Jn. 14:1
I've written about cemeteries a few other times [here and here, at least], so I hope you're not squeamish about them because here comes another post reflecting on a burial ground.
I'd been given some documents about a few ancestors on my mom's side of the family. I'd wanted to check out their burial sites for a while, so this Saturday while Pete was catching up on lesson plans, I took Henry on a little drive (just 25 minutes down the very road we live on) to the cemetery where they're buried. My parents and sister planned to meet us there, so we waited on the playground for an hour or so. Henry loved it and especially loved when the clock tower chimed for noon, followed by a hymn played by the clock tower bells. He made the sign for "more" when it was all over.
When my family arrived, we combed through the cemetery looking for the Dubson stones. It took a while, but we found them: my great-great-great grandparents, their son and his wife, and their infant daughter along with a few other assorted relatives.
I don't know how many ancestors you've visited, or if you find such places meaningful, but the small sum of our lives always stands out sharply when I'm in a cemetery. Whole lives are condensed to names and dates, and even some of those are obscured by lichen. Has your life really mattered when you've breathed your last and your story is reduced to the words that fit on a single stone?
Sometimes clues are nearby. Lena, the daughter of Isaac and Mary who lived just a few months, must have been adored by her dad and mom. Perhaps she was ill for the whole of her short life, or maybe a sickness or accident claimed her suddenly. I don't think I'll ever know. And there is no indication of how her parents mourned her after putting her tiny body in the ground. Another stone I saw, a huge monument probably 12 feet tall, honored the memory of five children of the same couple, all of whom lived less than five years. How does a heart bear all of that? What other aches and sorrows did those hearts hold, hearts that are now dust again?
In the context of all those lives, abbreviated to two sets of four numbers each, the importance of doing something meaningful while you're alive might be a natural conclusion. If you can't be remembered by much more than your dates of birth and death and maybe a short epitaph, then at least do something that will have lasting value. This is partly true.
But what seems more important to me is not the valuable things we do, but the direction our souls are facing. Isaac and Mary lost an infant daughter. Mary watched her husband die and then lived without him for another 40 years. Even Isaac's mother outlived him and had to put her son in the ground just 8 years after burying her husband. And these are only the sadnesses we can discern from a few slabs of granite. If my life follows the pattern of most people, my own sorrows and anxieties will be much the same. I will lie awake at night worrying about my parents as they slowly fail in health. I may host a funeral lunch for my husband. I can't even guarantee that I won't host one for a child. And then there's all the heartache in between. Car accidents and budgets too tight and broken dishes and stomach flu and burned suppers and maybe a lost cell phone.
At the heart of it, our lives are all very much the same. So knowing the details of my ancestors' lives is of little consequence, despite how it interests me. Knowing instead that I had ancestors - or friends, or children and grandchildren - who pointed their souls toward heaven and lived with eternity printed across their vision, that is of value. It's tempting to care about leaving a story worth remembering, but the details of my life will recycle themselves in someone else's story. And those details ultimately become dust along with our bodies.
What's left when we wake up on the other side of the death cot? Not the things we did that were worth the earth remembering, but the things Heaven noticed. The hard, slow ways that our souls began to mirror Christ. The choices and sacrifices that opposed our naturally selfish inclinations. The ways we humbled ourselves and leaned into God's plan instead of scrambling desperately to bring about our own.
As I walked through the field of death dates this weekend, I was prompted to consider this, to think about what a life really means, what it should mean, and how to live it so that the abbreviated version on a headstone says all that's really needed: the year the Lord placed me here and the year He plucked me back again. I pray that I'll fill the space in between with things that matter in His eyes.
Grateful this week for:
slow afternoons
overcast skies
Henry standing on a chair at the counter
new friendships
roasted marshmallows
a cardboard playhouse
fleece jacket
crunchy leaves
leftovers
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