October 15, 2011<\/p>\n
I paid my respects at the tomb of the Female Stranger yesterday.\u00a0 I really should think of a name for her.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I left one of my home-started, six-month-tended mums<\/a> at the foot of the grave.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n After writing about her (Rebecca? Felicity? Constance?) yesterday<\/a> it finally dawned on me how selfish, how Female-Stranger’s-Husband-centered the epitaph is.\u00a0 We learn that he<\/span> is disconsolate, that he<\/span> did everything he could to help and comfort her, that he<\/span> even tended her body in death.\u00a0 One telling of the story says that the husband “even sealed the coffin himself.”\u00a0 After the epitaph recounts what all he<\/span> did, maybe trying to justify his failures and selfish behaviors, he<\/span> engraved on the stone one of the most pessimistic, dreary bits of verse, even by epitaph standards, that I’ve ever seen.<\/p>\n How loved how valued, once, avails thee not It doesn’t matter how much love there was, how much filial respect, the end will be a pile of dust.\u00a0 It actually contradicts the note of hope expressed in the verse from Acts quoted at the end of the epitaph.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Instead of justifying himself and lamenting his pain and hopelessness, I wish he had written this epitaph, instead:<\/p>\n She was long-suffering and faithful, But then if he’d written that, we’d probably know her name.\u00a0 Maybe I’m on to something here.\u00a0 Perhaps this is the start of my own telling of the Mystery of the Female Stranger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" October 15, 2011 I paid my respects at the tomb of the Female Stranger yesterday.\u00a0 I really should think of a name for her.\u00a0 I’m coming to believe she deserves more than to be shrouded in the shreds of a … Continue reading
\nto whom related or by whom begot.
\nA heap of dust alone remains of thee,
\n‘Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.<\/p>\n
\nAlways wore a smile.
\nGenerous of\u00a0 spirit and tolerant of others,
\nShe loved God and and loved the people He put in her life.
\nWe will miss her.”<\/p>\n