When I finished “Where’s Sailor Jack”, I thought I’d got about as far as I was ever going to get in seeing a meaning to life. Since then, Mum’s died. It’s only gazing down with a handful of earth that you realise how far under six foot is. Feeling the moist earth below the green grass of Lancashire is a chillingly cold comfort. I’ve finally got round to booking my spot in the same graveyard, where my headstone will join those of all four grandparents and both parents.
Luke says: “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” He’s right about there being no person in the grave. Where he was though, there wasn’t even a body. Recognising that problem for the rest of us, Paul sees us all raised at the last trumpet in a twinkling of an eye, conjuring up images of a low budget zombie movie. If time is the great illusion, both could be right. My hope is that my soul, in me from birth but created from living my whole life, will be combined with my resurrection body taken when I was a young man. My physical body will decompose to put nutrients into the dark earth.
Without this, the impending, suffocating darkness would make present life a charade. Life never feels pointless for long. If there is a timeless eternity, today’s events are in that just as much as rose and blue tinted past ones are. In my children’s souls already are events that will take place after I’m gone.
This is not an elegy in a country graveyard. There’s no escaping the future coldness of personal time. Without others, these end days would be bleak. Next, to find out if they are anyway.
Recent Comments