When people die in Brazil, there are two ways for them to be buried, depending upon their wealth:
1) They can be buried in a private cemetery, where their family effectively leases the burial plot, making payments year by year, or something of the sort, or
2) They can be buried in a public cemetery, where the State lends them the burial plot for free, until it is urgently needed for someone else to be buried.
A couple of years ago, I attended the funeral of the father of a friend, an old man who had died suddenly from stroke. With little money even to buy a casket, there was no possibility whatever that João would be buried in private cemetery. He was buried in a massive public cemetery on a hill about half a mile from the family home. We had no idea that, like garbage in a landfill, the bodies of the poor are overturned to make way for new remains.
As we proceeded from the public viewing area, after a minister had eulogized João before his family, we walked out into a cemetery that was a hive of activity. There was no grass whatever. The ground looked more like a fresh-tilled field, with the roots and weeds freshly overturned. We walked past many crudely and freshly-painted white crosses marking new burial sites, but we saw no old crosses, no marble markers, no grave stones.
A two-foot deep trench had been dug to receive João's body. The minister spoke again and cast new spells to send João's spirit peacefully into the afterlife. And a good thing it was, because João's body would find no peace whatever in this cemetery. Even as the minister spoke, I saw grave diggers digging new graves beside and behind and in front of us. There was a red sneaker on the ground. Funny place for a small child to forget his sneaker.
Then I saw a dirty old human femer lying on the ground as well. Like some sort of bad dream, I began to make out many human body parts strewn about in the overturned dry dirt. I saw a human skull with the black hair still on it and then I stopped looking, because I was desperate to leave this cemetery and never return.
When I die, no matter where I am, I don't want my corpse to be returned to the United States, where it might be considered an enemy combatant corpse, to be tortured even in death. But I also don't want to be buried poor or rich in Brazil, to have my bones overturned like mulch before the meat has rotted off them, or held hostage for a monthly or yearly bounty that my family would pay so that my bones would not become tomorrow's overturned mulch. Suddenly, being eaten by sharks doesn't seem so bad.