Paul Harada lies under a rectangular mound of white sandy soil, the newest of the hundreds of graves that dot the grassy slope on the beach side of the road to the Kalaupapa airport.

The site is decorated with bunches of flowers standing in temporary plastic cemetery vases. And an avocado. It’s from his tree, a friend explained. His avocados were big, smooth, delicious, she said.

Paul would have appreciated that. He was proud of his garden.

Such is how people in Kalaupapa are remembered. In simple, meaningful ways.

My wife Cathy and I knew Paul for only the last two years of his long and rich life. But it seemed like much longer. Perhaps that is because he gave us generous glimpses into his fascinating past. He did this in long conversations beginning a couple of summers ago during our week-long visit to Kalaupapa, and continuing at Hale Mohalu, the institutional residence on the slopes of Diamond Head where Kalaupapa folk stay when they need the extra medical care Oahu offers.

Though 81 when he died on Jan. 4, Paul seemed to be the perpetual youth.

He was gracious, humble, funny and self-effacing, a person of no regrets and no hard feelings. He once said he thought 80 was a generous number of years to be given any man.

He told us stories of growing up on his family’s rice farm in a valley on Kauai. And how each member of his large family had to do his or her part in the fields. And how he realized something was wrong when, as a teenager, his arms began to hurt and feel weak. And how, what his father first thought was laziness, a doctor diagnosed as Hansen’s disease. And how the verdict seemed to be such a fluke because no one in his family had it.

The disease first meant admittance to a Kalihi hospital. There he met the Maryknoll Sisters who lived nearby at St. Anthony’s convent. Their kind ways and catechism classes led to Paul’s conversion and baptism.

And that is why, he told us with absolutely no trace of irony or guile, that he thanked God for his leprosy — because it led him to the Catholic faith.

It also led him in 1945 to Kalaupapa, where, being young and the adventurous sort, he said he actually wanted to go.

It was there that he met the beautiful Winnie Marks whom he married in 1955. The two were one of only a few Kalaupapa couples to celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary.

Paul was Kalaupapa’s best fisherman. While we visited, he showed our daughter how to tie a hook on a line so that it will never come off and took us to a few hidden fishing spots. The next time he would show our son how to “throw net.”

Early on, Paul served as a Kalaupapa police officer and later as the settlement’s sheriff. He showed us the silver dollars that counted as one day’s wages there. He showed us his dwindling collection of antique bottles that he had been giving away. He told us how World War II delayed the delivery of sulphone drugs that probably could have arrested the disease’s crippling effects on his hands. He told us how he didn’t like to travel much and how he managed to avoid a trip to Las Vegas his family wanted to give him as a birthday gift. Paul liked to talk story.

When he broke the news to us a couple of months ago that the chemotherapy wasn’t working, it was only natural that his face would show a little chagrin, but he didn’t dwell on it.

We knew that he was sicker than he let on, but we didn’t think he would leave us as soon as he did. On Jan. 3, at Hale Mohalu and now dependent on oxygen, Paul told Winnie that he had to get home to Kalaupapa, that he didn’t think he could last until the day the following week when they had plane reservations.

They secured a flight and that night, in the hospital at Kalaupapa, Winnie said Paul chatted into the night with a friend. The next day, a little after 5 p.m., he took his last labored breath.

Funerals follow death quickly in Kalaupapa because there are no embalming facilities. Paul was buried the next day. Fortunately, many of his family were able to fly in on short notice. Winnie said he looked good in death, at peace.

He was buried close to Winnie’s family – her grandmother, father, uncle, aunt and brother. Unlike Paul, whose disease was an individual twist of fate, Winnie’s whole family was affected.

There are few places on this planet that compare with Kalaupapa. It is a community so small and isolated that most of the people of this state will never get there. Yet, it is world-renowned for the immeasurable courage and sacrifice, beauty and generosity, humanity and love, poetry and prayers that have blossomed on its remote soil.

Kalaupapa is a place where people like Damien and Marianne were transformed into saints by the people they knelt to serve, people like Paul whose infirmity was no match for his deep faith, love of God, and a life lived with a smile.

And it is where, hidden just below the surface, the bones of thousands of God’s noble suffering children, now at peace, sanctify the soil.

Paul Harada has now joined them. He will have to wait a year before he gets a gravestone. The sand has to settle, Winnie explained. That wouldn’t bother Paul a bit. He’s too busy tending God’s garden, bringing Damien up to date, and comparing fish stories with another fisherman named Peter.