Visiting the grave of Mum and Dad back in December I cried a little. It was a bleak, cold, rainy day, so a few tears seemed appropriate, I suppose, but more than anything else it was the always painful realisation of the relative shortness of Dad's life that somehow hurt. At the time he died I thought of him as an old man; now he seems, paradoxically my junior. And at moments (as the one in December, staring at his age on his gravestone) it seems to me somehow unfair he didn't live to enjoy his 'golden years', to use a clunky cliché. But, of course, given the grim inescapable reality of the deaths of the young, it's foolish to entertain the idea of some kind of unfairness being involved.
But on that bleak day, and today itself, I find considerable comfort in the final line of the inscription: Reunited at Last. On a simple level a genuinely comforting cliché; and. on the deepest level of all, a profound truth.
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