A Girl, A kind Man and A Little Bit Of Hope

Chapter 3: Graves and Memories

The graveyard was an eerie place and Rebecca could see all the people she knew and some she didn’t gathering around the mahogany coffin with the dead mutilated body of her husband resting in peace inside.  Some of the gravestones were recently placed whilst others were cracked and old; ivy had crept over the face of the weathered stone casting it deeper into the murky deaths of a history that was forgotten, a life that never existed to anyone because that’s how we all end up, buried or cremated left somewhere whether it’s underground or not we are all left for history in the end.  The decaying bones were nothing but proof that there had once been life here but they served as nothing else and no one paid respect for the unknown dead.  They were just left to fade until they had no relatives alive until the whole bloodline was left for the forces of nature to decompose and dispose of. 

It could only make you wonder what this befuddled map of generations had meant to the many or few relatives they had had. It made you think what their lives had been like, whether they had been blessed with the gift of a nice life filled with life and health until the end or whether you had been cursed with a disease or the other option of less preferred eternal grief.

The graveyard was more like an ocean than a plot of grass, a sea of the dead one could say.  You had the classic trees, barren and the branches reaching out to the trapped bodies.  Sometimes it is said as a spooky story that you can hear the dead bodies crying out at midnight in torment and an eternal torture that has been cast upon them and maybe that is why people fear death so much.  Dedicated mould grew inside the engravings that on some of the gravestones was barely legible but everyone knew what a gravestone said and no one wanted to read one for the depression sometime became a unbearable weight that one could not carry alone.

The graveyard was somewhat like a prison with the spiky black haunting fencing that sits classically around the graveyard.  As if to tell the dead they cannot go anywhere, they are trapped.  They cannot move anyway for their pale skin has not felt the flow of blood or a beating heart since they took their last breath on the Earth.  Flowers lay like fallen gifts scattered across the scene some blooming with colour that stood out in the monochrome of death’s garden, some were wilting and in need of replacement or maybe it had got to that time where the mourner no longer wishes to bring flowers and tears to respect the lost ones.

After the preacher had said his part the attendants were then requested to say what they had to say in respect to the man who Rebecca had loved.

“I think it’s easy to say that he was loved by all who knew him well, whether it is for me as a husband or for my daughter a father or for some of you and certainly my family a friend.  He was a respectable man and a madman and although sometimes people judged his mad inventions and his way of seeing things we can now all see that what his creations were, were very him and they were him because his creations and inventions made him and he made his family.  He could argue his way through almost anything to prove himself right and I guess in some ways that is one way how I met him, he fought for his family and I would just like to say that I loved him and that I miss him and think everyone will miss him.” Tears rolled down Rebecca’s face as she spoke these words of truth because she had meant every single word of it, she had loved her husband and she would miss him deeply.

Jenny stood up, she was frail and her white complexion clashed with the darkness of the black dress, she looked like the grim reaper or a ghost who had gone the dark way around life.  “Well he was my daddy and he was always there for me, after every operation and even when we found out I had Cancer he was always there.  It’s hard for me because I am so young to realize that he was gone for good, but then it took me longer to realize that he is not gone, he’s never gone because our memories are not gone so he can still be alive to us in our dreams, daydreams and fantasies.  It was not expected for him to die before I did but I guess life has a funny way of showing us our chosen paths but if I could tell him something right now I guess I would say I love you daddy and thank you because I know it is not easy living with Cancer so yeah.”  Jenny had been courageous and meaningful with her words, although the preacher had come up with clever poems and quotes Jenny had seemed to struck a few more people into tears and as they reduced into tears so did she.

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Maybe the plan for life was to love but that would mean that it makes it many times harder to break so it was surprising that the human race wasn’t a pool of mushy emotions and crying people.  Instead there were the fighters that fought everyday with anguish and fake smiles because they could and there was nothing stopping them.  As Jenny stared at her own ceiling in her own bed that night she could not help but think more about her speech in the graveyard earlier.  She was going to die before her parents and she too was going to be buried in the soil and small coffin for a small body.  How long would it take for people to forget and neglected until there was nothing but a pile of rotting bones down deep underground.  How could she be expected to keep a chin up and the answer was because life was not fair.  It never had been and Jenny didn’t think that it even intended to be.

Most nights she had resided in the fact that one out of every five hundred children in the UK were going through the same ordeal and that she was not alone, she never had been but she felt so isolated and different to everyone else.  She could not do much and the days she did go to school she could never bring up the courage to go and play with the other children in the primary school.  Why should she?  If she did end up making another best friend it would just be someone else she was going to hurt when she died.

Sometimes she would happily lie in bed all day as if she had forever to live when in reality she had year’s maximum.  It was a nice thought though thinking as if you are going to grow old and live a well lived life full of memories.  All her memories were not happy ones and only existed to torment her. 

HEYA!!!! havent been on in ages :( :( yeah i hoped you liked this bit, please vote and comment on what you think, THNX LOADS!!!! :*

- LIV x