Shah Alam Memorial Park

So I was in the car on the way back to my lovely warm hostel when I saw this nice billboard showing green trees under a sunny sky saying

Shah Alam Memorial Park

So I said something along the lines of Hey Mum, why don't we go walk in the park and see flowers and stuff since it's Mother's Day?

And my Mum, being herself, shushed me and said: Mana oo lang khua hua tua cemetary eh?! (Manglish translation: Where got people go cemetery see flowers wan?!)

...

I didn't know they call graveyards 'Memorial Parks' now. What the hell.

I mean, you use graveyard when you want it to sound a bit creepy because it makes you think of a yard full of graves, and yards are usually choked with weed and perimeter-ed by a rusty chain-link fence, so you add that with some graves and you get this feeling that dead bodies lie there forgotten and bored so they might just reach up through the ground and grab your ankles.

And you use cemetery because it sounds very respectful for a place where you bury a loved one. Cemetery sounds very austere, like all the people buried there are solemn upright people who have done good in their lives and who have no regrets moving on. So you imagine a cemetery as the guardhouse to the afterlife where you can't enter unless you died. So you look at that photo of the great-grandma you never knew and imagine you're standing outside the gates of her heavenly mansion and she's looking at you through celestial CCTV and she won't talk to you because you're having inappropriate thoughts in your head. That's cemetery.

But Memorial Park? Park? With the capital M and P? I'm still getting used to it. I mean, right now, I have this image of the standard happy happy park. You know, the sunny one with the family picnics with red-and-white checked cloth under the trees and kids running around and slides and swings and kites and lakes and rowboats and benches. With a few tombstones scattered around the place. Beside the slide, behind the bench, oh a kid tripped over one, a place to tie free rowboats.

So I googled Shah Alam Memorial Park. It looks like somewhere Amy would like to jog. Haha. No lah. A bit like a well-pruned Taiping Lake Gardens. Decorative trees, stone sculptures, stuff like that. I was wondering why anyone would want to make graveyards pleasant and jog-able when I realized who would.

The undertakers. They would want more people to buy space, right? And when people are alive, naturally they would elect to be buried in a nice spot, right? I mean, choice between a view of lallang and a view of poodle-bushes. Hmmm. Even the people who are doing the burying would want to buy a place there. To make the experience of visiting more pleasant, like you're going there to walk with your dead loved one. I don't know whether its a good idea or not. I mean, should we take away the pain of losing someone, just by burying them in the Hilton of graveyards? There's a great deal of escapism and compensating-for-what-you-didn't-do-while-he/she-was-alive and not-swallowing-reality there that I don't think I have the capacity to explore. Then again, maybe people just do it because they think the deceased might like it.

The hell. It even has Facebook. 27 fans.

I applaud their skill in transforming their image 720° sampai I can terfikir of going there on Mother's Day. Dunno lah. Seems to me a bit counter-intuitive to call a cemetery a 'Memorial Park'. Maybe I'll go visit someday to see how much different it is from my grandma's :)