The beginning and the end

How did I get to set up a tradition of walking through cemeteries? am I in any way a morbid being? I don't think so.
I remember as a child having gone to the town cemetery every week, with my grandmother, who made a point to put flowers on the graves of beloved ones. During week-ends, it was my mum's turn to bring me to another such place to mourn other relatives. I would always stand by, and didn't quite understand why people around looked so upset while looking at a stone.
Growing up, I understood the meaning of mourning, sadly. Yet I never quite got around to processing my own sadness by visiting resting places. It never really mattered to me to feel physical closeness with people I held dear but untimely lost.
However, one day, out of curiosity, I visited a place in Paris - the famous Père-Lachaise cemetery. I felt that I was surrounded by serenity and beauty, as I walked by hundreds of graves of famous and anonymous people. I didn't feel sad, because of the poetry of the place. The silence was only broken by children's laughs, singing birds and rustling leaves. I realized remembrance didn't have to make one feel sad: some of my favorite artists, writers, painters, politicians, were buried there. Suddenly, I felt a closeness to the arts, by the sole mention of familiar names.
Little by little, I began a journey - as I grew up, I let this interest for the past and for departed people grow in me. I like to think I'm a spiritual person, even though I am an atheist. I try to bear that in mind as I wander through resting places. I try to be careful and respect people's mourning and beliefs as I shoot pictures of what I see as beautiful. I am not a believer, yet as I walk through these gardens of remembrance, I think of those verses from the Book of Revelation: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

Sankt Thomas Friedhof, November 2014, ©Emmanuelle Chaze

Cemeteries are obviously places of finiteness, but they are also places of continuity and renewal. Each grave tells a story: beyond that of a loss, it celebrates a life that has been, a love that has lived and outlived the physical disappearance of a being. Likewise, each cemetery bares the traces of its own past, and is a witness of vanished times. Added to one another, each of these testimonies contribute to a larger entity: history.