Erosion

06Sep10

As you approach Maynooth by train, you’ll see on your left a tiny, overgrown cemetary. Once you can spy the obelisk in the distance, you’ll notice it squatting oddly in a large field, grazing cows the only other occupants. It’s clearly very old; encircled by a low stone wall, the headstones lean and tilt at strange angles, bush and hedge encroaching upon the plots from all sides giving them the chaotic look of ruined teeth in the mouth of a bearded face. Toward the centre, trees have overrun what must once have been the little mortuary chapel, while ivy seeks to cover every last visible trace of stonework. Through the leaves and briar, you can just discern the warped metal railings that marked the perimeter of the plots – they were the style in generations past, before stone enclosures became the norm.

Passing this lonely oddity every day brings difficult thoughts to mind. I look at the headstones – mostly grey, but some of white marble; the faces all appear smooth, any trace of engraving long since worn away by weather and time. The identities of those buried there now lost, perhaps forever. And those who once tended these graves, they surely must have passed on by now as well. And what of those who, in turn, once placed flowers on their resting places? After just two generations, are the markers of these lives destined to be utterly abandoned in such manner?

When the words have been eroded from my own headstone, when those who tended the graves of those who tended mine have all gone – what then?

As we pass through life, change and decay seem to follow close at our heels, while erosion and oblivion creep toward us from ahead. Trapped so between the two burning ends of a narrow bridge, what are any of us to do in the time before the fall?

Try to leave some mark, perhaps. Create something that might endure past the day when our bones have rejoined the dust that made them. Like a traveller crossing a wilderness who leaves a rock at a crossing point: none may come that way again, but if someone does, someday, they might see that rock and know – someone passed this way, once. And maybe feel comfort from that. And perhaps wonder who he was.

Every morning, I board a train and head toward that sad, solitary graveyard.

Don’t we all?

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