![\"HG](\"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/HG-3-e1404297043237.jpg\")
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Why? This isn’t an A-list tourist attraction. Who hasn’t already seen a cemetery? (The only reason I went was because it was high on the list of a traveling companion who had shown great patience with all of my previous demands.)<\/p>\n
But I was\u2014am–unraveled\u00a0by it.<\/p>\n
It probably helped that the day was cool and humid and the place enormous and virtually deserted.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n (When, fifteen minutes before closing time, an employee walked through the paths ringing a bell, our first thought was “bring out your dead,” but of course, the message was just the opposite: “bring out your living.” There were scant\u00a0few of us\u00a0who could\u00a0heed that call.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n At first, I thought I was just charmed by the aesthetics: it felt like a movie set. Not creepy, per se. Definitely not campy. But, somehow, cathartic.<\/p>\n Their little brochure describes it as \u201cromantic decay.\u201d Unlike in every other cemetery I’ve seen, there was no attempt to domesticate death through orderly rows and meticulous manicuring. If Highgate were in the US, some eager beaver eagle scout would have been all over it like white on rice.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I understand the inclination to tame, believe me. I’m a worrier, a control freak, a perfectionist, anxious. Call it what you will, it keeps me up at night, visualizing the Worst Possible Thing from Every Conceivable Angle as my husband, asleep, breathes faithfully beside me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Every few months, I consider whether I should be counseled and medicated into a new frame of mind, but then I worry (and, no, the irony isn’t lost on me) about what that would mean, and don’t do it. I press on: avoiding some things, worrying others to death before they even happen.<\/p>\n Narratives are my enemy. (Do you have any idea how many ways there are for the story of a childhood to end badly?<\/em> For a family’s fable to fall to pieces?) I try to keep my plots in order, frantically cutting every new vine before it can overwhelm any one of the hundreds of stones\u00a0for which I take responsibility.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But the mute witness of Highgate Cemetery is that when you stop arranging and pruning, what wins is not chaos and decay or even death itself. The vines, the moss, the trees, the greenery\u2014in short, the living\u2014take over.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n They gently, inevitably overwhelm\u00a0what we thought were permanent memorials to the ways in which our dearest stories end badly.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n