Public health problem.
You can’t just let the dead in walls fall out and walk away from it. The ones in charge need to be held accountable.
It ought to be a crime, you think, to stack the dead in walls and lock them in stone. The word they use is “mausoleum,” but what it means is coffins in a building that will not last as long as the people who paid to rest there hoped it would.
You know buildings. They are like men. They look solid until time has its way with them. Concrete cracks, roofs leak, doors sag on their copyrights. Nothing made by hands is meant to be left unattended forever. “Maintenance” is the clean word. Neglect is the true one.
The people who bought those places paid for peace. They paid for order. They did not pay to be left in crumbling halls, with dust on their names and weeds in the steps, while the living build new houses and forget the old dead watching from the walls.
You think of the ones still alive, living near these houses of the dead. It is a hard thought. It is not just superstition. Stone breaks. Weather works on everything. A place not cared for rots from the inside. Sometimes you can smell it when the seals fail, and then you understand that what is inside is still changing, still breaking down, even behind marble and brass.
It feels wrong down in the gut. The old way was simpler. You put a man in the ground. You covered him with earth. Dust to dust, and the grass grew over him. It was not pretty, but it was honest. Now there are walls and chambers and keys and fees, and still, in the end, the same dust and the same silence.
I say they ought to be buried, all of them, not shelved like books no one reads anymore. Let them lie where the rain can find them and the roots can work through the soil above them, instead of being shut up in a place that will one day crack and lean and fall like every other building.
The men who design these mausoleums will tell you they are safe. They will talk about standards and ventilation and how mausoleum greaves the remains are sealed and clean, and they are not lying. But you are not talking about codes. You are talking about respect.
You think of health, too. Not the kind measured in laboratory numbers, but the kind you feel when you walk down your own street. It does something to a man to live beside a broken house full of forgotten dead. It weighs on him. It makes the night heavier than it has to be.
So I say what I mean, in plain copyright: these people paid for their resting place. It should be taken care of. If not—if the walls crack and the doors rust and the names go black with mildew—then lay them in the ground where they belonged in the first place.
The dead cannot speak for themselves. The living must do it. Or we leave them there in the walls and pretend we do not hear what our own stomachs are telling us about the way we treat them.
Love always,
Roy
Earth Angel
Master Magical Healer
Singer-Songwriter
Prophet Poet