Читать книгу Be Still! - Gordon C. Stewart - Страница 14

When I was just a young and naive pastor,an old man in the congregation would always arrive long before the rest of the people at the grave site. He’d shun the funeral, but haunt the cemetery . . . Standing by the open grave, he’d state his opinion of the deceased and share with me the type, style and brand of casket he’d told his wife he wanted when he died.As the morticians say, he “predeceased”his spouse, and when we met to plan, she tried to grant his wishes to the very last.She blessed their common gravestone with her tears,but smiled through life for many happy years . . .

—Steve Shoemaker8

My great-great-grandfather Isaac Andrews founded the Andrews Casket Company and Funeral Home next to the trout stream in Woodstock, Maine, more than two hundred fifty years ago. Isaac was a minister. Because there was no carpenter in town, he not only stood at the graves; he built pine boxes for those he buried. Over the course of time, the simple boxes became the caskets of the Andrews Casket Company and Funeral Home. You might say Isaac had a monopoly in those Maine woods.

Only recently did the Andrews property leave the family when Pete Andrews, my late mother’s favorite cousin, sold it to some whippersnapper who just wanted to make a buck.

My mother used to chuckle as she recalled playing hide-and-seek with her siblings in and among the caskets at the casket factory. The property, including the land, the mill, the old homestead, the funeral home, and the trout stream that had belonged to the family all those years belongs to someone new . . . which means that it, like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, never really did belong to us and does not belong to them. It does not belong to time.

Last October, my brother Bob and I stood with my cousins at the open grave of my ninety-nine-year-old Aunt Gertrude—our one remaining Andrews elder. I recited from The Book of Common Worship, the prayer I have prayed a thousand times at the open grave, the one my friend Steve and I prayed as young, naive pastors—a prayer for the living that feeds me day and night until my lights go out. I wonder if Isaac Andrews did the same way those many years ago.

“O Lord, support us all the day long until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then, in your mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”

Standing at Aunt Gertrude’s grave, I am like the widow of the man who loved graves. I smile through tears for all the years, and take strange solace in knowing that I don’t really “own” a thing.

8. Shoemaker, “The Man Who Loved Graves.”