I stay on the bus an extra stop as we crest the hill sailing past the cemetery. I walk back along Karori Road past a house that is built down the hillside. The top level is one room perched atop the house. An adult lifetime ago I “lost my virginity” in that room.  Even at the time I was aware that the bones of my ancestors were laying across the road. Sex and death shackled together.

My girlfriend at the time lived in the house with her best friends, they had trained the teenage boys working at the chain pizza joint across the road to bring them pizza to their beds when they were hungover. The pizza shop is no longer there. In fact the chain itself might no longer exist.
I cross the road and walk through the cemetery gates. According to the internet Karori Cemetery is the second largest in the country. It features the country’s first crematorium. My father was farewelled at the attached small chapel and then reduced to ash in the historic kiln.

The dead are segregated along the lines of monotheist gods. The war dead get first billing in the golden circle but after that it is oddly the Jews and the Catholics holding the choice front wings of the theatre leaving the establishment C of E deep in the back, in the heavens as it were.
I stop at the crematorium and chapel. There is a deep roar, resonant and guttural. Above the smokestack the air shimmers and distorts the view of the trees beyond. They have a burn on.  I look at the retaining wall that mum and my brother and I sat on in our ‘Sunday best’ to farewell the last mourners at the funeral before we could go to the pub. I remember the grass stains on the bum of my suit trousers. I also remember the funeral director apologising for somehow glitching the digital track of the song I chose for the start of the service like a vinyl record skipping. I told him dad would have found it funny.

Today I am hunting my maternal ancestors. Somewhere in these flesh fertilised gullies lies soil that once went by the name Moore. Atop that soil sits a family tomb, with its inscriptions to generations of Williams and Penwills, Anns, Nellies, Charles and Myras, but mainly Williams.
Initially I take a wrong turn and end up down a steep gully deep in Catholic country. A stream runs along the bottom and the air is heavy with a smell that sits somewhere between mothballs and industrial disinfectant. Some of the mausoleums look incredibly grim, not gothic grim but at best like crumbling World War II pill boxes of the sort that litter the hills of this city. At worse they look like the windswept remains of the Edwardian public toilets on the Island Bay foreshore.
I once found myself several stories into the hillside underneath the crumbling old pill boxes and gun emplacements above Shelly Bay in the company of skin heads with a ghetto blaster, a crate of Lion Brown and a 50 bag. I was 18 and spending a gap year working at a supermarket and the storeman had befriended me. He wasn’t a Nazi but his friends on this particular night certainly lent that way. Twenty six years ago and the memory makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I remember the primal feeling of danger, the precariousness of my position. They had no beef with me, and the evening passed without incident, Pantera, pot and a foray into the underworld. Just a visit, not eternity.

I haul myself up out of both my memories and the Catholic quarter and head onward to the bones of the reformation.  The family tomb is fairly impressive as far as these things go. A gothic column with carved floral embellishments topped with a carved stone urn. It was originally erected in 1906 by my great great grandfather William for my great great grandmother Ann. The inscription reads “So he giveth his beloved sleep” which probably didn’t carry so much serial killer menace in Edwardian Wellington as it does to my jaded ears. William senior and my great grandfather William junior, not to be confused with my grandfather William “Bill”, were the ones who emigrated from Salcombe in the reign of Queen Victoria. Considering this dynasty of Williams, as oldest grandson I’m lucky to be a Kieran.

The 2016 Kaikoura earthquake sent the column flying like a ten pin at the bowling alley. My grandfather’s cousin was interred in 2021 and his wing of the family had the tomb repaired.
My grandfather isn’t buried here and there is no risk of me ending up here, but visiting places like this reaffirms my romantic notion that I absolutely do not want to end up in a cemetery. Put me through the kiln my father went through and sprinkle me where there is living. Bad tikanga I know.