It does sound ominous and sombre. My strange fascination with graveyards and the serenity the place exudes. I simply refuse to feel uncomfortable there amongst the dead and the gone, I sincerely feel the place is divine, it has a touch of other worldliness as if entering it one steps into a fourth dimension, as though it is a bridge between this concrete world of senses and the intangible one after.
Horror stories, scary ghost legends, tales of unrequited souls all abound in every culture and as children we have all have had our share of them. We, at one time or another, have been scared to death of being encountered by a ghost or a being that wasn't human. Now, as one sees the angel of death hovering in the corner waiting to take away and then actually hurling away people you cherish and love more than yourself, you begin to replace fear of death with respect. You begin to understand that death is another form of being and it isn't not being at all as we normally perceive it to be. In death we live a different way, I am not privy to that way of life but I believe that we continue, our souls, ourselves, who we are essentially, the I in me lives on till eternity. So why the finality? why the ending? why the giving up? and good byes? Is it not true that we all will enter the same door and go through the same corridor to cross over to the next world and live in another form?
Would we remember this existence? this brief spell and sojourn on this inconsequential planet once we leave it? Did our soul, what we call I exist through eternity much before this role was cast upon it in other guises and in other forms and in other spaces? who knows what time and what space we have manoeuvred hence our arrival here and whether on our departure from this planet and this act would we even remember our character we played here?!
So where lies the tragedy in death? not in departing but in perhaps our own fears in believing this to be the end of life in the form we know, and maybe we mourn more for ourselves than the person leaving. He might not remember his past form, and that kills us, because for us he is still there. This discord and complete severing of ties, of cutting of communications, of never being able to talk and see and explain, and hear, and touch and feel the other is what is so heart rending hopeless about death. But in death is also a certain peace, a certain immutability, a permanence, when you die you achieve a state you cannot change from, a state that you will stay as is in till I will die, and that is stable and believable, and reliable. Maybe that's what I like about cemeteries - their unchange-ability, their definiteness, their reliance and dependence.
In this world of chaos, where the only things that are permanent are things of the other world such as the sun and the moon, graveyards bring me a glimpse of time coming to a halt, of the world not turning any more, of winds stopping to blow, and of leaves resting in peace. The place gives off a sense of serenity, of slow motion, of things going slowly or rather not going at all.... of just being. I love graveyards.... for whenever you go there it is always the same.
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