Continuing
Posted under People I love
Cold, crisp and bright sunshine – a perfect combination. I nipped out on my bike to take my shot for today’s Photo 366 (damn that extra day in February, 366 just doesn’t trip off the tongue in the way 365 does) and then slowly wheeled my way around the village enjoying the quiet and the fresh air. I ended up in the churchyard. I hadn’t intended to stop off there but the way the light shone on the pathway led me that way.
When I got there I remembered a letter I’d received recently from the daughter of the elderly lady we bought our house from just over a year ago. She lives in Spain, and her mother is now in a care home. She mentioned she’d been to the village a few months to tend to her late father’s grave. I never knew her father, nor her mother, and I don’t really know the daughter that well either. But I had a sudden impulse to find her father’s grave and tidy it up.
It wasn’t hard to find. It’s a very small village church with a small churchyard to match, and I know her father’s name since it’s stencilled on to his (old and very rotted) metal trunk mouldering in our garden, along with his regiment: ‘Royal Fusileers’ It’s on his gravestone too, quite austere…a soldier’s grave. It was pretty neat and tidy and I thought I could just leave it be, but as I turned to go I spotted a piece of red paper nestling near the stone. On closer examination it was a poppy, quite deliberately pushed in to the ground. His daughter must have left it there for him on her last visit. A poppy for Remembrance Sunday. Lest we forget.
I cleared away the leaves and left the poppy visible. Lest we forget. And I noticed the space at the bottom on his headstone, room for his wife when her time comes. I can’t imagine how it feels to bury your husband whilst having the presence of mind to leave room on a bit of stone for your own name and dates at some point in the future. It put me in mind of my grandmother who buried her husband 40 years before her own death, and her twin boys in infancy. All three names were on one headstone, sharing a grave. Yet there was still room for my mother’s name (most bizarre since she was actually cremated and her ashes scattered 200 miles away) and then my grandmother’s name 2 years later. There’s just enough room for my aunt. No room for me though. I’m ok with that.
I drive past our local crematorium a couple of times a month and every time I do I think, ‘That’s where I’ll get my send off’. Not in a morbid way, actually it’s quite comforting to know I’ve put down roots enough to know that this is where I will live the rest of my life. But I hope when I go that there is someone to tend to my grave, or my stone. My mother’s lies unvisited and untended and that pains me. Of course she’s not ‘there’ but it’s a sadness that no-one keeps it tidy, no-one makes that pilgrimage not even me because of geography. And so, today, I made a pledge to keep a soldier’s grave visited and tidy. Once he lived in our house. He touched the surfaces we touch. He loved the views we love. This place, our place…it was his place once. I never ‘knew’ him but we are connected and always will be. So I will visit, tend and take flowers from our garden, his garden. Lest we forget.
