Six months ago, I took my mother to a village on the Umbrian border for the weekend. We flew a few days before I got married and this hung in the air, a little. A return to the place she had taken me as a girl now that we were both women. 

The weather was truculent and changeable, we spent a lot of time perched by the fire that we couldn’t imagine being lit when we’d been there in the summer. We sat in the library and looked out at the view. Pushed needles through cloth, turned pages. And we went for a walk across the hilltops, laughing in the face of sideways sleet that we’d come to Italy and it was warmer in England. 

I’m writing this in bed and the sun has just appeared; a milky circle within the mist. It’ll burn the cloud away within the next couple of hours, and then the same hilltops we walked on will appear. A few days ago I retraced our steps, pausing at the village cemetery we’d visited. This is something I wrote then. 

It began early, I think. We would walk to school through a churchyard, spotting the names on the stones and picking out our favourites (mine belonged to a Victorian woman named Rizpah). At times, especially while walking beneath the wide boughs of the ancient yew in the longer, cooler nights, I’d give myself quiet thrills imagining ghosts and baddies, but mostly the churchyard was a germ of curiosity. Of people, and the lives they led, and the ages at which they died. To be a child, newly empowered with literacy and sums, was to see a gravestone as a portal to an unimaginably long-ago time. 

Of course, there are the famous cemeteries. The French ones with names from books in, such as Père Lachaise, where teenage tourists go to have a moment with stones bearing the names of Oscar Wilde or Jim Morrison. Highgate, nuzzled between streets of towering Hamsptead houses, home to the imposing bronze beard of Karl Marx. I have been to some of these, more marvellous for the tributes people lay upon them than the graves themselves, the flowers and postcards. 

Albert Camus is buried next to his wife Francine (nee Faure, what a name!) in a cemetery on the outskirts of Lourmarin, a sun-bleached village in Provence. His gravestone is pleasingly rudimentary: flecked with white lichen, his name and the dates (1913. 1960) carved as if with a stick in clay. People had left biros next to it. It stood atop where his feet had been lain, and behind there grew a silver birch, low and multi-stemmed. Lavender grew from hers. Both held the fresh green spears of irises. This was February, and I imagined how they would look in a few weeks’ time, frilly and violet with flowers.

In England we are weird about death - uptight and silent and awkward - and so I suppose we are strange about where we bury our dead, too. I find the cemeteries in other countries interesting because of how the living interact with them. In Japan, I have seen 12-feet tall Apollo rocket-shaped tombstones, created by aerospace companies to honour their most favoured colleagues; you can walk through the plots and spot global brand names - Nissan and Yakult. In the further reaches of Okuno-in Cemetery the older stones have been swallowed by the forest, smothered by moss and reclaimed by the land. The living leave things at the graves of their ancestors: bibs and small knitted cardigans around the shoulders of Jizo, statues that honour the babies that were never born; cans of coffee and packets of noodles for those who had loved them while they were alive. 

It had started to snow when we pushed at the tall, rusting gates of Lippiano cemetery. My mum and I had been walking across the surrounding hilltops and it was a landmark in this area of farmland and olive trees. It reminded me of a pre-dinner stroll one June evening a couple of years earlier, when Matt and I found a cemetery in a Apuan village that people seemed to have left entirely. This one also had walls of large marble tiles laced with names and dates in gilt, and photographs in oval plaques. They held an impossible rainbow of plastic flowers - roses and carnations, lilies and chrysanths. Just the one bunch of cut blooms among them: mimosa, fading. Red plastic broom handles propped against the wall.

Mum and I curled the names of these strangers around our tongues, peered at their faces from beneath the fur of our hoods. There were the young, the women who died in their thirties in the Sixties; there were the men who lived til their late eighties, and were pictured sitting on a bench that they spent many of those decades on. There was a woman named Ida, her mouth a tight line, wearing an enormous fur coat. We walked past them and I wondered what their lives were like, what their marriages were like, who they were when they were old and when they were young. I thought about a documentary I’d seen recently, about how death is built into the walls of Naples through the shrines left there. 

I think about the way death weaves through London. We have cemeteries, yes, and churchyards. We have statues and blue plaques. We have Postman’s Park and little brass signs screwed into walls that people walk past. We have murals by Tube stations, we have bunches of flowers tied to lamp-posts. We leave these things and often they decay, scattering cellophane to the gutter. Death lives among the pavement here, retreating to the ground as it has always done.