“Yes,” said the sister. “Every one knows that directly evening comes and we elders go home the poor children will come and dig up the eggs and take them away, and take also the wild flowers we have brought. Let them! It is quite good that they should. You know it is the festival of spring and of life.” I realised that she was right. It is the way to give to the dead—give to the beggars and to the children. The dead get what we send them, surely.
Strange to notice in this acre of God some graves that had not been visited this day—old graves. I reflected on many a country walk in England, culminating in a visit to an old church and graveyard, and the tracing of the names and dates of people long since passed away. It is somewhat strange. When we are in an old graveyard and looking at the graves of people who have died centuries ago we feel, instead of grief, a sort of quiet satisfaction, and that even when those whose burial is recorded are of our own name and family. We dare not even contrast our feeling with the poignancy that is attached to a new grave—with its garish stone, fresh clods, and wilted flowers.
I often wonder where the dead are. Neither in heaven nor hell, I suppose, nor waiting for a last day and dreadful judgment, nor going through the circles of purgatory, nor just simply under the earth....
We know that they exist and are alive, and the knowledge is of that more certain kind that does not spring from our mentality but is felt in our bodies. The grief we have when sons or daughters or fathers or mothers die is a physical anguish, and is akin to the pains of birth. Some one has been cut off, deceased—cut off from us. Even in a dream to lose one of those nearest to us is to suffer a sort of physical mortification, to weep senselessly, lose control of nerves, and be prostrated.
The fact is we are all one. Even the death of some one who is quite remote jars upon the soul.
We were talking one evening of death and some one said to me:
“... to die and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
—that is what I fear in death. They tell me I am a pagan, but I feel the dead are under the earth. I hate to think of lying in a damp churchyard and decaying all alone, through days and nights and spring rains, summer storms, autumn winds, winter snows. The rain must be terrible for the dead—to be all wet and old like a fallen leaf.”