If the cycle of experience is correct, then you and I are already disintegrating.
I used to think coffins were placed directly in the dirt. That’s how they show it in the movies.
But one time I was walking at Holy Cross, in the Our Lady of Peace section, when I came upon a gray concrete container. I found out its proper name later, a burial vault, or grave liner. That’s what they put the actual coffin inside.
According to the cemetery’s glossary, These sealed units are engineered to support the weight of the earth above the coffin and the movement of heavy maintenance equipment, to prevent the coffin from sinking too far down.
The vault I saw was plain, like a coffin’s exoskeleton, 2,600 pounds of pure concrete, but Holy Cross sells fancier ones with names like Divine Savior and Divine Mercy and the less hopeful Gethsemane, which are as flashy as the coffins themselves. Though who’s there to appreciate the design, apart from the creepy-crawlies that are mainly blind, more intent on wriggling their way into the container and into our orifices?
A grave liner’s purpose is not aesthetic but functional: To defer decay, to protect the sanctity of the coffin and the virtue of the corpse, and to keep the ground even, so mourners don’t twist their ankles. To repress and conceal the fact that a cemetery is a space made up of holes.
I used to think a plot and a grave were the same thing, as commutable as dark-haired identical twins. But as the glossary also informed me, A plot is the measured piece of land in a cemetery purchased to obtain burial rights, and generally contains two or more graves, which are essentially excavations in the earth.
If I were to put this in my own words, a grave is a cavity formed in the plot, which is the ground for the dead body’s secret plan.
Another time, I was walking in the Our Lady of Perpetual Help section, and I was so preoccupied I walked right up to the lip of one of these excavations. There was no one around, no gravedigger with his shovel or whatever machinery they use to dig graves. They hadn’t put up a sign or any of that caution tape. I nearly fell in. I could have broken my leg. Or my neck.
It’s like that grave was waiting for me. And once you’re in a grave, I bet it’s hard to get out. You might not want to get out of your very own hole, your hollow, your indentation.
Maybe I should just stick to the cemetery’s glossary. It’s safer and more instructive, offers up meaning more readily. All those graves at Holy Cross are way too real, but they’re also knockoffs, cheap imitations. Graves are not only receptacles for storing bodies; they’re substitutes for the lack of an actual hole. They’re holes of an artificial nature. In the absence of a metaphysical hole through which we might reach the secret of death, we must get by with these man-made holes.
Still, it’s good to get outside and stretch your legs.