the graveyard
The Avonlea graveyard is the small, peaceful burial ground where the community lays its dead to rest and where Anne Shirley confronts the first great sorrow of her life. It is a quiet place of poplars whose rustle sounds like low, friendly speech, and of whispering grasses growing at will among the graves. Here, after Matthew Cuthbert's sudden death from heart failure—brought on by the news of the Abbey Bank's failure, which wiped out the Cuthberts' life savings—the community gathers to bury the shy, gentle man who had been Anne's truest champion. For Anne, the graveyard becomes the site of her most profound encounter with mortality and the place where she begins to learn that grief and the beauty of the living world can coexist.
Matthew's Burial and Anne's Vigil
Two days after his death, Matthew Cuthbert is carried over his homestead threshold and away from the fields he had tilled and the orchards he had loved and the trees he had planted. The white majesty of death has fallen on him, setting him apart as one crowned. In the parlor of Green Gables, he lies in his coffin, his long gray hair framing his placid face on which there is a little kindly smile, as if he but slept, dreaming pleasant dreams. Anne has gathered sweet old-fashioned flowers—flowers his mother had planted in the homestead garden in her bridal days and for which Matthew had always had a secret, wordless love—and brought them to him, her anguished, tearless eyes burning in her white face. It is the last thing she can do for him. That night, alone in the east gable, Anne cannot cry at first; she feels only a horrible dull ache of misery. But in the darkness of the night she awakens, and the recollection of the day comes over her like a wave of sorrow. She can see Matthew's face smiling at her as he had smiled when they parted at the gate that last evening—she can hear his voice saying, "My girl—my girl that I'm proud of." Then the tears come and Anne weeps her heart out. Marilla hears her and creeps in to comfort her, and for the first time Marilla speaks openly of her love, telling Anne that she loves her as dear as if she were her own flesh and blood.
Anne's Ritual of Remembrance
The evening after she has decided to give up the Avery scholarship and stay at Green Gables to teach, Anne goes to the little Avonlea graveyard to put fresh flowers on Matthew's grave and water the Scotch rosebush. She has taken a slip of the little white Scotch rosebush his mother brought out from Scotland long ago—Matthew always liked those roses the best, so small and sweet on their thorny stems. Planting it by his grave feels to Anne like doing something that must please him, taking it there to be near him. She lingers until dusk, liking the peace and calm of the little place, with its poplars whose rustle is like low, friendly speech, and its whispering grasses growing at will among the graves. When she finally leaves and walks down the long hill that slopes to the Lake of Shining Waters, it is past sunset and all Avonlea lies before her in a dreamlike afterlight—"a haunt of ancient peace." The beauty of it all thrills Anne's heart, and she gratefully opens the gates of her soul to it. "Dear old world," she murmurs, "you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you."
The Graveyard as a Place of Healing and Continuity
The graveyard is not merely a site of sorrow; it becomes a place where Anne begins to integrate loss into her ongoing life. She feels a gladness in planting the rosebush by his grave, as if she were doing something that must please him. She hopes he has roses like them in heaven, and imagines that perhaps the souls of all those little white roses that he has loved so many summers were all there to meet him. This act of tending the grave is a continuation of the love Matthew showed her—the love that made him buy her the puffed-sleeve dress, that made him tell her he'd rather have her than a dozen boys, that made him proudest of all when she won the Avery scholarship. The graveyard, with its poplars and whispering grasses, becomes a place where Anne can still feel connected to him, where she can speak to him in her heart, and where she can find the strength to face the bend in the road ahead.
