Death Buried
By: Navin (October 24th, 2009)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you for coming and joining with us during this hour of great loss for our family. Yesterday night i lost my dear wife after a prolonged battle for life. As you all know that she has not been keeping well for the last two years and towards the last days it had become unbearable for me to see the most important person in my life loosing the battle although after a valiant effort to keep what we cherish most, life !
I have worked in this very church cemetery for the last fifty years with my wife and children. I was an orphan boy when the administrator at this church brought me here to take care of this vast estate dotted with white washed, marble laden and sometimes crosses that would show the resting place of people from every spectrum of our society. In the beginning it was scary because of the ‘not so envious’ job of staying in the staff cottage here and having to put up with the scary noises of the creatures of the night and the stories that were attached to it. But over time i realized that more than it being a place where horror stories were made it was a place of solitude, peace, tranquility and the final resting place for many who have have finished the race of life, which was ordained for them. I began to look at my work as a service to the people who would come here with broken hearts to lead their loved ones on their finally journey back to their creator. And that is why i took the pains of making this place carpeted with the best grass , beautiful flowers, with large trees which are spread in equal distances giving shade and solace to all those who come here.
I have seen every kind of person in the last fifty years. Children who were born still, children who lost their lives in their blossoming years, young men and women who cruelly ended their lives, promising lives cut short, middle aged who i felt could not finish their full time, many who had achieved much of fame or wealth or nobility, old who completed their task and looked fulfilled in those smiling faces, frozen for a time appointed, waiting for their final call to judgment. But the thing that troubled me most was no matter what we did here we all met the same fate, back to the ground, disintegrating every day till finally their frames will be no more when the earth and its creatures eat away everything that we so dearly looked after all our lives.
I have seen the rich walking in to this cemetery, well dressed and with the best smelling perfumes. They have laid down men and women of great achievements, their stories of valour and courage, perseverance and persistence, hard work and commitment engraved on their slabs of marble and stone. I could not help but remove my cap and bow before them for all that they did and achieved. But at the same time i have seen the most underprivileged of them, born in poverty, raised in the midst of trials and temptations, life playing a joke on them and laughing at their inabilities and weaknesses, sickness and pain. As if it would have been better for them to have not been born at all, but sharing the same piece of land with those who had an abundance of everything that life had to offer. Sometimes i would open up their graves after years to lay their near ones over their coffins and i would find nothing but mud of their mortal beings and sometimes lucky to see the remains of their skeletons left for time to complete its course.
When i saw this i was troubled to ask myself why do we struggle all our lives for nothing but a common end. We strive and toil hard, go through everything that life has to throw at us with the hope that we will be treated differently when we have finished it all. My heart searched for meaning in this life. If i and you have to come here with nothing more to look forward to, human life needs to be pitied more than anything else. I cried out as in the book of ecclesiastes meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.
Lest, there is somebody who calls mine and your spirit out of this dungeon, where he would weigh my every act and what i did with my life. Only then does it render meaning to what we do in our lives and a call for final judgment which is more soothing to me than to think that death is our final destiny. I would trade my unbelief to believe in a creator who calls us out of the grave not because i saw many holy witnesses, evidences that point to a creator, miracles that i cannot explain with my human mind or a divine revelation from above. But just because it gives meaning to what i do today and it gives a hope to meet somebody for whom i do it and HE shall crown me saying, Son, it was a job well done.
Oh God, if you are there, i give up my loving wife in that hope which you have placed in me. And that is why i don’t cry, i don’t grow weak and stoop because there is life beyond this grave where every life will meet its source ! God bless you all !
Adam.
Tags: battle for life, cemetery, death, judgment, life
October 28th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Yes…we’ve to go back to our source to answer what we did with the life that He gave us. Yet it ironical to see how people spend time in meaningless things which has no value in eternity. Whatever He’s provided us has to be used so that His name is glorified but actually we’re using it to glorify individuals.
Good one.