Memento Mori
Sorry for the lack of posting recently; el Oso spent most of the past month in the hospital. We’re slowly getting back to normal but he’s going to be fine, so I hope to be writing here more often.
Only a week left in Argentina before returning briefly to the States. So much work to do on our books…
But before we go, let’s take a look at one of the places that makes Buenos Aires one of my favorite places on Earth:
Ladies and Gentleman, La Recoleta Cemetery.
This cemetary is the final resting place of some of the most famous and important people in Argentina. According to Wikipedia, there are ’several presidents, scientists and wealthy characters. Internationally, Eva Peron is the best known person buried in this cemetery.’
The cemetary consists of 4,700 above-ground mausoleums, many of them breathtakingly elaborate. It’s a virtual city of the dead, with long wide streets, full-grown trees, and a colony of feral cats that wind in and out of the decaying tombs.
Some of the tombs are immaculate and well maintained.
Others, not so much.
It’s a fascinating place, contradictory. It is majestic and yet somehow pathetic, gothic, multi-layered. The underlying heartbeat of history is still audible in this place of death.
It is uncomfortable as an American (used to sanitized death) to be able to see into the tombs themselves; coffins are almost always visible, some in an advanced state of decay. In some, black and white photos of the deceased peer ghostly out of the darkness, unfocused eyes tarnished tragic by the span of years.
For even among these monuments of stone and marble, designed to honor their occupants for all time, nature creeps in and takes over. Ceilings collapse, weeds split the brick, and the presence of laughing, snapshooting tourists tend to deny the cemetery any lingering glory.
Ultimately, then, it is a place to both celebrate and bemoan human nature; our desire not to fade away, and the inevitability that we will.