It lies in rest beside the ocean. The sweet sickliness of gradually decaying flowers mingles with the water’s bitter coarseness.
A cliff divides the controlled mown-grass lawn, broken by hard white stone in rows of varying consistency, from the wildness crashing and swirling at its base.
Reaching for the flimsy rock wall standing worn atop the bluff, as though it could hold back the waves alone.
The pipes and gaps at its base to drain the floods prove it cannot.
*
Glancing to the clean side of the wall, a slab of black granite is polished to reflect my body in its surface.
A grave to victims of an unspecified helicopter accident nearly sixteen years ago.
Their lives are summed up in a date, a short commemoration. As though simply stating their titles and the nature of their deaths can preserve them.
Their bodies are not buried here, but their names are.
*
The calls of land birds and sea birds collide in bizarre contrast. Besides their incessant cooing, squawking, singing, there is no deliberate noise.
The living talk in hushed tones, as though frightened of disturbing the sleep of those lying in the grave plots around them.
Breaking them away from dreams that never end in darkness that never shifts.
*
Of the few who come and leave again, many linger by the benches at the fringes of the grounds. There are dedications nailed into the wood, labelling them gifts from people they may have never met.
Their backs are to them as they sit, looking out at the granite reminders of who used to live.
Some go to specific graves, perhaps to leave flowers, or have a conversation with someone they like to imagine could still be listening.
Gifts left by those no longer here for those no longer with them.
*
As I wander, reading the names, I realise how this entire space is dedicated to trying to stave off and cope with the reality of absence.
Of what is now missing that was not before.
The names in stone are gradually becoming less readable, dates less visible, poems and patterns obscured by the weather and the waters and the entropy of their material.
They freeze the basic essence of an individual in a form of semi-permanence, by becoming part of something more permanent than ourselves.
We will become absent before we see it disappear.
*
Date of birth and name, a poem or whether a parent or not, these are not a person.
They tell nothing of their laugh, their eyes, their hates and passions.
Basic factual information is not a detailed recollection of the complexities of a person.
Someone is never truly absent until their traces have disappeared: all memories forgotten, all influence and effect undone or buried under the works of the remaining.
Until those who uphold them join them in the ground.
Perhaps retaining surface-level information in granite, sandstone, slate, marble or limestone serves as a reassurance there will be something, anything, that will never vanish.
It may waste away, but even its dust endures, inherently joined with the individual it was crafted for.
Long after they themselves have become dust.
*
Our desperation to leave echoes has extended far beyond grass plots and vacant dirt holes waiting patiently to be filled.
We litter the data cloud with photos of our most benign moments. They represent emotions felt in places we cannot recreate.
Shared out of fear of moving on, then looking back without being able to recall them.
Encoded text serves as inscriptions on the headstones of accounts which no longer have owners.
Posts on dates that no longer carry significance are our acts of remembrance.
They never receive replies.
*
There are better ways of preserving what is lost than shallow carves in cold stone.
Individuals share memories. They are not always accurate, or joyful, but through their recanting they serve to reinforce a phantom of people, times or opportunities lost.
Pain fades, but pictures remain bright in their over-exposure, edited to a perfection that may or not have been felt.
Printed letters on books become yellow and faded.
They burn, drown, tear, sit on shelves gathering dust.
Text on bright screens pops up as crisp as when first published.
*
The breeze off the ocean plays with grass crawling up the sides of a limestone slab. Its surface is stained black.
Grime coats the names.
Leaning on the wall, soaking in peace, I feel how pleasant it is to exist in a space full of what is not here.