It’s reputed that many persons are worth more dead than alive. Their insurance clears up their debts and offers survivors resources unavailable to them while the loved one remains alive. This seems true of residents in the Chinese Cemetery in Manila, the Philippines. There creature comforts often pamper the dead. Visitors enter the “village of the dead” through a pagoda-topped arch. Inside the village mausoleum-houses line the streets. These residences allow husband and wife to lay together eternally (I wonder: do all these couples really want to be together always?). Some even have indoor plumbing, air conditioning, chandeliers, and other comforts that are “installed for the visitors’ rather than for the dead,” since the “cemetery comes to life on All Saints Day when visitors bring offerings for their loved ones” and are expected “to stay all day and night.” Some “homes” are guarded by lions,” the symbolic guardian of the dead. In the past fifty years, ninety thousand people were buried here. “Graves are built according to the Chinese tradition of feng shui, the favorable positioning of objects in harmony with nature.” When Monte and I visited the National Black Museum of history in Boston in 1998 we saw a replication of a tomb, with painted ceiling, carved walls and a gold-painted tomb. As impressive and wealth-expressing as it was, it pales at the description of Manila’s Chinese Cemetery. Residents of the “filthy tin-roofed shanties” on the perimeter of the cemetery could envy the dead inside the cemetery---perhaps even welcoming their own death. My friend Pet and I were walking in a cemetery in Connellsville, PA., when we saw a U-Haul truck at one of the grave sites. We wondered who was “trying to take it with them.” Perhaps they had their valuables in the truck, awaiting construction of a home-like mausoleum. Since it was October, I snapped a picture and sent it to the newspaper with a Halloween caption. It wasn’t published. However, the truck remained in the cemetery for weeks. Live may be fun, but it appears death may be “funner.” Quotes on Manila’s Chinese Cemetery taken from a Reuters news service article headlined Creature comforts pamper dead, published in the Greensburg Tribune Review April 12, 1998. Article from Commentaries on News and Life by Carolyn C. Holland | 
