Nothing makes you feel quite so alive as wandering with a dog in a cemetery on a clear spring day.
You are alive and vertical in a place where everyone else is dead and horizontal, covered in earth and lying on their backs in what remains of the boxes they were buried in. You are aware of the miracle of being alive: your heart working tirelessly in your chest, your breath, your ability to propel yourself on two strong legs, to see, to hear and to smell.
I've taken to walking from The Wood, where I now live up into the Whakapuaka Cemetery which sits on a bluff above Atawhai Drive overlooking the city, the Boulder Bank and the sea. Some of the graves are more than a century and a half old - a veteran of the Crimean war is buried here - and many of them are half caved-in, with leaning headstones.
The few marble angels and doves in the cemetery have wings blunted by decades of wind and rain. Some graves are plain slabs of concrete or are covered in a riot of weeds. Some are tall obelisks. Some have headstones which are locked into cramped cages of chicken wire. Some graves are decorated with porcelain wreaths of pink roses and purple pansies, some with fake flowers and plastic windmills. Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics and Jews are buried in separate neighbourhoods in this city of the dead.
The few marble angels and doves in the cemetery have wings blunted by decades of wind and rain. Some graves are plain slabs of concrete or are covered in a riot of weeds. Some are tall obelisks. Some have headstones which are locked into cramped cages of chicken wire. Some graves are decorated with porcelain wreaths of pink roses and purple pansies, some with fake flowers and plastic windmills. Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics and Jews are buried in separate neighbourhoods in this city of the dead.
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