The Deepest Night

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I’m not a ghost. I am dead, though.

My body lies in its casket underneath the pale sandy sod and wind-scrubbed grass of southern England, not far from where I was born. The marker for my grave looks much like all the others in the cemetery, plain gray stone, chiseled edges. Chiseled letters spelling out my name and significant dates, and a single phrase beneath all that about the salvation of hope.

Most visitors to the cemetery walk by it without a second glance; they have memories of their own dead clouding their minds. If anything, they might make note of my age when I perished—seventeen—and feel a hint of fresh sadness whisper by, thinking something like Poor lad, or Tsk! His poor mum.

Seventeen is young to most of them. Seventeen is a short sigh of years, barely time enough to taste the bitter joy of life, the ashen loss of death. Seventeen reminds them uncomfortably well of how their own years are ticking down to a final, finite number.

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