Recoleta- not for the weak stomached

Recoleta is a beautiful neighborhood that I passed each day on the 130 bus. This weekend I decided to visit. There was a fantastic art fair sprawling through the green hill on the way to the chapel and famous recoleta cemetery. I bought a handmade purse for my sister for her birthday. We visited the cemetery (more on that once I finish explaining the rest), we ate at a restaurant that belonged to ferrari, we toured the museo de bellas artes, we shared cheesecake at the cafe outside of museo de arte decorativo y oriental, and then we toured that museum as well. >We even walked all the way home from Recoleta, about a 5 mile hike through the city. It was basically a perfect day....... except for the cemetery. This part is not for the weak stomach. The cemetery is beautiful. Each person/family has its own little house/room that they are buried in. That´s all fine and dandy, but I already have some serious mental issues to deal with on the topic of death and cemetaries stemming from a childhood memory of walking through a civil war cemetary in the middle of the night as a child with my dad because he thought it was the safest option (our town´s downtown is pretty sketch). Needless to say, I´m still basically terrified of all things dead. I can picture it too well in my head, I think my imagination is a little too vivid. I WILL be cremated. I can´t stand the thought of anything else. Anyhow, back to recoleta. The issue with this cemetary is that these people didn´t want to be buried in the ground. Which is great. But in addition to this stipulation, the family wanted to be able to visit, and not just the grave, but the coffin. Almost all of the graves have doors that are glass, which may or may not have the glass in them now, and the families have keys to let them into the room where there ancestors forever lay in a coffin. This is very disturbing to me. I did not expect to see a billion coffins through windows into tiny rooms. What makes it even worse is that some of the coffins were sort of falling down, and I could just imagine one of them opening right up. At one point, my imagination took over, and I literally thought I was going to hyperventilate. The worst was the fact that over some of the coffins, they draped pretty cloths, like tablecloths. Unfortunately, coffins are not as perfectly sealed as people want to believe, and the acid/bad body juices/nasty air/ things that are eating the decomposing bodies, had left holes in the cloth around where the coffins were closed. I serously thought I was going to die during this visit. Needless to say, some people love to visit this place. I respect the way they treat their dead, but I would like to say that I want to have no part in it. Someone see to it that these wishes are carried out. You never know, with the way these bus drivers drive, my life might be shorter than I suspected. Anyhow, thank you for reading my morbid post. Know that you should visit this cemetary, I just have problems stemming from childhood that I will probably never grow out of. Visit, but be prepared! Ugh...