When I was younger, I can remember walking through the local cemetery near our home. I wouldn’t say it was a common practice for me to spend time there, but, walking through the cemetery made for a great shortcut to our friends’ houses in the other housing development.
Timing always played a determining factor for the use of the shortcut. Too early, and the mist would hover over the graves and create a very creepy feeling as you walked along the rows. Too late in the evening and all the ghost stories from our childhood would come alive in the dusk and darkness of the walk.
But we did enjoy cutting off time on the walk and so, as much as we could, we would muster up our courage to make the walk. Some days, when time was not really a factor to us, we would spend time looking at the grave stones. (We were known to make up some pretty cool stories about the lives that lay behind the names on the stones.) There was one thing that always did intrigue us though. We liked to pay attention to the two dates that were on the headstones just below the name. It was fair to say the more moss and dirt that accumulated on the stone, the earlier the birth date and usually the better the made-up story.
It wasn’t until later in my life that I realized the most important part of the date inscription was actually not the dates at all. As I have grown older, I have moved beyond the two dates and have begun to focus more on the dash separating between them. How can such a little dash reflect so much value? After all, most times within that little dash lives a multitude of…life. Most times that is.
I had a conversation today with someone who recently tried to make their dash much shorter in duration than anyone would have liked. As we spent time together, it was again a reminder of how precious life is and how little we sometimes know about a persons’ struggles to live it. With the proper outside help and internal change, this person was able to move beyond their sadness and look to the future. I am so glad this person didn’t accomplish their goal to shorten their dash. In fact, the best part of our conversation… she was too!