Today it was announced that the death toll from the earthquakes and the tsunami in Asia has now reached over one hundred and ten thousand. 110,000 people dead in five minutes. Unbearable. Is there any meaning to our lives at all? is the only meaning that WE are alive and THEY are dead? Is that all there is to US? WE who are alive versus THOSE who are not? When I saw the headline on the newspaper I did not feel sad that these people were dead. Because I didn't know them. and I did not feel happy that I was still alive. I just stared at it numbly sipping a cup of Starbucks and wondered if all the meaning in the world came down to just ‘us the living’ versus ‘them the no longer living.’ If I was saddened by anything it was this thought. No higher power to console us or to help us understand or to explain the meaning of any of it to us. just day after day in a giant mystery while we are still alive. And absolutely nothing for those who are not alive. We bury the dead in boxes under the ground I thought. We remember them sometimes. But they no longer exist. Their bodies decay and turn to skeletons. And soon they turn to ashes. And soon they are forgotten entirely.

I thought of my own grandparents who have been dead for almost ten years now. they are both buried in boxes under the ground in a cemetery in Boca Raton, FL. why? we haven't visited them in years. although we have pictures of them when they were alive all over the house. but they, their actual bodies, are just skeletons lying in a box buried underground. Horrifying.

When I pass by cemeteries when on the road I look at all the hundreds of tombstones knowing that we don't have nearly enough land in our country or anywhere in the world to place all the dead bodies of people who have come before us in graveyards and cemeteries. America is a young country so we still have plenty of cemeteries. So its not something we think about. we just keep burying people. But even the idea of this – that our gravesite will last forever -- is a myth that we just talk ourselves into. eventually the dead will have to be moved in order to make space for the living. We can’t have a whole continent filled with graveyards full of dead people because people who are still living need places to live.

There is the story, the reality, that in Paris they encountered such a shortage of space due to so many graveyards and cemeteries, I believe this was in the 1900’s, that they just dug all the dead people up and threw their remains in some cavern underneath the city so they could make room to build more housing for living people. you can go underground still there and look at the skeletons and skulls just randomly thrown about. hundreds of thousands of forgotten dead people. the same thing will happen to us one day in America. We don't want to think about that but it is inevitable. It will happen here one day. But luckily we won't be around to see it happen to us. But it will happen. there is only so much space to bury dead people.