Bearing witness

Unlike a lot of my friends I'm lucky that I've still got both parents. They were young when they got married and I suppose that their only disappointment, which as far as I know nobody has actually talked about, is that even though they've now got grandchildren in their 30's, there still isn't any sign of them becoming great grandparents. But, even though both of them are still in reasonable health, give or take a pace maker, crumbling knees or the odd short term lapse of memory, we are beginning to think more seriously about the inevitable; and I don't mean taxes. 

Now when you're young it's hard to take your own mortality seriously. This week has seen the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill's death and it brought to mind one of the few occasions that I can remember when, as an adolescent, I gave my own potential death any thought at all. I'd been reading his jingoistic version of British history "This Island Race" and had wandered off to visit a friend who, rather recklessly I thought even at the time, had been given sole charge of looking after a nearby village store. On the way I distinctly remember wondering what it would be like to be dead and then dismissing the thought on the horribly sensible grounds that I wouldn't actually be there to notice. Clearly not a believer in any sort of after life then.

Since then the stories that I tell have been told from the even broader perspectives of geological time and the big bang. All of which makes it easy to see my own existence as not only brief but also, in all likelihood, extremely forgettable. Not only will the mighty never look on my works and despair but they're also unlikely to see out the current century let alone slowly erode into invisibility over a millennium. 

Now I'm well aware that this particular way of looking at things might make scientific sense, though it doesn't in any way reduce the sense of wonder I have that life exists at all, and it probably puts more emphasis on the individual, that's me, as part of a collective phenomenon, that's the evolution of life in general and of homo sapiens in particular, than most people would be comfortable with, but that's how it is. Without purpose and wonderful all at the same time.

If you've got this far you might be wondering what brought all this on. Well, a few months ago, in Ghost Rider,  I reported on the death of our pet Whippet and in the aftermath I've been learning to take the walks we used to take together but alone. The most common of these went through the local cemetery on our way to Peasholm Park and down to the beach. Whilst I enjoyed walking through the cemetery, in particular the way the gravestones would shuffle past each other out of the side of my eye, I'd allowed my over rational self to ignore why the stones were there in the first place: To cling to the collective memory for at least as long as the engravings withstand being worn down by the elements or encrusted by lichen.  

So, to reflect the spirit that got the stones engraved and erected and to recognise that while these lives may have been brief they were, to those intimately concerned, as significant as yours or mine might be now, I hereby consign this picture to be buried in cyberspace as a modest way of bearing witness to lives past.