in absentia

I've never been emo or goth, but I have always had what I consider to be a healthy fascination with death. I'm hooked on Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State. It worries my mom. I won't touch a ouiji board, but the question of what happens to us, really, when we die, and even what dying itself is, is very interesting to me. Religion seems wholely based on living so that you don't go to hell. A great uncle of mine died at age 16 because of a freak and mysterious hunting accident, and said "it's so beautiful," looking around before he breathed his last. As I get older, it becomes clearer that birth and death are the truly uncontrollable things we go through--maybe that's why they are so strange. I read somewhere that the body is 3/4ths of an ounce lighter upon death--soulweight. The only thing that really distinguishes death from life, an element totally immeasurable and inescapable.

This was all weighing heavily on my mind when I took a walk through the cemetery (morbid? maybe), bored out of my skull after being home for nearly a week. The twilight of 4:30 and the monstrous hill where our Fulton dead rest, some stones hundreds of years old, became beautiful to me. I read the inscriptions, the only stories left--the oldest stones didn't even have names, just "mother," "father." The important things, birth date and departure date. My cousin had a baby Christmas day. I think about that girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash. I think about the hundreds and thousands of people killed daily, mere blips in the newspaper, dead because of the soullessness of others. I don't necessarily see death as something to be afraid of--I think reincarnation...yeah, maybe reincarnation makes sense.

Sorry to be so heavy. Still figuring this one out.

Pictures. The one is my uncle's grave, born and dead on the same day.