Infrastructure at the End

Rachel’s hamster, Wolf, was a happy rodent who liked to be hand-fed seeds and then fall asleep in the pocket of Rachel’s hoodie. He lived to a ripe old hamster age, something like the human equivalent of $220\text{years}$ (which leads me to suspect that there’s something fishy about the “human equivalent” calculation—you know, dog years, cat years, and so on). In his final days, Wolf started to lose his hair and became lethargic, not moving around much or playing. He stopped drinking, and Lauren took him to the vet, where he was prescribed a hamster antibiotic. The medicine seemed to make things worse. Rachel set up a heat lamp to keep him warm that night, and he was still breathing, but we didn’t hold out much hope.

The next morning, Wolf was gone. We had prepared for the moment with a formal ritual. A lot of the ritual was based on physical things, as a way of accounting for things that can’t be accounted for. We tried to acknowledge the fact that one minute Wolf was here and the next he wasn’t. We had a solemn ceremony in the backyard, with some prayers. Wolf was a good pet, and we tearfully prepared a small grave and memorial rock for his resting place.

Mortality is the fundamental, unknowable mystery. To deal with what is essentially not dealable, we have developed an infrastructure of familiar things to help us cope. Some of the greatest engineering feats from antiquity are mortal attempts to achieve or at least address immortality. The pyramids have no practical use in this world that we know of, but they have risen for centuries over the Egyptian desert. The spectacular Taj Mahal is frequently referred to as the world’s most beautiful building, and yet, the Mughal emperor of India, Shah Jahan, commissioned the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his favorite wife, Mumtaz, who died in childbirth.

Modern cemeteries are cloaked in common things. They have infrastructure components that the living are used to seeing. Many are designed as otherworldly villages, with streets and destinations. In larger cemeteries, the intersections have stop signs and basic traffic control devices. I don’t know of any cemeteries with signalized intersections, since the traffic demands of the living are not that great at these locations. We can only hope that we will not be dealing with graveyard freeways anytime soon. But otherwise, the layout of cemeteries tends to be very geometric and familiar, especially for civil engineers. Cemeteries have plots and plot plans, almost as if they were housing subdivisions. Older cemeteries remind you of Transylvania, with hideous, spooky trees and scattershot, disorganized spaces.

With the passing of time (which there is a lot of at cemeteries), the spatial designs have become more refined and delineated. There is even distinction between upper- and lower-end facilities. Upper-end cemeteries can be like luscious parks, with ponds, beautiful but serene landscaping, and all sorts of special accoutrements. Loved ones may feel that the beautiful surroundings ease the way for the departed—a final resting place that’s a nice place to be and that is actually restful. But, of course, the living don’t know whether the departed appreciate the park-like surroundings, so the plush facilities really ease the way for visitors.

Although it is cloaked in everyday things, a cemetery is a place where we are forced to confront otherworldly issues. So the boundary between a cemetery and the outside world is uneasy at best. Some larger and newer cemeteries in the suburbs are set in the woods, and the living world is shielded from the other world by a green belt of trees. But older cemeteries in more densely built areas are not so well separated. At one cemetery I visited, a street with houses juts awkwardly into the cemetery space. This cul-de-sac is surrounded on three sides by the rolling greens of the plots and tombstones. The borderline is marked by a black, metal fence—a slight upgrade from the gray, chain-link variety. I wonder what the people are thinking here, both the homeowners who are surrounded by the graves, and the funeral goers who must listen to kids splashing in the backyard pools during the service. These uses of space seem mutually exclusive, and yet there they are, side by side and somehow coexisting.

After a period of time, a cemetery no longer fills the role of being a direct connection between the living and their departed loved ones. In downtown Boston, several burial grounds are situated next to busy streets, surrounded by tall, modern buildings. The deceased have long since stopped receiving visits from relatives. Instead, the visitors are tourists who come to pay respects to notable gravesites, but also to take in the spectacle of the discordant site. A cemetery is not something that belongs in the heart of the modern city, the nerve center of commerce and a temple of the living. So its presence is both jarring and interesting.

In Kevin Brockmeier’s novel, The Brief History of the Dead, the hereafter is described in concrete, graphic terms. In this story, people congregate after death in a city that is not heaven and not hell, but something in between—a vast, working city with all the features and infrastructure forms of modern life. The people have jobs, apartments, and travel around living their afterlives. They exist for decades in this strange city, frozen in time and place. The city itself is not otherworldly at all. It has streets, subways, districts, factories, stores, and a riverfront with a large suspension bridge. The suspension bridge crosses the river and goes somewhere, but we never find out where.

Maybe expressing ideas about mortality in terms of infrastructure is the best we can do. Infrastructure is common and understandable, and it surrounds and defines our everyday lives. But, of course, there’s no way of really knowing. I like the idea about suspension bridges in the hereafter. I hope they are beautiful and well-designed.