In Death Is There Life?

Partially-crumbled, faith-drenched aesthetics of old churches and cemeteries, fascinate me. There’s something beautiful, sad, holy, and eternal, about visually time-stalled love, loss, and reverence.

Today I needed to walk. I also needed to go to the market. Since I live on the side of a mountain in stunning Santa Fe, New Mexico, I combine trips when I leave home to go to town. I park my car at the store, figure I’ll take a few-mile walk from here, shop when done.

I walk around several long blocks, turn, and find myself at the old Rosario cemetery. I drive by it all the time and consistently glance at the tall religious statues and obelisks. I’d been meaning to visit it since I moved here a year ago. I enter. It goes without saying, but surroundings are profoundly quiet. I trample over dry green grass and look down:

A man with two names.

A headstone adorned by pinwheels and beautiful plastic flowers.

One grave has fresh flowers as if visited yesterday.

A few other graves, obvious by crumbling headstones, have not been visited for decades.

I come across a headstone with a date 1929 to 1929. I feel instant sadness. The starkness makes me wonder how many months the baby got to breathe in life before death? I imagine a shattered heart of the baby’s mother.

There’s a broken gravestone. How did that happen? Did someone willfully destruct it, or did time?

I slowly sweep my eyes and realize there’s a lot of empty grass — I think about plots, and earth wating to cradle future bodies, and death as real estate.

Dead flowers rotting on graves are immensely sad.

Currently, I’m single. While going through a recent divorce the thought of dying alone occurred to me. I see a grave with two crosses. I’ll be laid to rest, alone for eternity, next to no one.

I see graves with photos of the deceased, which bring death alive. I feel an unexpected grief and curiosity for the dead stranger, Diego, whose face I stare at. I say a prayer for the family whose hearts still break.

There are graves with overgrown grass burying names. Ants traverse over headstones.

I come across two graves, nearby each other, both deceased are young. Overwhelming sadness comes over me. I feel an abysss of loss, and my heart reaches out to the mothers of these lost children. I feel for their friends who had to say goodbye too soon. I think about the deceased, and their stolen innocence — tasked with an unimaginable burden of their own death.

A surreal epiphany sneaks in. Up until now, age 54, I’ve truly been torn the entirety of adulthood over what I want for my end. Burial? Cremation? An array of strange possibilities for final resting options have arisen including having ashes crafted into jewelry, placed into a vinyl record, blown into space, or sunk into a coral reef. I never settled on what I wanted, because the thought of having my body flung into an oven freaks me out. But as I walk through this graveyard of ghostly dreams, I don’t think I want to be buried. Nobody will visit. I’ll be forgotten underneath a layer of grass and dirt. In a box. Some curious stranger with a camera will walk over my perished bones.

Perhaps cremation needs reconsideration. That way my children could bring me with them wherever they travel, if they wanted, and share in future absent moments, with me.

We’re merely memories of memories, once people die that knew us. We’re not even a real memory anymore. What does a recognition of death’s unforgving permance say about life? My life I have in this moment?