if you hope for your grave to be visited well after you’ve passed on, then don’t wait too long to die. The longer you live, the less likely you are to be fondly remembered. But you should also ensure that you are buried, and most importantly, that you have the right type of family. For over fifteen years now, I have been discovering why various people do and don’t visit cemeteries, who they visit and when, what they do there, and what visitation means to them. This has involved exhaustive quantitative and qualitative sociological studies, involving thousands of bereaved persons visiting cemeteries throughout Australia. Large urban cemeteries are among the most visited places in the nation. They are virtual hives of activity with mourners of diverse cultural backgrounds. Some sites, attracting over two million annual visitors, are more popular than most of the country’s major tourist destinations. Within a national population of almost 20 million, around 33 million visits are made annually to Australia’s 2300 cemeteries. Your nearest and dearest are likely to join the crowd if visiting your grave or memorial becomes an important component of working through their grief. How frequently they visit will relate to the degree of emotional attachment to you, how long ago you died, your family ethnicity, and whether you are buried or cremated. Your grave will be mostly visited shortly after your funeral, and especially so if you are a child, spouse or parent. Initially, your survivors will need to fulfil their personal senses of duty or obligation, progressively disengage from their relationships with you, and seek solace from their grief. But as they work their way through grief, any need to visit will correspondingly diminish. Within months, your family will have found that other things have taken priority. Though, for the next couple of years or so, they may continue to visit you on special occasions, such as your birthday, anniversary of death, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas and Easter. There may be someone who visits you occasionally over several years. When they come, most of your visitors will place flowers, clean and tidy around your grave or memorial, and talk to you. Sometimes they will shed a tear or say a prayer. Your most frequent and longest staying visitor will be a mature-aged female.Don’t depend on your friends. Friends make less than five percent of cemetery visits, while close family members make around ninety-five percent. Two out of each thousand people visiting the cemetery have no spiritual or emotional interest in you, or anyone else there for that matter. These people visit for their own reasons, including recreational and heritage interests. You can almost forget the idea of being visited at all if you are a British or Australian Protestant and your family have you cremated. A similar fate awaits the ungodly. And if your family argues over your ashes, you may well end up languishing in a garage, or tipped out somewhere. Then the rest of your family will have no special place to go and remember you on anniversaries. You simply won’t be visited at all if your remains are scattered, or buried in a cemetery that’s not accessible to your family. Nor will they come if they don’t really miss you, or they repress their grief and find a visit to be distressing. If you are a wife, your husband is less likely to tend your grave and is more likely to seek a live replacement for you. And if you are a typical grandparent, your heirs will possibly visit you once in their lifetime, just to satisfy their curiosity. Perhaps that is something to remember when writing your last will and testament!If you really want your grave to be visited well after you’ve passed on, then it is best not to be Anglican, Jewish or Muslim, and definitely not Buddhist or Hindu. Unless you are really famous (or infamous) your best bet to attract post-mortem visitors is to have an Italian-Catholic or Greek-Orthodox family. Then two-thirds of your visitors will initially attend at least once each week. However, their commitment will still wane at a similar rate to that of other families; and you won’t yet be at rest. You can then expect to be called upon regularly to intercede and ensure that your living family is well looked after.

Dr Philip Bachelor is a Melbourne based cemetery administrator. His recent publications include Life After Death: Understanding bereavement and working through grief (2002, Hill of Content, Melbourne), and Sorrow & Solace: The social world of the cemetery (2004, Baywood, New York).