For most of her life, Deborah Ratcliffe avoided cemeteries.
Today, she spends her weekends restoring forgotten graves, uncovering hidden pieces of Johannesburg’s history and helping others see these spaces in a completely different light.

The Northcliff Melville Times met Ratcliffe, a volunteer with the Friends of Johannesburg Cemeteries, at the Braamfontein Cemetery on July 18, when the group hosted a clean-up, during which she shared how her journey began with fear. “I lost my grandfather at a very young age and had to go to the cemetery for his burial,” she said. “Being so young, I associated cemeteries with death and frightening rituals. I think the idea that my grandparents were ‘stuck in the ground’ created a deep fear in me.”

Read more: Volunteers step in after storm damage at Braamfontein Cemetery

After seeing the organisation’s work on Facebook shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic, she made the surprise decision to confront that fear by joining the group. Her background in art and design soon found an unexpected outlet. “Restoring headstones and bringing them back to their former glory became one of my passions. I saw it as a way of helping people who are no longer able to look after their family graves and restoring those graves to dignity.”

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Ratcliffe remembers arriving for her first volunteer day with intense anxiety, but said the calm presence of fellow volunteer and heritage activist Flo Bird helped ease her fears almost immediately.
The turning point came when she realised that cemeteries were not places of terror, but places of stillness. “I’m an introvert, and crowds make me anxious. Being in a cemetery with like-minded people brings me a sense of peace. There’s a stillness here that makes the anxiety disappear.”

Now she sees cemeteries as beautiful spaces that hold the stories of forgotten heroes, political figures, artists and ordinary families. Through volunteering, she has learned about Johannesburg’s riots, memorials, historic leaders and the remarkable craftsmanship of older headstones. “We have heroes sitting here who are being ignored. We have to keep their memories alive.” One of the moments that affects her most is cleaning the grave of a child who died young. “I’ll talk to them while I’m working and say, ‘Hi, I’m sorry.’ It may just be a vessel lying here, but I believe it matters that someone is acknowledging them.”

Ratcliffe encourages anyone who feels nervous about visiting a cemetery to go with a friend and experience it for themselves. “Once you spend time with the people who volunteer here and see the passion they have for history and heritage, it pulls you in. You don’t want to miss the next weekend.” Asked to describe her volunteering journey in three words, she doesn’t hesitate: “Peacefulness, passion, history.”

For a woman who once crossed the road to avoid cemeteries, those three words say everything about how profoundly her perspective and her life have changed.

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