38 • The Beacon June 6 , 2024

assaulted the Northeast that year . Three-thousand Confederate soldiers died from exposure , malnutrition and despair .

A former slave was in charge of burying the deceased soldiers . He took meticulous care to document the details of each man ’ s death . Eventually , the wooden tombstones were replaced with white marble .

There are hundreds and hundreds of rows of those simple white marble tombstones . So many men died so far away from home . The morning I visited , a squirrel was whimsically dance-hopping across one of the rows , his furry tail following in flag-like fashion his energetic march . There sure was / is a lot of pain planted under that granite .

Because I was at Woodlawn , I decided to check out Mark Twain ’ s grave site . Twain had married a

local girl , Olivia Langdon . An interested young man will always follow that girl to her hometown .

He penned stories of boys ’ adventures ( Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn ) in an enclosed gazebo fashioned after a riverboat ’ s wheelhouse at his in-law ’ s estate , just down the road from the farm my folks owned on Langdon Hill . The author who brought so much pleasure to so many in life himself suffered a life filled with deeply personal and tragic loss . Twain ’ s first child died as an infant . He lost two out of three daughters to premature death and his beloved wife . The author ’ s thoughts on the matter are heart-wrenching .

“ It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man , all unprepared , can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live . There is but one reasonable explanation of it . The intellect is stunned by the shock , and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words . The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting . The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss — that is all . It will take mind and memory months , and possibly years , to gather together the details , and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss . A man ’ s house burns down . The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations .

“ By and by , as the days and weeks go on , first he misses this , then that , then the other thing . And when he casts about for it , he finds that it was in that house . Always it is an essential — there was but one of its kind . It cannot be replaced . It was in that house . It is irrevocably lost . He did not realize that it was an essential when he had it ; he only discovers it now when he finds himself balked , hampered , by its absence . It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete , and not ‘ til then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster .”

I was still feeling reflective on the following day ’ s bike ride . Peddling to the forefront of my

dawn reflections that morning was a memory of a story my grandmother told me of boys killed by wolves who were buried in a wisp of a nearly evaporated tiny valley cemetery . If the stone engravings were legible in Grandma ’ s time , they were no longer observable in mine . But there was one stone I could read clear as a blue and sunny skied day .

Those deep-cut fancy engravings and lettering were the work of an artist . Ruth Pierson , wife of Henry Brees , died March 28 , 1833 , age 78 years , 9 months and 19 days . That declaration makes her a teenager at the time of the Revolutionary War .

Even today 78 years isn ’ t a bad run . How much more so in the early 19th century . Though the time since had flown by and there was a day when her loved ones mourned her passing at the very place where I stood , I expect Ruth or at least those in her immediate circle were Christian , for under those dates were these words from Revelation 14 :

“ And I heard a voice from heaven , saying , Write : Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on ! Yes , says the Spirit , so that they may rest from their labors , for their deeds follow with them .”

Life is filled with wars , some between men , many between sorrows , all ending in death . And yet we are blessed , even in death ? “ Yes ” says the Spirit , for our deeds will follow us .

As I think of the tombstones I saw and read this Memorial Day weekend , I ’ m reminded life is short , and it can be hard . But I ’ m also reminded that at the end of any and every sorrow I will ever experience , either vicariously or personally , awaits rest from my labors and the echo of how I have lived my life . For our deeds good and bad really do follow us , both now and into eternity , in our spirits as well as the hearts and minds of those around us .

Seek the blessing of death in the Lord always . Live well . And make deeds count , for this life of ours , short or long , will follow us forever into eternity .

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