This weekend we visited Karori Cemetery. It was a beautiful morning, and a most enjoyable walk around a park, trying to compose photos to give some idea of the beauty and scale of the place. With so much vegetation around it was often difficult to get an appropriate vantage point, but I think it worked.

I was so reminded of Dave Dobbyn's lyrics about having "a father buried on the hill, with the best view in town" (Shaky Island). I don't have any relatives buried there, but I find it a much nicer place than the considerably more famous cemetery "La Recoleta" which I visited in Buenos Aires. It seemed quite a lot larger too, although possibly less populous - apparently 80,000 people have been interred within the nearly 40 hectares.

All this peace and beauty must really be for the living though. A dead person is, surely, dead, and doesn't really need a mausoleum, a tree-lined path. Surely a peaceful nonexistence means nothing to them. We call it "respect for the dead", but the only people who visit are very much alive, and the place is clearly a park. It is a shame that the pressure on space is making them less and less interesting. When once you could have an imposing mausoleum to remind everyone of your antecedent's existence, nowadays it seems you often have to settle for the more budget burial. Of course even burying your predecessors on a budget will cost you a bundle. At Karori Cemetery you can apparently be interred in an existing grave (with appropriate consent), but it will set you back a good few thousand to do so and if I have to recommend burial then Makara Cemetery is cheaper, although a lot less parklike. A mass-produced interment, rather than a craftsman-produced one - following an ongoing trend we all see in everyday life.

I like the park, I think, but not so much the concrete and marble. When I die, if my own feelings are to be considered relevant to the matter (and they probably should not be), I would prefer my mortal remains to be more usefully disposed of. While turning them to ash is less waste of space (and money!) it still seems a gross waste of good biological material. Perhaps I could be ground up into a good sack of blood and bone and sold off for a small sum at the local garden centre.

No doubt such a non-standard approach would be more expensive, and the cheapest useful way to 'get rid of the body' would be to 'donate' it for medical purposes. In which case, science it should be!