a headstone for our daughter

They installed our daughter’s headstone last weekend.

Daughter’s headstone.

Who wrote that? 

They installed our daughter’s headstone last weekend. 

It couldn’t be done right away. Did you know that like most things in our culture, headstones, too, have gone the way of mechanisation? Gone are the craftsmen. Now, our beloved’s names are etched into stone by lasers and polished by fast moving machines.

I didn’t know that either. Who needs to know such things? Who wants to know such things?

After our daughter died, I was presented with headstone “options”. Pink polished granite. Grey polished granite. Whimsical fonts. Classical fonts. Modern fonts. Jaunty etchings of a person’s favourite things while on Earth, carved into stone from computer directed laser. Maybe the laser dug out the image of a sports car. Maybe a favourite hockey team logo. Perhaps a blooming rose for the more feminine. 

I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand any of it. The computer GIFs, the shiny stone, the stupid ass pictures. I couldn’t stand that hands would not carve the name of our daughter into stone. Automation and technology, that was not her. She was slow and considered, an admirer of the authentic in all and everyone.

I needed the real hands of a stone carver. I needed the heart and the skill of a human who knew, with every tap of his instruments, what he was bringing to life and whose life this marker would represent. Someone who could find her essence in a slab of lifeless stone. She who knew a handcrafted life, in all of its facets, could not have the resting place of her body be marked by a machine.

I searched for a craftsman that could help us. I was driven to find a stone carver with the skill and the willingness to take on such a project. If I lived in other countries, where such traditions carry on, it would be easy. But I don’t. I live in Canada where speed and cost trump all. And still, despite the odds, I found our stone carver.

The very first time we spoke he told me, he too had a daughter who died. A daughter close in age to our daughter. He opened his heart to the agony of mine. Imagine that? Being willing to give such a painful gift to another human being you don’t even know. He accepted our commission. 

They installed our daughter’s headstone last weekend.

On it, carved by his hands is her name. On it, carved by his hands is an image of our daughter, walking boldly and proud into the forest. Into the unknown. She has her bow in one hand, her barn kitties tumbling around her feet, loyally following. She is mighty and she is love. She is the wayfarer.

How did he do that? How did he pull her moving hair and proud chin from stone? How did he know the gait with which she walked and find the tool and the angle and the nerve to strike? How can the softness of a cheekbone find its way into stone? Alchemy, I think. The skilled hands of a craftsman with the guidance of something ‘more’. It’s there, in there. I know because I can feel it. She was there. In the stone, her echo.

A masterpiece.

An abomination.

We asked to have her plot in the old part of the cemetery. It is sandwiched between other graves from the 1800s. Families with child after child listed on fading limestone markers, all of them dead before the age of twelve. Other families with women whose deaths at such tender young ages coincide with the birth date of their child that went on to live to be six. Story of heartache and strife found in the dates of our entrance into this earthly realm and then, back out again. We are not unique in our grief. We are not special. I often feel as though our love was deeper, more connected and profound than most, but that’s not true either. It just hurts like hell.

There are extra spots beside our daughter’s grave. Those are ours. That earth waits for the offering of us one day, soon enough.  Our names are on little marble markers showing the corners of where, one day, we will be placed, next to our daughter. She will not have the names of her husband or her children written alongside her’s. There was no need to leave room on her headstone for such possibilities. 

It won’t be there, though, that we reunite. And reunite is as sure as the sweet little birdsong making its way to me through my open window as I write. A little bird that, surely, has seen its own horrors. The last date on her headstone is not the end. It’s just not like that. I am being taught this. I am listening. I am a simpleton in the language of spirit, but I pray for the openness and vulnerability to receive and I am reciprocated by a love and a peace beyond any I have ever known. Death here opens to life, beautiful, peaceful, illuminated life ever after. In the meantime, we continue. Our love continues. Our relationship continues. I look for her in the still and the ethereal and she finds me. 

Memories are beautiful treasures, but they are not alive. Our relationship with our daughter lives. It is so much more than a memory.

They installed our daughter’s headstone last week. 

Part of me knows who wrote this, part of me still looks at the sentence with a sad curiosity.

We stared at the headstone for a long time. Her, in stone. A name we chose with such care and love. “Beloved by all”, that’s what her name meant. And that she was. We stood in that graveyard with the impossible before us, written in stone. We stood wrapped around each other, awed by the beauty, crushed by its purpose.

And that is how we live now. That is our lives now and forever. With every joy, a sadness. With every plan and adventure comes the ache. There is no shaking it. We live in the haze of overcast, grey skies, all the more grateful for the sunbeams that reach us.

On the bottom of the headstone, under her name and her years of life in this physical realm, a reminder, “Delight in whatever sunlight remains.”

Beyond this place. Evermore.