Would they smile?

There was a grave on my way home.

This wasn't particularly surprising, since I was walking home through the cemetery of a church, nor was it eye-catching or flashy. It was just an old grave, tucked away beneath the branches of some tree. The earth in front of it was bare, other than some small spurts of grass that had grown up, starved on light in the twin shadows of the tree and the church.

I don't know who was buried underneath that tombstone. The names had long since been eroded away, time taking it's slow and steady toil on the rock that made it up. If that was the state of the stone, I thought, then what lies beneath it must be long rotted away to the bones, all signs of the life (or lives, since I don't even know how many are buried there) that once animated them long gone.

I wondered who it was, beneath that tree. Perhaps it was a merchant, rosy cheeked and with jolly eyes for the customers, then tired and worried about rent payments behind closed doors. Or a solider, coming back from a war, or The War as he might have thought of it. Did he live long afterwards? Or was he tragically struck down in a drunk bar brawl?

I do not think it is a child's grave; it is too large, and dominates too large an area for a small body to be buried. Maybe it is two lovers, wrapped together in a scene resembling the love that once sprung between them, now looking like two dolls wrapped around each other, joints stiff and unmoving.

By the time I am home, I have had the images of so many people flash by in my mind; men, women, young and old. A stooped old university professor gives way to a nervous young maid gives way to a priest gives way to a tanner gives way to a student gives way to a blacksmith, each steadily growing (with my grasp of history as poor as it is) less and less rooted in the reality of what the person was like.

I do not know who is buried there, or what they were like. Did they smile a lot? What did they do for a living? What about family, friends? Did they ask to be buried under the tree, or did that grow over them later?

And then I think that, like them, someday I too will be an unknown body under an eroded gravestone, perhaps with a gnarled tree over my head. And that's fine; I won't be in my body to feel my flesh rotting away. That is some small comfort, at least (although I'd rather be alive).

One day we will all be lost beneath tombstones, or scattered to the wind. Our minds will no longer roam the earth, only the hardness of bones and tombstones will remain. And even those, those things that for us seem so ancient, will disappear as time continues onwards, until not even those signs of us remain. Forgotten, but not meaningless.

I wonder if I should bring some flowers to the grave. I wonder,if the person buried there was alive today, would it make them smile?