Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff.

Over the past two weeks, I was on vacation with my family, visiting the lovely country of Peru.

It was my first time there, and I really did enjoy it. There is one part of the

trip though that I want to talk about and it isn't what you may be thinking, Machu Picchu.

Actually what I want to talk about is my visit to the monastery of San Francisco

and the catacombs they had underneath the monastery. The monastery had its beginnings in Lima, Peru, in 1673, and it's been the home to Franciscan

monks ever since that time.

If you've been a Catholic over the centuries and knew your death was approaching, you did have the option of being buried underneath the monasteries.

This place where they buried you was called the Catacombs.

Well, my family and I visited the catacombs. Well my family and I visited the catacombs and believe

it or not there are about 70,000 people buried underneath the monastery. It was truly

amazing and quite an experience.

But of all the experiences that stood out to me,

the one that was most prominent,

was the fact that of these 70,000 people

who had been buried underneath this monastery, there wasn't one person

who they were able to identify.

It was just thousands and thousands of bones and skulls, but no people were known to associate it with

each of these skeletons. They were nameless in death, and no memory of them survives. But how do the catacombs of San Francisco Monastery relate

to us? How do they have anything to do with happiness? I think as a listener to this podcast we probably all have that temptation to think I'm going to live forever, I'm going to be remembered, death isn't going to come to me.

But the real truth is that it will come to all of us.

And with time, maybe not overnight, maybe not in a hundred years, but with time we too will be forgotten. We will be put to the ground, perhaps cremated,

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