Elegy in a Country Churchyard in the 21st century (fragments)

Out walking one mid-summer day, Flora took the path through a churchyard she had never explored before. Nobody else about, roses spilling over the walls and the stones warm in the sun. She had always visited churchyards, a habit inherited from her parents, she thought. But,  quite suddenly, it seemed that the place spoke. Not with fresh revelation, because it wasn't as if, through experience and knowledge, she had failed to feel loss or a sense of the brevity of life. That it could ebb and flow, but leave brutally; confoundingly. The message was of a sadness beyond words and yet, when it spoke, it was both sharp reminder and reassuring call, despite the shock of the detail it contained and the sharp address to those who needed to be reminded.

On a grave of 1812, a passer by was addressed directly, thus.

Sacred to the memory of Margaretta Sally Shute who, with her daughters, Mary Susanna and ------, was unfortunately drowned at Chepstow on the evening of Sunday September the 20th, 1812, after hearing a sermon from Philippians, 1st chapter, 21st verse.

Sacred to the memory of Richard Chute Esq., Sydenham Kent, who died at that place the 17th of April, 1819.

Part of the text read

Farewell ye broken pillars of my Fate,

My life's companion and two first born:

Yet while this silent stone I consecrate

To conjugal paternal love forlorn,

Oh, may each passer by the lesson learn

Which can alone the bleeding heart sustain:

When friendship weeps at virtue's funeral urn:

That to the pure in heart to die is gain.

At home, Flora checked the Biblical text, rather as instructed to, she thought: "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."

Whether you believe this or not, she thought, Mr Shute had done two things. Perhaps, it was just a verse and description made by a sculptor who did not know the family, but it did not feel that way. It felt like a privileged intimacy: read the text and will yourself yourself to feel and see and believe what I am willing myself to feel and see and believe, it said. But it was also a reminder, a sort of call to action and Flora, often stymied by petty squabble and worry was brought up short. Bind those you love to you with hoops of steel, he might have said. You: passer by. And make me feel I am not alone.

Flora sat for a while. Found herself  reflecting on a line from Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb', where the poet gently chides those who come to "look, not read." And she found she had missed another part of the text: Richard's Shute description of his children's mother (she) "who gave them life and taught them worth." Now that really is something to be proud of.

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The grave in question is real and in the churchyard of a village in Somerset. The response to it is shown in a truncated form in this story.