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.
