of his fathers. Instead, he was laid to rest in the place where he had built his life, the place where he had his wives and raised his children. He was buried in the soil of his adulthood, not the soil of his origin.
This is not uncommon where I come from. But recently, traveling home for the holidays, watching the landscape blur past the window, I found myself staring at the earth and thinking about death in a frantic, logistical context.
I started wondering: How do we decide where we stay when we are gone?
There is a strange, unspoken pressure that suggests we must "earn" our grave. In many traditions, to be buried on your own land is the ultimate sign of a life well-lived. It implies you conquered a piece of the earth enough to claim it for eternity. But does that mean we must earn our living just to decide where we are buried? Does the size of our bank account determine the peace of our rest?
If we do not buy land, are we simply returned to a village we barely knew, to lie among ancestors whose names we cannot pronounce?
And then there is the complication of progress.
My grandfather was buried on his land to be near his family. But life moves on. His children—my parents, my aunts, and uncles—grew up. They moved. They succeeded. They bought their own land in different towns, different districts, sometimes different countries.
Now, those children want to be buried on their own land, the plots they worked for.
So, what happens to the grandfather?
He was buried there to be the anchor, the center of the family plot. But if everyone leaves to start their own centers, he ends up alone. The patriarch becomes a solitary seed in a field, while the forest grows somewhere else. The lineage of the graveyard is broken by the success of the living.
It makes me wonder about the definition of "home" in death. Is it biology? Or is it connection?
There are cases where grief is thicker than blood. There are times when the people who mourn us most deeply are not the ones who share our last name. If we followed the path of grief rather than the path of blood, where would we end up? Would we be buried with friends? With lovers? In the cities that held our secrets rather than the villages that hold our records?
We spend our entire lives moving. We migrate for work, we travel for love, we run for freedom. We are constantly in motion. But death demands a permanent address.
As I look at where I am now, and where I come from, I realize I don't know where my own map ends. If everyone is buried "everywhere," scattered by their own ambitions and land titles, we might find that in death, we are freer than we thought—but also, much lonelier.
Perhaps the tragedy isn't that we don't go back to where we were born. Perhaps the tragedy is that in our quest to own our own patch of earth, we stop belonging to each other.
Now playing; Meet you at the graveyard