In this column, Juliane Uhl walks through a cemetery looking for the grave of a man from her hometown and asks what will remain of her generation - a generation to whom the whole world seems open, yet whose places have been lost.
She observes the spread of anonymous burial lawns, places where even the names of the dead often have no room. While traditional burial culture once created memorials to individual people, anonymous graves can feel like a manifestation of nothingness. Even the possibility of becoming an archaeological trace is disappearing with cremation and biodegradable urns.
Standing before an open grave, she asks what should remain after her own body has vanished. Her answer is not a monument, but meaning for other lives: sharing knowledge and experience, making the world a little better and living in responsibility toward children and community.
Working almost daily with death has made life more important to her. Fear of death, she writes, is often also fear of one's own unused possibilities and fear of never truly having lived. At the end of life she wants to be free - free from other people's expectations and from her own unnecessary ones.
The column ends with concern about a tense world and with a hope that people can learn again to listen to their inner voice and live their lives in community.
