It had been one week since her husband passed away when she went to the cemetery to visit him. She wanted to go earlier but she had been too unwell.  She was tired from the effort of walking and was grateful she could rest on the seat of her walker.  She made her way slowly to her husband’s grave.  In the distance, she could hear the sound of someone sobbing.

She sat looking at the headstone and replayed in her mind memories of when they were together.  It was not her first experience of death, having lost her two year old daughter many years ago.

She recalled many weeks spent at the cemetery mourning her loss.   But then one night she had a dream of angels in a line descending from the sky, each one bearing a candle in their hand.   Then she saw her daughter but her candle was not alight. She rushed towards her daughter when she heard a voice telling her that it was her tears that kept her daughter’s candle from burning.

She awoke with a start and vowed never to weep for her daughter again.   She shared this dream with her children in the hope that it would help them in the future.    

Twenty minutes later she signaled it was time to go, we walked slowly towards the car.   

The sobbing sound became louder as we approached a woman weeping.   I went over to comfort her,  my mother was behind me.   The woman told us she had been married for 56 years. Her husband passed away six months earlier.  She missed him terribly and felt lost without him.   When she closed the curtains at night, she felt so alone. 

My mother then came over and held the woman’s hand and said so tenderly, “My husband and I were married for 60  years.   We are all going to go one day, not just your husband, my husband’s gone, one day it will be me and another day it will be my daughter, next day who knows? it’s going to happen to us all.   We have to accept it.  That’s the way this world is, it is sad but we have to carry on.”  Then she released the woman’s hand and walked slowly towards the car.

My mother used to say to me “If you have a kind heart, you could accept anything and you could forgive anything”.  

I think she was right.