Art After Life

I left the country for a day. When I arrived at the capital of Hungary, Budapest, the microbus driver and I reconfirmed as best we could with my limited Romanian that we would meet at the bus station about five hours later for our return to Romania.

—I came to Budapest because I had to leave the country every three months so that I did not remain in Romania illegally.—

After he drove away I was left to myself on the streets of Budapest, a place where the average citizen appeared more American to me, but the language was further from my understanding than Greek; I don't know one Hungarian word. After a snack and a self-tour of the bus depot, I hit the streets. I couldn’t find a map of the city and so decided to attempt a walk without one.

I walked for about an hour when I came across an interesting cemetery. The graves weren't packed all together, in fact, there was often open green lawn between each site with enough space for a car or two to fit. It was like a park. Huge, life-sized statues stood atop the tombstones. One tombstone had Christ carrying his cross, another had three life-sized women, joining hands, and all three weeping. Other graves had beautifully sculpted women looking down thoughtfully. There was a sculpted man with a walking stick, who appeared so comfortable with life that death was the last thing he expected. There were many romantic sculptures and being in this cemetery was like walking in a museum. When I admired a piece and looked at the date I was sometimes surprised by the year. 1843 was engraved in one, the beauty, the originality, and the youth of the pieces made me think these tombs had been erected more recently. I guess even in that era people were every bit as creative and original as we are today.

Many tombs had statues expressing deep sorrow, like the three women joining hands that I described earlier. There was an adult woman with a young adolescent boy standing beside her. Below them a life-sized male figure clung to the tombstone tortured by grief and longing. The woman and boy seemed not to notice him, while the male figure seemed not to notice anything but them. I was attracted to the open expression of grief that these figures portrayed. It reminded me a recent conversation with Romanian high school students. "There is something unnatural about death," I told them, "It just seems wrong." When I said "wrong" I meant out of the ordinary, weird, and absurd even.

As we were driving to Budapest I was thinking about how the consoling words, "He's in heaven now" don't really cut it for those that have lost a loved one. As "spiritual" as we may want to be, just knowing the deceased’s abstract personality still exists in another place—even a better one—doesn't compensate for what we've lost. We lack their physical presence. Losing something, somebody, that you can hold and touch and feel and even just look at is a tragedy.

Robbing us of our physical form—is—robbing us. I don't understand, of course, what the afterlife is, but I have to believe that there will be a physical realm to it. When the Bible describes us as being made in God's image, we are inclined (or even encouraged) to think that the word "image" only refers to a spiritual concept, but I am tempted to contemplate that our physical image is also makes us God-like. Image, after all, in its most basic sense is something physical.

After these thoughts, the weeping concrete statues that stood atop of real people turning to dust below, demonstrated grief in a real sense for the physical body (and all that comes with it. How can we separate soul and body?) that is lost at death. And it seemed very Christian to me to weep at death and hate it... as these ornately adorned tombs seemed to condone.

If we hate death with ever fiber of our being, are we not being more like God? No one hates death more than God who fought death to the core and ironically even gave his life so that His children could live forever. If we hate death, and when I say hate, I mean HATE, we are more like God. We are allowed to say, "Death, I hate you, and I will NEVER give into you." And I don't mean a hatred of a metaphoric death, but a hatred of real death. Death that smells bad after a few days.

In conclusion, I leave you with a mental picture of my favorite statue: The woman stood on two legs, but she was bent over, crying, leaning on a man beside her with one of her hands covering her face and her head close to her knees. In her posture of grief she seemed so controlled by sorrow that she did not realize neither the man on whom she leaned nor his stature. Unlike the woman, the man stood upright; he was strong. He looked up to the sky with a concentrated gaze. You might have felt he was disconnected from the woman, but he held her hand with the same strength with which he gazed upward. It didn’t take long to recognize that the man was Christ and the woman, my heart told me, was any of us who have ever wept with one hand over our eyes and the other, even absent-mindedly, in His grasp.