Luna seemed very impressed by the cemetery once we had arrived at the floor where my parents were buried. I offered her my hand with a smile. “Come, let’s go, it’s not that far now.”

She just nodded and took my hand so we could start walking again. As we were walking over the stone paths towards my parent’s graves, Luna kept looking around herself.

“There’s so many.”

“Mhmm, you don’t need too much space for urns after all.”

“Ah… yeah, that makes sense… For some reason I thought about actual burial… Don’t mind me, my mind just acts strangely at times.”

“Well, I know some war memorials where they had coffin-in-dirt burials, but in the Antarctic region that isn’t really a thing.”

Luna nodded in silence as we walked the last bit towards our destination.

“We are here.” I said as we halted in front of the gold-leaf decorated white marble slab, surrounded by violets and angel’s trumpets. A bouquet of gladiolus, clearly put here recently, dressed the top of the marble slab as well. I smiled and knelt down in front of them.

Luna swiftly followed my lead.

“Hey there, Mom and Dad, I brought someone with me today, she’s called Luna. My girlfriend.” I started, Luna softly squeezing my hand. “She’s not really from around here but I love her to bits. And when I told her about you, she wanted to come and say hi.” I looked at Luna and smiled.

She seemed a bit unsure what to do for a moment, not that I really expected her to start speaking to them as well, but Luna decided that she had something to say too. “H-Hello, it’s nice to meet you. I-I don’t really know what to say, but I definitely want you to know, wherever you are, that you have raised a daughter you can be proud of. Even more than I know you already were. She has saved my life and changed it in ways you can’t even imagine. She’s so kind and sweet, and from what Lauren has told me, those are all things she has inherited from you. So… I guess I just wanted to thank you for giving life to her.” Luna then said something in a language I didn’t understand, but it did sound very melodic.

“Luna…” I was gobsmacked by her little speech. Once she had gotten rolling, she had really managed to make me gosh darn emotional.

“Sorry, I didn’t know what to say… but something just came to heart and I had to let it out… I guess.” She was starting to get a bit teary-eyed too.

“Want to sit down for a second?” I nodded to a tree a bit behind us. “So we can get out of the simulated ‘sun’ for a bit.”

She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “It is a bit bright, yes.”

We sat down against the trunk of the tree in the middle of the ‘contemplation fields’ as they call it. Those were dotted around the area where people could sit down to think or to process their feelings. I leant back against the tree trunk itself and waited for Luna to do the same, which she did quickly afterwards.

“Hey Luna, that bit at the end of your talk, what exactly did you say?”

Luna turned to me. “It’s just something I thought up in my native language. It basically means ‘Rest peacefully and assured’.”

“It sounded very poetic.”

“Mhmm, I did that on purpose. Our language really has no concept of rhyming, it got introduced to me through human culture, the same goes for the concept of mourning the dead by the way. At least not in the way humans go through it all.”

“So you figured that sentence out from scratch?”

“Mhmm.” She nodded. “The people back home would really look strangely at me if I said something like that back home.”

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“So when someone dies, do people not feel sadness?”

“They do.” Luna nodded. “But the bodies mainly get disposed off as fast as possible and the people who just lost someone are expected to just go through with their lives like nothing happened.”

“And people are okay with that?”

“They don’t know anything better. That’s how it works, how it has always worked and how it will always work for most of them. If you know only the color gray, you won’t even think of the possibility that other colors even exist.”

“So again, as utilitarian as it can be.”

“Pretty much.” Luna nodded and looked around. “This is a way better way of honouring that sadness everyone has within themselves. Giving it a rightful place. A place where it may exist without anyone looking badly at you. No prejudice at all.”

“They shouldn’t all be as grandiose as this place, but I do get your point. Dying is a part of life, something everyone will deal with at some certain point in time. And therefore it should also be something that gets plenty of attention. Of course it shouldn’t be everywhere, since that would be very depressing, but it needs to have a place, as you said so yourself.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot my people could learn from humans about that kind of stuff.”

After that the conversation fell quiet again as I just looked in the direction of my parent’s grave. It brought up memories from the first time I had come over here and sat in exactly the same spot, although I was pretty much crying my heart out still at that point. Today, while I did feel a pang of sadness, I mostly felt happy that I could show this place to Luna and foremost introduce her to them.

“Can I ask you two questions now?” Luna asked a couple of minutes later.

“Always.”

“I know that we just talked to your parents, but do you actually also believe that they can hear you?”

“Hmmm.”

“Sorry if that is a rude thing to ask.”

“No, it’s fair. Considering the conversation we had earlier.” I rested my head against the tree and looked up at the leaves. “I’m not really a religious type, you probably already figured that out. But when it comes to this… I don’t know. It helps talking to them, it makes me feel better, do I know or even think that they can hear me? Not really. But on the off-chance that they can…” I scratched the back of my head thinking of what to say next, accidentally knocking my beret off my head and onto my lap. “Ah.”

Luna gently put her hand on my beret and then raised it up to me. “It’s one of those things you can’t really explain.”

I accepted my beret back and smiled “Yeah, pretty much.”

“And can I still ask my second question?”

“Oh ye, definitely.”

“Whose flowers were on your parent’s grave marker?”

“Ah, those would be of a friend of mine.”

“A friend of yours?”

“Yeah, before I left for our little space trip I made sure I had someone to come over to watch my parent’s grave. Of course they have droids here who maintain the graves, but I still wanted to have a human touch. Get some nice new flowers once in a while. So I paid a friend of mine to come occasionally to do just that.”

“And does that friend have a name?”

“He’s called James.”

“I assume you two are pretty close then?”

“Not particularly.” I shook my head. “He’s someone who knew my parents though, and I do trust him as well. He’s a guy of integrity but who sadly doesn’t have the best paying jobs in the world. That’s why I chose for him to keep an eye out and he gladly accepted.”

“What job would that be?”

“Funnily enough he works for the city’s maintenance service. So what I’m asking from him is quite in line with that.”

“Hoh.”

“Not the answers you were expecting?” I tilted my head and smiled.

“Not really, I just find it interesting.”

“Wanna know something funny?”

“Sure.” She nodded.

“Gunny and I were talking about this exact thing on the day I met you.”

“Heh.” Luna smiled back. “Talking about Gunny, I wonder what he is doing right now. We already know that Eva is having some fun with Ellie.”

“Probably something very distanced from work and far out of reach of any technology.” I replied.

“And what if he gets called up?”

“You can be assured that Gunny will have coincidentally had his holo stick nearby. The man is just lucky like that.”

“Mhmm.” Luna giggled.

I put my beret back on and then helped myself to get up. Offering a hand to Luna as well. “Come, let’s go say goodbye to my parents and then go out to eat something at a restaurant. I’m getting a bit hungry.”

Luna nodded and took my hand. “Do you know anything nearby?”

“I’ve got a couple of ideas, yes.” I gave her a wink and then together we walked, hand in hand, back to the grave of my parents to say goodbye to them again for the time being.