About five winters ago, I spent a lot of time wandering around London’s cemeteries. Not so much the famously occupied ones, with their hulking tombs and majestic statues, like Highgate, where Karl Marx and George Michael share soil, or Westminster Abbey, a real who’s who of Western achievement, housing everyone from Isaac Newton to Charles Dickens to Stephen Hawking. No, I preferred the ordinary, scraggly cemeteries, tucked into the outer boroughs, where crooked, ivy-choked gravestones teeter atop earth that buckles and splits from the creeping roots of trees, and people have names like Elswyth Wivelsfield.
I had recently left New York City, where I’d had a steady day job in journalism, a steady side hustle with a literary magazine, a steady relationship, and a steady social network. When I moved to London, I had none of those things—by choice. After years in a cocoon of stability, it was thrilling to shed it all, to expose myself to the elements. Colors shone brighter, rain felt fresher. Any sense of a predetermined future fell away, and in that empty space was possibility. I was ecstatically free. But I was also painfully lonely, sharing a basement apartment with a moody seventy-three-year-old theater director and struggling to meet people and find work in an unfamiliar city. My neighborhood was gushing with attractive, artsy young souls who all looked like they could be my friends, but they weren’t. I was floating. Cemeteries were, quite literally, grounding.
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