As a child, I loved the plaintive beauty of a song written by Pete Seeger based on a Bible passage, with the haunting lines “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven.”
A few weeks ago I went to Mount Auburn Cemetery, a landscaped garden for the dead that curls around a hill. If you stand at the top of the hill, you look eastward to the Charles River and Boston. I wandered around on a cold winter day with dried leaves kicked up by the wind and looked at the stones and sculptures that mark over 150 years of loved ones lost.
Two marble statues have stubbornly stayed in my mind’s eye. The statue of the sorrowful child marks the grave of a boy named Leonard Junior, with all of the promise his father must have felt on his birth when he gave his son his name. The little boy died when he was a toddler. His is one of the earliest graves in the cemetery, and I wonder how his parents felt when he was buried in the earth and the sculpture was placed to mark the spot.
The other marble statue dates to roughly the same period, and it marks the grave of a young woman. She seems to be more thoughtful than sad. Her face, half in sun and half in shadow when I saw it, haunts me. She seems ready to say something from the wisdom of more than a century in her spot, framed by a bush on one side and a tree on the other.
Death almost always rends the hearts of the survivors, and families in the 19th Century knew that as well as we do. The statues are their testament to pain and grief. Yet when I think of the toddler and the maiden, I wonder if there is a deeper message, one carved in the clefts of sculptured stone that have slowly eroded and softened with time. Neither statue is frightening. If anything, they invite you to sit and ponder.
The text in Ecclesiastes says “A time to be born, and a time to die… A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
As I got ready to drive home, a large bird flew onto one of the top branches of a tall evergreen that flanks one side of a chapel. By the shape of the beak, I knew it was a raptor, a bird of prey. I was able to get several photos of it sitting on the branch, and then it was time to get a photo of it taking flight, soaring high over the hills and the river and out of sight.
From dust we come, and to dust we shall return…… Our bodies will return. The best of what we are, our souls and our purest loves, are not destined for the earth, but for the sky. The hawk reminds me that some day, when we let go of our griefs and our burdens, we will fly.
