Time kills us twice
We have two deaths. The first is when our bodies stop working. Permanently. The second is when memories of us fade to black among the living.
My wife took the day off today. Saturday is usually one of her busiest days and we rarely get to spend it together. The sun was out and it was hot and we went into town and sat and had a cold drink outside a café.
I visit my ageing father on a Saturday lunchtime and Laura decided to come with me. Our walk from town to where my father lives took us through the graveyard of the ancient church that stands at the heart of the original Norman centre of our small town. This part is mentioned in the Domesday Book.
There was a wedding at the church and we had to push — gently — through the small crowd waiting to cast confetti at the newly married couple. Then we were on the path round the church that skirts the northern edge of its reasonably large graveyard.
In the far corner, close to the exit onto the main road, is a section where the graves are in poor repair. The engravings on the headstones — when the headstones can be seen through the long grass — are worn and completely illegible. Some of the headstones are broken; some have fallen to the ground. Ornamental pillars have toppled. The blank headstones appear as pristine blocks of granite or marble that have never been marked except by nature. These are memorials for people long dead and long forgotten. Perhaps there is a record in the church of the names of those who were interred here but nobody will access those records now. The names and places in the Domesday Book are more alive in memory.
A month or so ago, my father and I ordered a small memorial stone to be placed close to where my mother’s ashes are scattered. She was cremated and her ashes spread at a place she had never visited, hundreds of miles from her original home.
My father plans to follow the same path into oblivion. The memorial we purchased has space for his name to be added. And it is likely I will move away. And the small plaque with their names will tarnish and fade. The stone that marks not even the place where they lie will become covered in moss and, no doubt, finally disappear from view.
This is the fate of most of us. Even Ozymandias. Fame is temporary and, let’s be honest, pretty useless once we’re dead.
It’s Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary this year. That’s fame. His work lives. He doesn’t. We know so little about him. That his work survived is almost chance. The life he lived would be no less rich had the work died with him.
But we would be the poorer, that’s for sure.
I’m thinking of asking for a blank inscription — no inscription, in other words — on whatever form of headstone my family deem worthy. Blank saves money and might even cock a snook at time’s insensitive hand as it comes to erase the record of my time here.
For all these morbid thoughts, Laura and I had a lovely day together. The memory will live as long as one of us does. That’s good enough, I think.
