Dear Editor,
Instructive it was, the diligence with which a funeral parlour was recently closed, even more justifiably in these pandemic times. Such facilities at this time must be more than simply crowded, indeed overwhelmed. When one sees the daily count of Covid deaths, and the projections of so many more to come, overlooking in the process that there are also other deaths (including too many by violence). But there is no recording in the press about how and where these regretted departed are buried. Many would have been pensioners – former employees of public and private sector organisations, who one wonders how much they mourn losses, if any, except when the employee is quite senior. On the other hand, it must be this collective indifference to ‘departures’ by an insensitive management corps which results in the chronic degradation of the Capital City’s main cemetery – Le Repentir. One recent incident involved the hiring of a contractor to clear heavy bush to accommodate the specific burial location – an indecent descent from an earlier and most condolescent spiritual pulpit.
It is truly remarkable, that with all the evidence, and even more talk, of wealth and prosperity, health, climate change, not to mention crime, that neither individual nor group of decision-makers seem to care that this forested representation of our city’s history now stands out as an embarrassment – exposed to the increasing influx of foreign residents. Not unlike the collapsing City Hall, it reflects, at a minimum, a poor sense of our cultural aesthetics. More fundamentally, and at a spiritual level, we keep displaying a shallowness of feelings for those we perfunctorily send to ‘the great beyond’ – better referred to as ‘bushy park’ – by the bereaved who must go back in search of their lost ones. ‘Rest in peace’ would have become an anachronism. Could not the several private sector organisations who have the capacity to set an example for their public sector counterparts, combine to restore the now vandalised location to its prior state of peace which we all prefer? Hopefully, the churches, however silent, would offer prayers. But a weeping mourner screamed: Why don’t they burn away the place with some crematoriums?
Sincerely,
Elijah Bijay
