Written by: Dr. Caterina Conti
This is Part 2 of A Diet of Tobacco. In this installment, Dr. Caterina Conti reflects on cemeteries and cross-cultural visions of death. Catch up on Part 1 here.
After the first nights of dieta, when Tobacco had pulled me deep into visions of death and decomposition, I found myself drawn to the places where humanity has always tried to give death a form. Outside the maloka, that same pull guided me into cemeteries—those thresholds where the living meet the dead, where silence teaches as much as spirits.
Luckily for me, I am one of those people who love cemeteries. Without doubt, throughout my explorations and travels, they are the places I have visited most often. I go there to walk, to bring friends and lovers. Sometimes I’ve eaten there, had a picnic, even taken a nap. I’ve had erotic dreams in cemeteries. I’ve seen spirits, and I’ve even startled myself a little.
Once, I went searching for clues about distant family in Buenos Aires. Another time, I went to visit a friend—or someone famous: Fabrizio De André, Evita Perón, Jim Morrison, tango players, Monet.
I’ve taken LSD in monumental cemeteries, watched the dawn rise there. I’ve climbed the walls at night to get in when the gates were closed.
I was stopped at the gates of Havana’s cemetery, forbidden to enter because I was a tourist. Only the Chinese cemetery there is public, so I stayed inside for hours, discovering its curious syncretism. I’ve heard the chiming of funeral bells in the desert wind. I’ve joined brass-band parades of remembrance. I’ve accidentally stepped on rotting wooden crosses in Amazonian graveyards.
I still long to visit Varanasi and Mexico, where the celebration of death feels closer to my own perception of the wedding-dance between life and death.
Beyond Morbidity
This lifelong fascination with places of death is not born of a morbid taste, but from a yearning for peace of the senses. Every cemetery, after all, is a human attempt to give form to the formless, to narrate death in order to understand life.
Though I don’t identify with the tragic Catholic framing that highlights separation between life and death, I recognize the social function cemeteries play in industrial society. Perhaps the cemetery reconnects us to one of humanity’s oldest symbolic gestures: the awareness of death as the very ground of meaning.
Philosophers like Heidegger wrote that it is through facing death that we awaken to authentic existence. But even much earlier, in Neolithic burials, we see signs that humans felt compelled to give dying a form, a rite, a place.
Cross-cultural Visions
In every culture, death has always demanded—and still demands—symbolic, ritual, and physical space. Cemeteries are their modern manifestation: architectures of memory, but also social devices. They mark the threshold, the connection between living and dead, between what continues and what has been. They embody the liminal space of passing time and transformation.
In the Catholic world—which I have often felt as painfully separatist, emphasizing absence rather than transformation—death is framed in terms of mourning, penance, salvation. Other traditions offer different visions.
In India, at Varanasi, death on the banks of the Ganges is liberation, a final offering to the current that returns everything to the One. In Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, the dead come back to feast with the living, reminding us that separation is only apparent. In Afro-Cuban cemeteries, where Catholicism merges with Yoruba religions, vibrant, colorful rituals dissolve the border between life and death: the threshold is porous, alive with spirits, sounds, dances.
The Sacred Threshold
The cemetery, then, is not only a place of death. It is a space of passage, a symbolic threshold, a point of listening. It is the sacred theater of an unbroken dialogue between what we are and what we are no longer.
Even in modernity, even in an industrial society that has sterilized death and pushed it to the margins, there remains the need for gathering, for pause, for silence—which cemeteries provide.
Perhaps this is why I love walking there, bringing along those I love, feeling myself alive in silent dialogue with death. In a world that has erased the idea of the end—and therefore of limit—cemeteries are among the few places where time itself withdraws, opening a space for contemplation.
It is no accident that in many languages the word “cemetery” derives from the Greek koimeterion— “a place of rest.” But it is not only the rest of the dead; it is also ours, the rest of the living, who there can suspend the urgency of doing and reconnect with something radically human.
They are the place where, finally, human beings—whether still moving or already still—come together in peace, in contemplation, in listening. The field where spiritual silence is honored.
As I wandered among tombs and rituals, I realized that death is not only carved in stone or remembered in song. It is also written in the body — pulsing, bleeding, renewing. When I returned to the dieta, Tobacco led me there: to blood, to cycles, to the ancient wisdom of the womb, and to rebirth.