What a strange thing, a cemetery. A monument to death, a monument to pain…where the culture of the living is clearly reflected in the objects they leave behind. I had never before entered a cemetery in South America. There was a baroque excess of detail in bright color, plastic and acrylic paint – cutsie cherubs singing out of tune for the duration of their dying double A batteries, names and dates of death painted by hand onto concrete, golden-framed photos, amateur frescoes of Catholic iconography, shriveling roses in dirty bottles, faded colors of weather-worn plastic, crumbling concrete, crooked crosses, weeds, overgrowing the graves.
It was depressing to me, that people should choose to linger in such a place. A gloomy reminder set by the church of the fear we should have, our cult of death.
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