Cemeteries, it's said, are the richest places on earth because so much unrealised potential lies beneath them.

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Buried deep with all those bodies are countless dreams never pursued; prize-winning books never written, profitable businesses never built, life-changing inventions never launched off the drawing board, unfinished songs left unsung.

Every headstone marks a life that was lived and infinite others that might have been.

Cemeteries are also where we bury the truth because moments after that last breath is drawn the editing process begins.

A disagreeable neighbour who could find an argument in an empty room is celebrated for "his willingness to speak his mind".

A sociopathic boss is recast as "demanding but fair".

A crabby, narcissistic aunt becomes a "beloved family character".

Rough edges are sanded smooth, inconvenient facts forgotten, as we award the departed a posthumous promotion.

It's image management politicians and movie stars would die for. But it raises a delicate question. What, exactly, do we owe the dead? Kindness and flattery? Or honesty?

In the modern world there seems little room for both.

The issue recently erupted in the hours after the death of former FBI director Robert Mueller when Donald Trump weighed in with typical coarseness. "Good," wrote Trump about one of his long-time opponents. "I'm glad he's dead."

It wasn't the first time Trump had defied society's taboo of never speaking ill of the dead. Years earlier he'd delighted in posthumously mocking Senator John McCain, a former Marine and prisoner of war whose repeated torturing by his North Vietnamese captors left him with lifelong injuries.

Trump also pursued another adversary into the graveyard in 2019, implying John Dingell, a long-serving Democrat critic of Trump, had gone straight to hell.

Trump revels in his self-proclaimed role as a disruptor, delivering opinions with the subtlety of a brick hurled through a window. But his boorishness and recent warmongering aside, his passion for dancing on the graves of others is surely further evidence of his unfitness for office: the man has no empathy.

For millennia most of us have agreed, sometimes uncomfortably, with........

© Canberra Times