Nearby is Crowland Abbey, partly in ruin. I wandered around the graveyard, noticing the modern taste for euphemisms in the face of death. People no longer die, it seems; they ‘pass away’, they ‘fall asleep’ or ‘depart this life’. A child (no name given, except ‘our precious little angel’, so presumably stillborn) was ‘born sleeping’. The headstone of a boy, who died at the age of two, was inscribed ‘Jesus called a little child; of a man who died aged twenty, ‘the Lord hath need of him’.
For those who weren’t ‘called’ too early, the same phrases kept cropping up. The dearly departed are at rest; reunited; together again; in God’s safe keeping; in the arms of Jesus; in heavenly love abiding; resting where no shadows fall; gone from our sight, but never from our memory. Time moves on, but memories stay. Death is only a shadow across the path to heaven. To have, to love and then depart, the saddest story of the human heart. Our family chain is broken, nothing seems the same, but as God calls us one by one, the links shall join again.
On the hundreds of headstones in the graveyard, the sentiments were similar. There wasn’t a single word about the judgement of God. No one goes to hell; everyone is assumed, optimistically, to go to heaven. Though the Bible suggests that hell is very crowded, none of the damned appear to hail from Crowland. I’m not mocking sentiments such as these; if I allowed myself the luxury of imagining a life to come, it would be equally restful and carefree. However, the scientific view, held by most neuroscientists, is that once the brain stops functioning at death, consciousness stops as well…
Licensed today: the River Nene in Wisbech...
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