Nick’s gravestone has finally been installed, and I have come to see it for the very first time. I have been looking forward to this day and dreading this day in equal measure. For months I have had to visit an unmarked grave, a patch of bare earth with no way to identify the name of the precious person who lies beneath it. Surely my son deserves so much better. Yet now that it comes to it, I also hate seeing his name carved on a slab of stone. There is something so unnatural about this. So stark. I can’t decide if this gravestone is the final honor associated with his life or the final indignity associated with his death.
I read aloud the words I prepared months ago. At that time they were fleeting black characters tapped onto a flickering white screen; now they are permanent white characters etched onto a polished black stone. It was important to me then, and remains important to me now, that his Christian faith is made as explicit in his death as it was in his life. In a place where so many are buried beneath vapid platitudes and trite
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