October 15, 2011
I paid my respects at the tomb of the Female Stranger yesterday. I really should think of a name for her. I’m coming to believe she deserves more than to be shrouded in the shreds of a rotting veil, shrouded in the mists of time, shrouded, as I think too many women are, in the shadow of their men’s (husbands, fathers, brothers) egos.
I left one of my home-started, six-month-tended mums at the foot of the grave. It’s the least I could do to honor her memory and express regret for the times my guyness (if it wasn’t a word, it is now) has overshadowed the women in my life.
After writing about her (Rebecca? Felicity? Constance?) yesterday it finally dawned on me how selfish, how Female-Stranger’s-Husband-centered the epitaph is. We learn that he is disconsolate, that he did everything he could to help and comfort her, that he even tended her body in death. One telling of the story says that the husband “even sealed the coffin himself.” After the epitaph recounts what all he did, maybe trying to justify his failures and selfish behaviors, he engraved on the stone one of the most pessimistic, dreary bits of verse, even by epitaph standards, that I’ve ever seen.
How loved how valued, once, avails thee not
to whom related or by whom begot.
A heap of dust alone remains of thee,
‘Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.
It doesn’t matter how much love there was, how much filial respect, the end will be a pile of dust. It actually contradicts the note of hope expressed in the verse from Acts quoted at the end of the epitaph. For someone with a faith in Something Bigger than any one person, whether God, Love, Goodness, Charity, the idea that the Bigger Thing is at death all for nothing, is fairly faithless.
Instead of justifying himself and lamenting his pain and hopelessness, I wish he had written this epitaph, instead:
She was long-suffering and faithful,
Always wore a smile.
Generous of spirit and tolerant of others,
She loved God and and loved the people He put in her life.
We will miss her.”
But then if he’d written that, we’d probably know her name. Maybe I’m on to something here. Perhaps this is the start of my own telling of the Mystery of the Female Stranger.
