for it is thou

before boarding a plane back to north carolina, shirley and i enjoyed a sunday afternoon with the dead in st. michael’s catholic cemetery, happy valley, hong kong. shirley memntioned that local graves have been moved for building projects; we speculated on how safe the cemetary was from developers. but mostly we walked in restful silence. shenzhen now has commercial cemetaries that cater to hong kong and taiwanese families seeking resting ground. for a price, of course. what’s more, most chinese people don’t spend sunday afternoons with dead strangers, preferring to visit relatives and friends on specific days. quite obviously, cemetaries are for the living and the living have different relationships to the dead. and yet. i begin to think that the point might be otherwise, or rather think that the point cannot be reduced to cross cultural ethnology, although such analysis helps and is more often than not fascinating, but rather the point is to ask what death teaches each of us, here, today. r.i.p.