"I'll go get Pops for you," said the young man who'd just shown me a photograph of his chihuahua terrier mix on his phone. I'd asked if Paul were around, the cemetery's mortician. After the man with the dog opened the door, Paul popped out of the low building next to the chapel, dressed in his scrubs. When I told him my own life seems full of death and dying now, he looked tender. He's keeping an eye on his 94 year old mother in Jersey; a family friend died at 50. ("She's JW," he said, "but a strong member of the community, so there will be a large gathering.") His work doesn't bother him much because he figures they're all fine now.
We started in on the difficulties of our time, and he indicated that he didn't need to say more. So many conversations happen that way now. You start talking about Trump, the climate (even next week's weather), the height of the grass, and you announce that you've already said enough. "I won't bother you with my diatribe," one woman said to me recently. "Oh, I have one, too," I said, and she replied she figured as much. Paul and his friends talk about the end-times, then realize they just saw them in the news. "Woah," they say to each other. At least the world will begin again, and there will be another chance to do it well, he adds. I tell him I think of us as tourists. We come here, we look around for a while, and then we leave. But maybe that analogy doesn't work so well in a place where hundreds of tourists come each day to see the Temple turned photo destination. Many of them don't even realize they're driving through a cemetery.
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