Life Amidst the Living at Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
In a city devoted to the dead, a cemetery’s living inhabitants sometimes go without notice. After four months of nearly daily pilgrimages to graveyards, I now begin my acquaintanceship by seeking out the live guides – the cats and birds, the flowers and plants and lichens. They are different there than elsewhere. Calmer, I think. Possessed of something extra. They soothe, and they help me see.
Pere Lachaise is an immense place – magnificent and distressing and humbling and amusing and absolutely teeming with activity.
On this particular winter’s day, I was searching for signs of life.
The lurid green of the lichens and the mosses, with the French ivy preparing for its white firecrackers of winter bloom. On a spot of hot granite, the kitty bathes her claws...a raspberry tongue rasping away
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Her spats glow a little in the shadows. At first glance, she's not even there. She is a granite and marble colored cat, at home amidst the somber-hued palette of bone, charcoal, and grey. Her signs of movement reveal her existence...little white fangs honing in on a direction, like twin needles on a feline compass. She seems to know where she's going. What's happening with that coffin there, Lady Kitty, away beyond the iron gate?
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Oooh, we'd best take a closer look inside this crypt. The iron door oxidizes a little every day, dissolving and evolving. If you are absolutely utterly silent, you can hear the process. It sounds like leaves falling, like hair being combed, like a thousand tiny clippers snipping fingernails. The sound of orange, of earth, of change.
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Tucked away behind the iron gate, a cosy cardboard cat house. It is a house-within-a-house. Down below is the coffin, and up above are these little insulated kitty houses, made and maintained by the women of Paris. Meow!
[...] In February, I was lucky enough to visit a few Afterlives-related sites in Paris and London with my father. At the top of the list was Père Lachaise, a sprawling village of the dead in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. Wikipedia says it’s the most-visited cemetery in the world, which isn’t hard to believe (though who keeps track of these things?). When I visited, men half-crazed with cold sold tourist maps outside the entrance to a steady stream of young art students, couples, and tourists from around the world. I hear that when it warms up the place is even more crowded, with both tourists and hundreds (thousands?) of resident cats. [...]