07 · The Most Crowded Place

What is the most crowded place in a healthcare facility? Not the hall, not the clinics, not the waiting room, nor the corridors. The most crowded place appears on no floor plan. It is the future. Everyone who enters carries a question with them — patients, families, doctors, nurses, directors, even the one who cleans the floors. No one truly knows how it will end, yet everyone keeps making plans for the day after. This is why I believe the cemetery is the most crowded place I have ever known.

Many think the opposite of life is death. I am not so sure. After time spent in rehabilitation facilities, hospitals, care homes and cemeteries, I have reached a different conclusion: the opposite of life is not death. It is oblivion.

Looking closely, I discovered the cemetery is not the place of the dead — they are in the houses they inhabited, in the words they left, in the gestures we learned from them. The cemetery is the place of the living: of those who return, who remember, who still have something to say to someone who can no longer answer.