Personal Blogs

Gratitude Amidst the Stones

There are moments when the body feels like a quiet battlefield; when something unseen stirs beneath the surface and reminds you, gently but firmly, that life is fragile. Illness has a way of naming that truth. It arrived for me without ceremony, settling into three places at once, as though my own body had become a kind of Trojan horse. And yet, even there, life did not retreat.

At the beginning, there were careful words and cautious optimism. “We don’t use the word fatal,” the doctor said, and I have come to understand the wisdom in that. Life resists such final language. It continues, often stubbornly, in the face of uncertainty. Three years on, I find that the days are still full of ordinary rhythms, of quiet joys, of a gratitude that has deepened rather than diminished.

I think of this often when I walk through the Glasgow Necropolis. It rises above the city like a place set apart, where time feels both present and distant. On bright mornings, when the light softens the edges of thought, it becomes less a place of endings and more a place of perspective.

Among the stones, I find myself drawn not only to the length of lives but to their brevity. So many names belong to children, little lives scarcely begun, their years marked in small numbers that feel almost impossible to comprehend. They lived in harsher times, taken by illnesses that swept through like sudden storms. Their presence there is quiet, but it is not empty. I now understand why the Bible proverb in Ecclesiastes 7 says, “It is better to enter a house of mourning than a house of feasting.”

It is a strange grace to stand as an older man among the young who never grew old. Not guilt, but wonder rises, wonder at the sheer gift of years. Of all that has been lived: journeys taken, words written, faith questioned and found again, grief endured and softened. Life, in all its ordinary depth, reveals itself as something far more generous than we often notice.

In such a place, illness changes its shape. It no longer feels only like an ending waiting in the wings, but like a marker along the road; a reminder to look not only ahead, but also behind. However, many days remain, they are held alongside the many that have already been given. And that changes everything.

The questions that come are not neat ones. They drift through the quiet: what of those who never had time to choose, to believe, to become? And here, faith does not answer with certainty so much as with trust. The words of Christ linger: that the kingdom belongs to such as these. It is enough, perhaps, to believe that no life is misplaced, that mercy reaches further than our understanding.

Cemeteries carry a kind of equality. Every name rests the same, every story concludes in stillness. Yet for those who continue walking, there remains something extraordinary—time. Time not only as something passing, but as something full. Time to forgive, to notice, to love, to be thankful in ways that once felt unnecessary.

So, I keep walking. Not only through that city of the dead, but through each given day. Illness walks with me, yes—but so does gratitude. And so, in a quiet, steady way, does hope.

Reposted at On Visiting the Glasgow Necropolis | learn1

Where the Small Names Sleep

I walked through the Glasgow Necropolis as I often have. It was one of those bright Scottish mornings that softens even the hardest thoughts. The Necropolis, that city of the dead perched above Mother Glasgow; the city of the living, where space not only for memory but for quiet conversation with time itself exists. 

As I made my way among the gravestones, I found myself counting years, not just my own sixty plus but those etched into stone: the tiny, abbreviated lifespans of children lost long ago in a Dickensian age to epidemics like cholera, diphtheria, typhus. Names barely had time to settle and establish into the world before they were carved in stones suggesting they were here.

It’s a strange thing to be old in a place filled with the young who died. I felt not so much survivor’s guilt as survivor’s wonder. I’ve had decades of travel, of reading, of walking beaches at sundown, of writing, of grieving and healing, of faith evaluated and restored. What would any one of these children have become with even half of my years?

My cancer, in that moment, seemed less like an ending and more like a milestone. I don’t know how many more years are allotted to me, but I know now how many I’ve already been given, and I know what a privilege it is to reach an age where you look both forward and back.

The graves made me think of God’s purpose—not as a tidy doctrine, but as a question folded into every name worn smooth by wind, moss, and rain. What becomes of children who never had a chance to choose faith, to assess goodness, to wrestle with meaning? Where are they in the great scheme of things?

Jesus once said, “Let the little children come to me... for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” I must believe that children taken early are held in a mercy deeper than we can grasp. They are not forgotten; they are not lost to God . If anything, it is we who are still lost, walking among headstones trying to make sense of the living and the dead.

There’s a sobering democracy in cemeteries. All names are equal here, whether child or elder, rich, or poor, known, or unknown. We all close our eyes and rest with our forebears. And yet, those of us still walking have something the dead do not: time. Time to reflect, to forgive, to change. Time to be grateful. My cancer has made me aware of time—not just its scarcity, but its richness.

So, I keep walking, not just through the Necropolis, but through each day, carrying with me the invisible company of children who never saw their coming-of-age birthdays or perceived  the invisible grace of a God.

Image generated with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot

Updates : Where the Small Names Sleep | learn1

“Those places most densely inhabited, by the poorest of the people, have suffered most severely. The epidemic, having once got into a densely crowded land or close, never ceased until it had visited every house, and in many of the houses every inmate.”

—Doctor Robert Perry