Revisiting the Here After.

*TRIGGER WARNING* 

Discussion of exhumation, death, bodies and skeletons.

Feel free to skip this post. 

Dead and buried, laid to rest, phrases that in English imply the end, death, the matter is over and done with. Our very language tells us that death is the end of (the) matter and we have no need to revisit it.

In Greece that is not the case. 

The day dawned cool and cloudy with the odd shower, a portent of the coming winter and a very fitting atmosphere for my first task of the day. Today was a dear aunt's exhumation. Yes, you read that right, she was being dug up. Due to the lack of suitable ground (not too rocky, not prone too flooding, on the outskirts of town, but not too far out) graveyards are hot property in Greece. Here, your final resting place is actually just a port of call, (unless you're willing to pay luxury house prices that is).

In Greece, graves are hollow pits, lined with cement blocks, somewhat reminiscent of a garage, and like cars are parked in and taken out of garages, so bodies are 'parked' in and taken out of graves. Once the coffin is in place, just enough dirt is added to cover the casket, which is buried for five years, for decomposition. After that, the skeleton is removed, cleaned, blessed and dried. The bones are stored in an 'osteothiki', a metallic box made for the purpose, which is placed in an ossuary, a building for storing bones, on the grounds of the cemetery. 

The reason for this macabre ritual is space. There are simply not enough graves in the country for the number of bodies. Thus exhumation has become part of the 'burial' process in Greece. 

If you are asking why bodies aren't cremated, it's mostly a matter of faith. Though cremation has been legal in Greece since 2006 (before then, bodies were apparently sneaked across the Greek -Bulgarian border), the Orthodox Christian Church is opposed to it, as the body is seen as the temple of the soul and there can be no redemption if a person is buried without one. (Let me just state for the record, this is not a personal concern; I wish to 'become' a tree. If you have no idea what I'm referring to, click here .)

So, there I am standing in the cool autumn air, with a good two-grave distance between me and my late  aunt's not so final resting place. The decorative pebbles are scraped off the metallic gauze that covers the grave hole, and Vasilis, the council worker doing the uncomfortable deed, starts to dig. After a five minutes, he stops and puts his mask on, then he pulls out a femur, then it's twin. Ribs, hip bones and all those other ones I never learned in biology, and finally, the skull with the sutures strikingly obvious. Somehow, my morbid curiosity is greater than my sadness or revulsion.  The bones ranged in shades of dirty yellow, brown to almost black. None of the white you see in Halloween skeletons or the beige colour of anatomical structures in school labs. There was also nothing relating to the person that once was my aunt.

A week later, the bones having dried, the skeleton was wrapped in a cloth bag and then placed in the osteothiki; truly, finally laid to rest. It was unceremonious but strangely peaceful; just me and the grave digger, and aunty, of course. I was left with a sense that her journey was finally complete and that was all I needed to know.