BY BILL TAMMEUS

NEW ORLEANS - (KRT) - The archdiocesan Catholic cemetery at Basin and Conti streets here - called St. Louis No. 1 - closes at 3 p.m. on Saturdays.

So my wife and I - ignorant of the rules - were met with locked gates when we showed up a little before 4 to see the above-ground tombs, many of them frayed and spalling (a little like me). As we stood looking in through iron bars, a man walking by on the sidewalk behind us said, "Boo!" Both of us started just a bit, not having seen him coming. He kept moving but, as he walked away, he said, "I just wanted to see if that really worked on people at a cemetery."

Our culture is full of myths, traditions, habits - even bugaboos - about death and cemeteries. We shout "Boo!" at each other in them. We talk about whistling past the graveyard as a way of keeping scary things from happening. We say people have "passed away," as if they've simply evaporated like rain puddles from a sidewalk. We remind ourselves not to speak ill of the dead. And on and on.

Some of these habits grow out of religious beliefs and practices. For instance, religions that promote a belief in an afterlife tend to be used to support the idea that a person hasn't died but merely passed into an eternal hereafter.

Here in New Orleans, death seems somehow more visible, more insistent, because of the practice of burying people in above-ground vaults to avoid problems with a high water table in land at sea level. These cemeteries - similar to one I've seen in Cairo, Egypt - often are called "Cities of the Dead."

Just inside the Basin Street gate to St. Louis No. 1, for instance, is the crypt of a Revolutionary War soldier, Pierre ``Pedro'' Voisin. His life dates are listed as Feb. 22, 1756, to Sept. 14, 1822. He saw - and apparently even helped to bring about - the birth of the American nation, though I have no notion if he did anything even minimally heroic in the war.

The fact that he's been dead for nearly 200 years has not erased his name. It is not exactly immortality to be named on a tomb in a cemetery a few blocks from raucous Bourbon Street in New Orleans' French Quarter, but it's as close as many of us may get.

Think about Voisin and how we treat our dead. One way to do that is to pay attention to these instructions on a plaque just inside this cemetery: "We invite all who have loved ones at rest in this cemetery to cooperate in beautifying and preserving these sacred grounds."

Why are they sacred? Not so much because the remains of the dead are themselves holy but because many religions would say that the life these now-gone people were given was ultimately divine in origin. So these faiths urge us to worry about beautifying and preserving burial grounds.

Religion can teach us that death's irreversibility calls us to value life, to use the priceless and limited gift we have not so much to achieve fame or to produce monumental works of staggering beauty - though there's nothing wrong with that - but to do what the 17th-century Westminster Divines declared was humanity's chief end: "to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." Notice the word "joy" embedded in enjoy.

I visit cemeteries in many of the places to which I travel because I am endlessly intrigued by how we memorialize, honor and pay attention to the dead and because I know I must understand my own death if I hope to make sense of my life.

As I have planned things now, my ashes one day will be interred on the grounds of my church in Kansas City, and my name added to a plaque in our chapel that lists members whose cremains are in the earth on the church lawn.

Sometimes I imagine my children or grandchildren standing on the church yard and thinking of me or reading my name on the chapel wall and maybe even missing me. I hope they will do that once in awhile. (I promise not to sneak up behind them and say, "Boo!")

But it will please me even more if they will remember that the reason we care for and honor the dead is that death requires us to acknowledge what a precious gift life is.

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/9030890.htm