What makes me think about graveyards?

Here in Iceland it is custom to go to the graveyard around christmas. I have gone there with my husband for many years, in the old days we took the children with us, now we go alone, grandfather and grandmother. We go to the old churchyard, full of low growing trees and old gravestones. There are his father and his mother who died when he was a little boy. Quite near there are also the graves of his grandparents. We put candles on the graves and christmas tree branches as many others do and walk through burning memories of all the visiting people. Life is hushed there.
My husband´s father married again after the death of his wife and was buried beside his first wife. My husbands halfsister was worried where her mother would rest, feeling her rightful place had been taken away. Yes, how is it in modern families? Who goes to rest beside whom? The stepchildren, fosterchildren, halfbrothers or sisters, ex-husbands and ex-wifes?
I did not grow up with this custom as there was no grave to visit when I was a child after the second world war. Coming from the eastern parts of former Germany, now deep in Polland, all family graves were left behind. Those who died in action during the war maybe had a cross of remembrance, I know about my uncle’s cross in Italy, somebody´s else in France.
The first graves I remember and took part in saying farewell to their ashes were my grandparent´s, three of them and three aunts in two years. Those graves were in Germany. Nearly a whole generation gone. As only the ashes remained the spot was tiny. But it was a beautiful place, with much of heather and big trees, part of the woodlands behind it really. In the old days when I still went to Germany I visited there with a bunch of roses. Now those graves are gone, the family decided to let them go as nobody lives in Germany any longer. I don´t know what became of their ashes.
Walking through the graveyard here at christmas I wondered where the souls had gone to. The place felt so empty, just the memories of the visitors hovering between the tiny trees.
I stood beside my dear grandmother when she died, a long time ago, around 40 years. Of course I was crying, loudly, as I remember. But since than I am not afraid of the act of dying in itself. She let go of a breath and you could hear it was the last one, maybe relief. Since than I know that every living thing lives between two breathes: the first one in, after birth, the last one out. What we put in between them, is it our choice? Is it fate?