By Pius Kamau

I recently attended the burial of an acquaintance's child. I didn't know most of the people in the crowd, but in our private silence, we each had our own thoughts. I felt a gentle breeze waft from a million winged butterflies: the throng's thoughts passing through our minds. Mine ranged over a wide cogitative wilderness: death and life; burial or cremation; celebrate life or entomb us in granite mausoleums. I drive by Fairmount Cemetery several times a week. To the physician in me, it symbolizes failure. We spend much of our time and energy holding death at bay and are paid a lot of money to keep people alive.

But sooner or later, death comes to us all. Yet the death of a child - this particular child was stabbed to death by a mentally ill relative - is especially disturbing. It signifies the robbery of innocence. It takes away a blank slate upon which life's seasons have yet to paint their masterpieces. It, in a single stroke, negates all the potential a nascent life possesses.

In this place of death, we were well turned out, scrubbed and dressed in our Sunday best. But for whom? Since the dead child's spirit wasn't interested in our dress code, it had to be for us, the living.

I'd last been in the cemetery a dozen years ago while training for a marathon. There was a waterlogged quarry, and a road bisected the cemetery, and led one down to the Highline Canal. I hadn't appreciated the dimensions of the many concrete structures occupying large tracts of land. Clustered together in large numbers, the mausoleums formed a small city of the dead. There was nothing here; the bones were silent.

I wondered how many more cemeteries with their mausoleums there were in metro Denver. And how much of our resources went to preserve mortal remains? There are a dozen cemeteries serving the area's population, each with its own complement of mausoleums. I lamented the good that all the energy and money used to design and build these lifeless structures would have done if spent on the living.

Growing up Catholic in Mombasa, I remember the church's teaching on death. We had to have intact bodies because on Christ's Second Coming, we'd all rise from the grave and ascend to heaven with him. But my child's mind was puzzled each morning when I passed by a Hindu crematorium on the shores of the Indian Ocean and often saw smoke billowing heavenwards. If I was downwind, a certain smell permeated the air. Surely cremation meant the dead Indians wouldn't go to heaven on Jesus' Second Coming?

I now know better. Cremation is more earth-friendly (think of India's billion people and the number of cemeteries they'd require) and more economical. I also know that, all God (who created man and the universe from an idea) has to do is merely will our ashes to rise as we were: living and whole.

The dead child's grave was in a poor part of the cemetery, some distance from the cemetery's "downtown," with its rococo cement mausoleums. In death as in life, we insist on showing our distinctions: rich and poor; Christian, Jew and Moslem; black and white.

The hole in the ground was ringed by scores of us, a few of whom had known the boy alive. Why hadn't we been as concerned for him and his family then? Surely if we'd been more involved earlier, he might have been saved? The killer, a former psychiatric patient, wasn't taking his meds. Surely we owed it to this family and to all the mentally ill in our society to force our legislators to pay more attention to their plight?

We see a steady murder of the poor in our communities, and each murder is succeeded by an expensive, elaborate funeral, which always leaves someone in debt. How I wish the potential death money would be accessible while they are all still alive - to help with nutrition, education and health care.

Alas, for many of us, it's easier to go to funerals; it demonstrates our piety. And it mollifies our conscience.

Pius Kamau of Aurora is a thoracic and general surgeon and a commentator on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." He was born and raised in Kenya and immigrated to the U.S. in 1971.

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