A Nazi has been buried at Willow-Witt Ranch in the Forest Conservation Burial Ground where my husband and I will be buried. We already have our spots there.
Do we really think the earth cares whose body will now feed her? Do we really think his body will decompose any differently than mine?
By all accounts, this man, this Nazi, stood for and enacted horrible, ignorant, hurtful things from his terrible beliefs about other humans, and inflicted them right here in this community. In many ways we should be glad he’s gone. And yet — are we going to also be exclusionary and say only certain people can be buried on our slice of earth up at Willow-Witt? We are to bury the dead as humans. The moment he took his last breath, he ceased to be a Nazi.
I am glad that, distasteful and conflictual as it must have been for all of the good people involved in the Forest Conservation Burial grounds there, that they did something larger than that man could ever have done. They allowed his body to be buried. Are we now going to allow the toxicity of exclusionary, hateful politics invade our own hearts and cemeteries? Doesn’t his Nazism “win” then? Who does fighting about where his body decomposes truly benefit? Does it really show how wrong he was and how right we are?
Respectfully,
Sara Harris
Talent
