The Grave Nobody Else Visits

There is a path that goes up the left hand side and then you cut across at the third bench, and after about nine years of doing it there is a faint line in the grass that he is fairly sure is his.

Nine years. Roughly every six weeks, which is more than most and less than some.

He takes nothing. He used to take flowers, in the first year, and then stopped, and could not tell you exactly why, and he suspects it is because the flowers were doing something for him rather than for anybody else and once he noticed that they stopped working.

So he goes and stands there for about eleven minutes. He does not speak out loud and he does not pray in any organized way. He stands, and he thinks about specific things rather than general ones, and then at some point it is finished and he walks back down the left hand path.

Nobody else comes. He knows this in the way you know things in a cemetery, which is by the state of the stone and by never once meeting anybody.

He is seventy three.

That is the whole of it, and it arrived in September, standing there in the usual eleven minutes. He is the last one. Not the last one who cared, because other people cared very much, and are dead. The last one who comes.

And after him, there will be a stone in a place, with a name on it, and grass around it, and the faint line in the grass will fill in over a season or two, and then it will be a grave like all the other graves at that end, which is to say a thing nobody visits.

He is not frightened by this and he is not maudlin about it. What he cannot do is stop noticing it, and he has not been able to stop since September, and the noticing has begun to be there before he arrives.

You will have your own faint line in the grass. The thing you are the last one who does, and the picture of it filling in.

The word the psalm uses and how long it means

There is a line in a psalm about a person's life that makes a claim about duration, and the duration is the part worth stopping on.

He is not afraid of bad news; his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord. He will be remembered forever.Psalm 112:6-7

Forever. The psalm is not saying he will be remembered for a long time, or by many people, or by his descendants. It uses a word that puts the remembering outside time altogether.

And notice what it does not say. It does not say a monument will stand. It does not say his name will be spoken. It does not identify anybody who will do the remembering, and this is not an oversight; the psalm has just said his heart is firm because he trusts in the Lord, and the remembering belongs to the same subject.

So take it plainly: you are inside a remembering that does not require anybody to keep walking up a path, and that is what Psalm 112 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about a steady man and lays it down on a faint track in the grass.

Which reaches September directly, and it does it by moving the location of the thing rather than by reassuring him about the grass.

His picture is accurate. The line will fill in. In four years it will be a grave at that end like all the other graves at that end. Nothing in Scripture disputes that, and I am not going to dispute it either, because disputing it would require me to guess about the future of a cemetery and he would know immediately that I was guessing.

What the psalm says is that the remembering was never located in the visiting. He has been the visible expression of something rather than the mechanism of it, and the two are easy to confuse when you are the only one doing it for nine years.

You have been the visible part of something rather than the whole of it, because the written word puts the remembering in a forever that no path maintains, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a man who cannot stop noticing since September.

And there is a small thing in the verse before it worth carrying up that path. He is not afraid of bad news. Which is an odd promise to sit next to a sentence about being remembered, until you notice that the thing standing in the grass in September was a piece of bad news arriving: the line will fill in, you are the last, this ends. The psalm puts the steadiness and the remembering side by side because they hold each other up. You have been handed something that stands under bad news rather than around it, and Scripture is what places those two lines together rather than my arranging them, and His Spirit is the one who makes a steady thing feel like ground rather than like advice.

What he is not being asked to arrange

Now the guardrail, and it needs to be firm here.

Nobody is telling him to find somebody to take it on. No nephew, no arrangement with the cemetery, no note in a will. If he does any of that it is fine and it is not what this article is for, and a man who leaves here with a task has been handed a weight rather than helped.

And nobody is telling him somebody will come. I do not know that. Scripture does not say it. Predicting it would be putting a comfortable guess where a hard fact belongs, and he is seventy three and would see straight through it.

And a grave that nobody visits is not a person who has been abandoned. That sentence needs saying plainly, because everything about the picture argues otherwise and the picture is wrong. The visiting was never what was holding anybody.

You are held by a regard that does not run through a visitor, because the written word puts the remembering in the Lord rather than in a descendant, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing to arrange and nobody to appoint, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what stops a noticing from turning into a duty a tired man carries.