Memento mori

Sue lives near Lone Fir Cemetery, and we often go strolling there in the quiet at sunset, watching the rays of the sun streak the ground and illumine leaves and the bark of trees. Each time we go, we see something we hadn't seen before. This gravestone, set in 1855, is being absorbed in the trunk of a large maple tree. Sue was trying to make out the name on the stone, but the tree's growth has covered it.

We noticed Saturday the epitaph for Valentine Brown, who died in 1871. According to his stone, he was "An honest, upright, candid worthy man." Proud tribute. I would be glad to be all he was, though I would hope someone might add good-humored, passionate, and kind.

I'll be cremated, but if I were to have a stone, I would want as an epitaph Arundhati Roy's summation of the main characters in her novel, The God of Small Things:

They broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

What would yours be?