The View From the Otherside
A meditation on this life — and what comes after
Yesterday, somewhat out of character, I spent my afternoon walking among the dead.
I had just come from a happy hour with coworkers and was driving home, lost in thought. A few hours of socializing had not been enough to distract me or lift my mind out of its melancholy musings. It was the kind of mindless, meandering drive that was ripe for an unexpected detour.
As I headed west on Highway 285 from C-470, the sun was just beginning to set and the big light-up cross that sits on the side of a mountain — the one that’s been there forever, the one you can see from everywhere in town — loomed right in front of me.
I remember this cross from when I was little. We could even see it from the big window in the living room of our house in the foothills. My dad had told me that there was a cemetery up there, but I had never been up there or seen it. Only the bright white cross, floating in the night sky above all the glittering lights of the city.
For whatever reason, I got the impulse to go up there, to explore this place that had always seemed so mysterious and faraway. I had always wondered about it, and I had no great need to go home right away anyway. Going up a mountain, alone, to visit a cemetery where nobody I knew…
