These are the history-defining moments that shaped 2020

I wrote the following piece about my encounter with the picture of the cemetery in Jakarta shown at the link above.

Looking at picture of the arial view of the graveyard, my eye is drawn to the gaping hole covered with two-by-fours in the bottom row, closest to me, the viewer. a two-by-four lines each of the long sides of the rectangular black hole. Two two-by-fours cross the gaping abyss. The wood serves as a warning rather than protection against an oblivious wanderer falling into the hole. That person would most certainly find themselves plunged into the abyss between the thin boards.

Examining the picture, I felt no particular sense of loss. Only curiosity. Who were the people beneath the crosses and pillars? And interest. Interest in the symmetry of the green-grass topped rectangles, not perfectly aligned, but close enough to sketch a rough grid. The cemetery was rough-hewn, with brownish-red, bare dirt between the green gravitons. Perhaps the cemetery had been recently created.

Yes, according to the caption, “land was cleared solely for COVID-19 victims.” A mass grave, sectioned out into equal portions turning disorder into order. The green rectangles represented the dead, almost more than the grave markers. The darker brown, dirt rectangles represented new (or forthcoming) dead people.

None of that moved me beyond curiosity and wonder in the details. My usual fascination with death, dyings, and cemeteries–the stories they tell.

And then I noticed the gaping hole in the foreground like a tooth that had fallen out. I felt my heart drop. My stomach flittered, jittery with feeling. Despair. The weight of the pandemic. Nervousness. Sadness. But, above all, foreboding.

That hole just awaited the next person to fill it. And they would. More people–many more people–will die before we get the pandemic under control. Someone’s body will be lowered into that grave. It’ll be covered with dirt, maybe green grass, and marked with either a cross or a pillar.

To me, that hole holds the future. Never before has a cemetery sparked me to consider the future. I do that plenty in my daily life, anxious over what the next hour, day, week, or month might hold. But cemeteries always launch me into the past. Who were the dead? Who were their families? Why did they die so young? So close together? So far apart?

I’m not particularly afraid of dying, and the future I felt when I saw the hole didn’t portend great fear about mine or my loved ones’ death. Instead, it was the intimate knowledge that someone would go there. Inevitably, the hole would be filled and someone’s presence would become the past. I’d considered all of this before in my numerous visits to cemeteries, but this time it hit me in a different way.

It was as if this tiny portion of earth revealed our collective future in an unobtrusive, intimate whisper that spoke directly to my soul.