Funerals are sad events, not least when no one is there to mourn because the deceased has no family or friends. This happens several times a year in the city of Zurich, with the interments taking place at a communal grave. However, such funerals are no longer quite as lonely. In 2017, poet Melanie Katz imported a Dutch project to Zurich called “The Lonely Burial”. The idea is that a notable poet attends the burial and recites a fitting epitaph for the deceased. A book has now been published containing 37 of these poems as well as essays on loneliness, death and interment.
The poet lends meaning to this otherwise forlorn event, writes Alexander Estis. People who die a lonely death often leave behind “small black holes” that need to be filled in through research, says Nathalie Schmid. This is why the poets have embellished each of the 37 poems with an account of how they traced what little information there was about the deceased. Looking for clues was quite a challenge in many cases. “How can I pierce the loneliness without contradicting the facts?” asks Martin Bieri.
Published by Melanie Katz, this book provides an answer. It contains a wide range of different poems and written accounts that sometimes barely skim the surface. “We know little about you/Nothing in fact,” Klaus Merz’s poem begins. But sometimes there is someone who knew something about the deceased which could then be included in the epitaph. A lonely burial becomes a proper farewell. And the poem communicates solidarity, writes Katz. The result is a wonderfully touching ritual. Many of the memories and scraps of information about the deceased are quite similar at first glance, but ultimately each of the epitaphs has a very personal feel. The people who died may have lived in precarious circumstances, yet each of them had something that made them unique. These varied tributes stand in relief against the often cold, fast-paced, unheeding nature of modern life. Poet Michael Fehr: “Calm and strength are not mutually exclusive.”
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