Anindita Jaiswal
(Ph.D. student @ University of Edinburgh
She is no writer or poet…just an expression of self!!)
BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART…..
FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD
The dead can narrate stories…..
No, I am not referring to any ghost tales here, but real, honest and at times
the most grandeur anecdotes. This actually comes from places I quite
frequent in times of solitude- peace or conflict, joy or pain, or simply when
I want to converse with me, myself…and no one else.
Places I find most beautiful and serene in the hustle bustle of life
- GRAVEYARDS!! (I know many eyebrows being raised at this mention…no,
I am not on a ghost hunt…nor a depressed soul…I am normal as what you are).
Yet, I have visited several of them, sometimes with my gang of friends,
and sometimes alone. A recent stroll through the graveyard at Roslin
Chapel (a quiet and picturesque corner in the vicinity of the busy city of
Edinburgh) triggered a wave of thoughts and emotions, and left me perplexed
and inspired to write this piece.
Graveyards, by literal meaning, stand at nothing more than a cluster of some
lifeless and motionless burials. But to me, they are places where I can find
the true meaning of existence- narrating journey of all that life could offer.
A tale of a husband departing at the age of thirty-five…no, the story does
not end there…infact, a long but solitary journey of a wife just starts from
there!! Does she come every Sunday with a bunch of fragrant white lilies,
as a memoir of what he had gifted to her on all those special moments that
could never be relived again…??
A mother leaving behind a son and a daughter- happy to find her children
beside her in those last fleeing seconds. Little did she know that her son
loved her too much, such that he could no longer sustain this world without
her for another year.
Or was she blessed?
To not have seen her daughter struggle through all alone? To not have
lived through a death worse than her own- that of her child?
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