“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”

Beautiful and a little bit creepy for a lot of tourists, but romantic and calm for me. That’s the perfect description for the walk in Dieweg cemetery, on the outskirts of Brussels, during a cold January day. Constructed after the cholera epidemic in 1866 and abandoned in 1958, the cemetery fell into a state of decay offering now a unique visual experience. The nature reclaimed the stones and covered them in ivy and weeds, so the graves seem to be out of this world.

I’ve ever been fascinated about cemeteries, about these quiet spots in every city I go because I learnt not to be afraid of death. In these places, everything is quiet, maybe too quiet for someone used to the everyday noise and this experience may be overwhelming. But after a while, the brain stops asking questions and I can get in touch with the surroundings, with the birds, the leaves and the trees and I enter a different world that no longer exists. Reading the names on the stones, seeing all the faded photos of the dead, I can imagine a lot of stories about their lives: what did they do, whom did they love, were they happy, were they forgotten forever? I remembered some words in a poem by Robert Frost….

                                                       (“In a disused graveyard”)

The living come with grassy tread

To read the gravestones on the hill;

The graveyard draws the living still,

But never any more the dead.

The verses in it say and say:

‘The ones who living come today

To read the stones and go away

Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’

....and I left the place with a heart full of joy, with the desire to live the life fully.