The graveyard swallows me whole. No roads, only footpaths meander around 300-year-old gravestones with blurred names and dates and solitary brick markers. Just inside the gates is a small mailbox empty of guide pamphlets—there’s an app for that now.
Defiant weeds and summer flowers poke their way out between twig and stone on the footpath as I wander. Some graves are completely covered in concrete, as if the dead would arise according to old superstitions—or to protect the peaceful dead from vandals.
My fingers gently touch the headstone of a small child only a few months old, her mother lain nearby. There are other young children. A nearby wooden grave is draped with colorful Mardi Gras beads. British and American flags stick in the dirt. I can only make out “Little Girl Buried” on her dark and smoldered marker…