Graveyard Walks

It might sound pretty weird if I tell you that I enjoy walking around graveyards. No doubt my passion for history and biographies are contributing factors. On mossy stones are brief histories, summaries of lives lived before mine and yours; some long lived and others, tragically short. I wonder at their stories, their trials and victories, loves found and lost. As a child, an afternoon family walk would sometimes be around graveyards. While some kids went to Alton Towers, we walked around graves talking about them, asking questions. One weekend we came upon a local grave for a ‘Nelly Jelly.’ We were still laughing about it when we arrived at my Gran’s house. It turned out that she knew Nelly who'd only lived a few streets away from her.

A Graveyard walk has at times dished me a healthy dose of perspective. When our 8th child, Susanna was a toddler, she really stretched us to our limits. She had no ‘chill’ mode. Every Sunday morning Dean and I would work hard to get our young family to church only to struggle with restless Susie until I’d take her out into a back room to run around to her heart’s desire. One morning, overstretched and frustrated, I opted to take Susie outside rather than seethe inside. She trotted and tripped down the path between the wonky old gravestones, while I tried to calm down. My gaze flitted over familiar stones and their stories when I spotted a small gravestone that I had not noticed before; a former parish priest and his wife and their 2 little children who had passed as babies within a year of each other. I recalled the story of my Great, great grandmother, herself a mum of eleven, who had buried 3 of her children in a typhoid epidemic in Lincoln. How does a mother cope with that? She was a strong woman of faith, but not made of stone! What heartache she must have endured. I reflected on my own struggles; Susanna’s birth at home, a blue lighted trip to hospital, a stay in NICU, 6 months of serious illness and life saving surgery at 6 months old and a full recovery. I remembered the incredible care and love we received by our church family and our local GP in that season when life felt like a daily fight with fear. Susanna, so desperately sick, was now so full of boundless energy….and LIFE! Humbled, I hugged my girl gratefully, sorry for my whinging thinking and thankful for second chances.

In 2019 however, I had a thoroughly strange occurrence in a cemetery that I’d not walked through for over a decade. I was walking my young children in the Cathedral quarter of our city when I passed the gate to the Newport Cemetery. On an impulse, we turned in and wandered around. I decided to look for an old school friend who was buried there and as it was hot and the children were enjoying ice creams, we lingered. Suddenly I remembered that our old church pastor, John Shelbourne, was buried there. There were hundreds of stones in neat rows, but I took my time to seek it out to pay my respects. John pastored our church when I was a little girl. A jolly Yorkshireman (you don’t find that often!) with a big heart and terrific sense of humour. He had been a missionary in Africa along with his wife, Muriel, before pioneering a fellowship here in Lincoln. Every Sunday evening my dad would take me to a packed building where hundreds of people gathered to worship and hear John preach with passion. On one of those Sunday evenings, John made the altar call and amongst the throng moving to the front, was my future husband. They were special days that marked us both forever.

I found the grave and stood for a moment praying a quiet prayer of thanks for John, who had died suddenly, unexpectedly, when I was seventeen. One eye on my children, the other on the stone, I caught the date and gasped. It was 30 years to the day of his passing! I had no idea! I knew I had felt ‘drawn’ there and wondered for a long time after about the meaning of that. My reflections on it, drawn from my own experiences and the understanding I have of God through the many Bible stories I’ve read and studied is that dates matter to God, even though He is outside of time. Dates cause us to pause and look back and reflect, which is good for us. When we honour those who braved this Earth bound life before us, we are humbled, we reflect on our own mortality and the fleeting breath of our own lives, perhaps reflect on the legacy that WE shall leave behind.

Dates, Memorials, Acts- help us to remember. In the Bible, God often urges people to REMEMBER. Why? Because we are so quick to forget! Throughout the Old Testament, stones were erected as a tool to jog the memory and tell the stories to children, to pass on the memories of tried and tested people. These stone markers, altars, stories- reminded the ancient peoples what God did for their ancestors to give them courage that He could do it again, for them! He is faithful and never changing. Memories, stories, were passed verbally, one generation to another. There were no photos, but a person’s name and story could live on forever in evening fireside story telling. Today, any stroll through villages and towns will bring us to memorials- the great war, a terrible battle, a bench named after a loved community member, a house where a great poet or novelist lived. Museums are full of the creations, innovations and ideas of men and women long gone. Legacy, reputations, are important to people. More significantly though, the same God who saw and knew them, sees and knows us too and He desires that for our benefit we remember those who went before us, what they did, what they got right or wrong AND to remember kindly for the human experience can be as brutal as it is wonderful. We are not created in isolation, not immaculately conceived, but bear the DNA of a thousand generations in our blood that connects us to those who lie beneath our feet as dust.

Today we have a plethora of media images to leave behind us. But do we tell the stories? Human identity is questioned much by our younger generations now. People need to know who and where they came from. In all our cleverness and culture of connection, have we lost understanding of our connection to the land on which we live and the generations that passed before us? Just as the seemingly small decisions our ancestors made created ripples for generations after them, so do ours! In the saturation of entertainment to while away an evening, that hold us in the present, have we forgotten to tell the stories of our ancestors to our children? Are we raising the future with their histories in mind? Are we letting our elders slip away with out asking them to tell us all they can remember?

What was passed to me, I want to pass to my children, because what is a life, if not an incredible story to be told?