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“Afterlife”, Honolulu, 201?.
FOR SANDY

WE threw my mother and my sister’s ashes into the Atlantic when they died. My husband chose the volcano Mauna Kea on the Island of Hawaii for his. After Sandy died, I hungered for a place to visit her. I began frequenting the Uluhaimala Cemetery on my way home from dusk walks in the Makiki rainforest. It borders Auwaiolimu Street with no sidewalk, gate or sign. The cemetery meets the street. 

The dead have a view of the valley under an enormous Banyan tree that shades almost the whole hillside. A palpable relief settles inside me there. There are never any other visitors. I spend time at each of the graves and study them closely through my camera. Time leaves me alone and I can stop thinking. 

Through a side door in his border fence, a neighbor releases his bountiful brood to run freely and lay eggs amongst the stones all day. Waves of haunting crows fills the valley at dawn. They are the first birds up. I can hear them on the other side of the valley. I always wondered at the source, imagining chickens in cages screaming to get out. Now they just sound mournful to me.

From the handwritten epitaphs on many of the stones, I surmise Uluhaimala Cemetery came about because Punchbowl Cemetery, which is actually nested in the volcano itself up above it, was unaffordable for these dead. All the gravestones in Uluhaimala have Asian and Polynesian names. 

Both places are finally stops for veterans of all the wars. Sandy fought to survive her whole adult live, until her own body became the battlefield of her final year.

Due to the lush weather, and time itself, many of the potted plants have broken free and become massive trees. Some have taken over their grave sites entirely, crushing stones and churning them into the earth with their roots, so slowly you can’t see it happening.

Many stones have offerings of things I imagine the ones that loved them thought they might need or miss on the other side. We drew representations of everything Klaus remembered his father enjoying, his motorcycle, card games, and bottles of beer, and burned them New Year’s Day in Hong Kong one year. He was ten when he died. A red metal model muscle car is parked atop one stone. Strings of lei drape some and cut flowers in tin-foil wrapped milk cartons adorn others. Some stones are hand made.

There is no place to leave anything for Sandy, but I am certain she would have chosen Uluhaimala if she could have and I know what I would leave for her there.