______________________________________________________ Cemeteries
Passing the small cemetery near Waikapu the other day, I thought how peaceful cemeteries are, and how unlike the image we have of them from literature---dark, dangerous places; "graveyards" full of skulls and ghouls.
Most island graveyards are pretty nice, and the tended ones can be beautiful----both those that are cared for privately and the big commercial ones than can afford sit-down mowers.
Even the neglected ones look good compared to what is going on around them. Traffic whipping past. Tournahauler trucks dragging tons of cane. People racing around in a frenzy trying to squeeze another buck or another deal out of this deal-weary island.
The graveyard is restful. Nobody's going to get rich in here, and nobody's going to get any poorer. If there was illness, it's over. If there were cares, they are clouds now.
The clouds float over the headstones. Tall grass bends. Flowers tap-tap in glass jars---some fresh and real, others plastic for the long haul. It doesn't matter. It's the thought that comforts.
Some graveyards are weathered, wild places on sand dunes overlooking the sea. During big swells, ghosts of salt spray drift gently among the monuments, beckoning. It's the ocean calling us back. The Bible says dust to dust, but I like spray to spray.
"Full fathom five they father lies;
"Of his bones are coral made;
"Those are pearls that were his eyes:
"Nothing of him that doth fade
"But doth suffer a sea-change
"Into something rich and strange."
Shakespeare wrote that passage for "The Tempest," and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had the last three lines engraved on his headstone. He can have those. I like the first three myself, especially "Of his bones are coral made." That's a concept I can live with---the idea that we just change form.
The islands change form, too. They built themselves up out of the ocean floor like weightlifters, adding slow layers of lava. Finally they bulk themselves into mighty Schwarzeneggers, thrusting skyward until their shoulders are caped with snow.
But then they wear down. They recline at last in their blue ocean plots, with just a shoal for a headstone. It's amazing to think of those islets stretching a thousand miles northwest of Kauai---Nihoa and Necker, French Frigate Shoals, Hermes Reef, Laysan, Pearl, Kure, Midway. Once towering Hawaiis and Mauis, they're just slivers of reef now. Of their bones are coral made.
I'd like to be a deep fish and swim down to the graveyard of the Hawaiian Islands. I think it might be peaceful there: no traffic, few tourists, nothing stirring but seaweed. Every century or so a bubble might bloop up out of the mud and wobble toward the surface miles above, but that would be about it for action.
There's some action in land-based graveyards. In Wailuku, lei flowers are picked from a plumeria-scented cemetery at the head of Vineyard Street. Canoe teams and sunbathers park near the kiawe-shaded graveyard at Lahaina's Hanakaoo Park and Kuau neighborhood kids shortcut through a pleasant, grassy cemetery on their way to the store.
Some resting places are the stages for major annual events. Flags snap to attention in the Makawao Veterans Cemetery, which each Veterans Day resounds with speeches and military honors. And up the mountain at Waiakoa, village children costumed as angels and prophets make an annual feast day procession around Holy Ghost Church and its small graveyard.
My favorite is the Matokuji Mission cemetery just past Paia. I remember a night in late summer, the tail end of Obon festival season. Dancers in beautiful kimonos circle the musicians tower, dipping and turning gracefully to the drum beats and the singers' voices.
A fat silver moon hangs over the ocean like a paper lantern. Beneath it, other paper lanterns strung through the graveyard cast soft rose, green and amber light onto the monuments. Family members picnic on woven mats among the inscribed stones, sharing this fine night with their ancestors.
Soft laughter and murmured conversation float into the warm, moonlit air around the monuments. Silver waves pulse shoreward, sea-changing the land, stirring coral and pearls. The whole night breathes life.
There are no ghosts here but the ghosts of kind regard.
October, 1987
Note: This book was published in 1989. Since then, brother Tom has written for the Maui News several more times. He said his final alohas in 2010 when he moved to California permanently. All fifteen thousand copies of his book, "Shave Ice", instantly sold out (I think). On the day of the book's release, the family dutifully trooped down to the major book retailer at the Ala Moana Shopping Center, Hawaii's first mall, and marvelled to see my brother's book prominently featured in the front window. I do believe our parents had never been prouder.
My father, who was somewhat of an 'eminence grise as one of the leading psychiatrists in the islands, new a lot of VIP's on Oahu, where we lived. He was having lunch one day at a country club the family belonged to called The Pacific Club---although it's probably not proper to call it a country club since it was situated right across the street from Queen's Hospital, Oahu's main hospital, in downtown Honolulu. "Hey Doc" A voice behind him called out. "I was just going over the list of recent locally published books and I saw one written by a Tom Stevens and published by the Maui News. Doesn't one of your kids write for the Maui News?"
It was Thurston Twigg-Smith, the managing editor, publisher and majority owner of Oahu's most popular daily newspaper, "The Honolulu Advertiser". He was also a fifth generation "Hawaiian", a direct descendent of two of the original missionaries who came to our fair shores in the early 1820's. "Yeah Thurston, that's my oldest boy." replied our father, "He's the paper's human interest columnist---has been for years." "Well he must be a pretty good writer if they published an anthology of his best stuff" remarked Mr. Twigg-Smith. "I hear the book's selling like hot cakes. Maybe I'll have a look at his stuff---keep him in mind for the Advertiser. You must be proud as hell of the kid." With a broad smile lighting up his face our dad just said. "Yeah, Thurston, we couldn't be prouder."
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