I collect the habits and idiosyncrasies of the dead.

Unintentionally, but I do.

Along with their names and their stories and keepsakes from their funerals. It is part of the payment and the toll of the job, a gift and a burden.

I look at the faces of friends and fellow townsmen and women, and the faces of their mothers and fathers, their husbands and their children flash up unbidden.

My house is covered with their art, my family altar is dotted with the ephemera of their ceremonies, things like pebbles, painted for peace by an old man, or a stiff, long dried, spiky buttonhole bouquet of gorse handed out to each mourner one bitterly cold, bitterly sad day in a moorland village hall.

A clay leaf, imprinted and glazed, a string of origami cranes, all different colours from the funeral of regal Japanese woman, hang from the branches of a houseplant.

One dying man turned each of his hospital paper pill cups into flowers, carefully unfolding and flattening them into simple, petaled suns, handing them out to visitors like a defiant hippy putting flowers in the gun barrel of his mortality. Sometimes I see these paper flowers hanging from wing mirrors in cars.

We hold secrets and memories too, keep open hidden lines of communications between the living and the dead. It is strange to know things that others don’t, to remember things that never happened to me, but are now a part of me; a synaptic fusion of my life and theirs, a broker between the past and the truth, repositories of feelings, and the truth behind those feelings, should the living ever come asking.

And landscape is similarly animated by memory, the villages and graveyards of Cornwall and Devon each filled with story, the houses we pass that for us still hold anecdotes of the dead we met too late, and their bereaved we encountered, so fragile, so strong.

I take on the habits and rituals of the dead we have cared for too, consciously enjoy things they no longer can, the polar opposite of the medieval ritual of sin eating: joy drinking.

I relish their likes, dance to their music, see the lines in the landscape they would, walk along their favourite beaches, enjoy fires and booming fireworks they loved.

One young man, dead far too soon, was irritated by a metal drain cover in the road outside his house. It was set badly, and every so often a car would drive over it making it loudly crack.

Most of us would harangue the council, badger an official for months to fix it. His approach was much simpler and purer; he would wedge a piece of kindling into the frame, jamming it in place.

The weather and the passing cars meant it was an ongoing job. Effective, but ongoing.

One night, a year or so after his death, I found myself outside his house. I looked down at the drain. His last bit of kindling was all but rotted. I turned back home to fetch a new piece, returned, and jammed it in, testing it with my foot.

I have taken on the silencing of the grate. Someone else lives there now, they need their peace too.

There are many ways to keep the conversation going, keep stirring the memories, keep feeding
the ancestors.