Torajan culture is steeped in history and tradition.

It’s a beautiful thing, really, from the design of their houses, a long memory stemming from their arrival on ships centuries ago, to their tau-tau, sanding with arms stretched out, an invitation from beyond the grave.

The first day we were in Tana Troraja our friend Nicholas took us on a day long loop south of Rantepao that took us to three separate burial sites.

The first was at Lemo,which means lemon in the local language and was so named for the valley full of lemon trees that used to exist here. Generations ago they were cut down to make room for rice terraces. A buffalo wallows in one that has already been harvested; green shoots allowed to regrow for his munching pleasure.

The graves here are carved high into the cliff face. Nicholas explains that each grave is a large room and many bodies are placed in each one. Each wooden door indicates a family grave. Etched into the rock in between the mausoleum like rooms are “balconies,” for lack of a better description. On these, the tau-tau are lined up. Lifelike statues of the deceased, carved from Jack Fruit Wood, “Because this wood is very hard and is naturally the colour of human people,” Nicholas explains. It’s the colour of Torajan people, at any rate. Their jointed arms are extended, flat eyes staring out of wooden features, a testimony to the generations of living, breathing, loving, hating, hard working, hard fighting people who have worn paths in the groove of this valley with the soles of their feet for thousands of years.

“The tau-tau are carved for the important families, the king people. They tell the story of the ruling families. They are important for preserving the history. Especially long ago, when we had no education, no writing, in Tana Toraja. The tau-tau told the story of the generations.”

A door is missing from one cave-like opening and a bundle of bones, wrapped in decaying white gauze, protrudes slightly. Life, death, history, and the modern world come full circle in one swirling moment.

Our next stop was a backwater village at the end of a very long, rough, one lane road. We paid our modest entry fee to a weathered woman with betel-red teeth and she extended her hand to the left.

We followed the path between flooded rice paddies and around a corner while thunder cracked in the distance through an ever darkening sky. We saw the hanging graves first: ornately carved coffins, boat shaped, suspended from beams in the ceiling of a limestone cave. Stalactites dripped from the ceiling, bearing millennial witness to the weeping that has echoed off of these walls. The coffins are over 750 years old, the ornate carving is still clearly visible, even though the clay based paint has long since faded away.

Skulls and femurs, ulna and rib bones are stacked in piles everywhere.

Many of the coffins have disintegrated, but their inhabitants have not. Hollow eyes stare out of holes in the rock where descendants, have tucked the nameless faces to watch the world go by. Nicholas insists that we pose with a pile of skulls while he takes our picture, like any good guide would.

I quietly wonder who they were.

I stare into the worn eyes of their tau-tau and wish they could answer the questions I have. Their statues stand their endless watch, and I wonder what they make of our pale faces, strange clothes, and language. In that moment, the world seems a miraculous time machine to me, with hidden portals where worlds touch, threads of history almost intersect and the tau-tau almost come to life and tell their story.

The baby grave tree was scary to me before I saw it.

All I could think of was the other horrible tree that we saw in Cambodia this past summer. The one under which I was brought to my knees in gasping, mama sadness for the horrors perpetrated there. This was an altogether different sort of tree.

According to the ancient beliefs of the Torajan people, a baby who died before his first birthday must be buried in a tree. In this way, the baby could grow up and out through the tree. The babies were carefully wrapped and placed inside hollowed out spaces in the trunk of a growing tree, and covered over with palm fiber doors. The hope being that their essence would become part of the tree. I like that thought. I like it a lot.

These graves are nearly 200 years old, from just before the Dutch missionaries came to convert the Torajans. The tree is mostly dead, but there are still a few green shoots reaching for the sky from the remains of the old trunk. It must have been a great comfort to the mamas to come and sit beneath the tree and commune with the spirits of their babies. That sort of burial makes good sense to me.

The thought crossed my mind, as we bumped along the nearly impassible roads, listening to Nicholas tell us stories of his people and his history, that, on the surface, it seems like the Torajans are obsessed with death.

But really, it’s just the opposite. They are celebrants of life in some of the most beautiful ways.

When their people die, they keep them in the house for a long time, allowing time to grieve, time to let go, time for life and death to fade together gently. Death isn’t the sharp cutting of a cord and immediate detachment that quick burial is. I kind of like that.

They craft tau-tau in the image of their loved ones, preserving a piece of them for future generations, as well as telling the stories through faces and eyes. They are amazing likenesses, some of them, and the very best of familial art.

They transformed death into something living, with their infant burials; a really lovely connection made between animal and vegetable, short lived, and long growing.

Death isn’t something to be separated from life, it’s merely the next step that we all take.