by Father J. Michael Byron
High on a hill overlooking Boston Harbor is an historic colonial-era cemetery. Inside its gates are some of the oldest grave sites in New England. The weather-worn stones of the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground offer a silent and often charming testament to the lives of the people who once inhabited the city’s North End.
On one of those fading slate tablets is etched these words:
Reader: Beneath this stone is deposited the remains of Major Thomas Stewart, who gallantly fought in our late Revolutionary War, and through its various episodes behaved with patriotic fortitude, and so died in the calms of domestic felicity, as becomes a true and universal Christian.
Often enough, grave stones are small but permanent testimonies to what people regard as the very most important insights into life. Most likely Major Thomas Stewart is no longer known to anybody today, but to ponder the inscription at his grave is to feel for a few moments as though he is reaching out to us. He addresses “Reader” with something important that he wants to have us know. Major Stewart invites us to ponder the virtues of patriotism, courage, faith and family. In his lifetime he had found these to be the things that matter the very most.
Other gravestones I have seen also try in a word, a phrase, or a personal proverb to make one final and lasting proclamation to this planet about what ultimately is true and right—words that try to capture a whole life in a few inches of granite. I recall the grave of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Atlanta and its inscription: Free at last; free at last; thank God almighty, I’m free at last.
And at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where there were no bodies left to bury, the sobering admonition on the tablet: Never Again. And the sweet simplicity of the poetry carved into the tombstone of a friend of mine: You are my greatest comfort, my greatest love, my God.
To conjure up some of those epitaphs is also an opportunity to wonder how, given the chance, I might choose to say in a sentence or two what the most true and rich and beautiful realities of life really are. What would I want the world to hear from me as a testament for the centuries to come? What do I feel the most passionately about? What am I most concerned that people not be allowed to forget?
- When all is said and done, what really matters?
- What do I hold as of ultimate value? Who might know what to put on my stone? How apparent is what gives my life meaning and passion?