Silent under the feeble shelter of that black, webbed dome that was being held in your hands, the vibrations from the hammering rain could be felt through its handle. Gripping it tight in vain effort to fend off the bitter cold that was quickly seeping through now heavy clothing, the wail of the wind being broken now and then as it passed in an uniform yet persistent rushing, by the muted tone of the priest as he stood over the recess of Earth you were failing to ignore. It was cold, you were cold, every aspect of your corporal form was frosted over with an icy sharpness so intense that it hurt to move, to think, to breath. It was a cold that wasn’t just caused by the torrent rain or the gale thundering by, but was a penetrating abyss void of hope, love, or will, emanating from the loss you recently experienced. A loss that has left you breathless with a crushing weight, lost from yourself and the world around you.

You haven’t looked up yet, at the tombstone, afraid of the words you already knew were inscribed there. It couldn’t be true, and if you looked, the lies you were trying to desperately believe would be ripped asunder, shattering your broken frame. Yet the entirety of the engagement was pressing on, no end in sight, every nearly unmanageable breath taking a lifetime of grief to endure.

The rain lessoned for a brief moment, making clear the words on the solemn surface of the wettened stone a few paces away. Gaze affixed on those simple words, somehow, your burdened lightened from a deathly hollow to a remembrance of the life your lost loved one lived, and those words on her tombstone weren’t as frightening as they once were. Those words on the tombstone, however final they might be, would not be the last of her to live on.

The other glossy stones, as the ones before them, were etched in time incorporeal with the last thing those they resided over ever said, a perfect ghost of a mysterious figure, having passed on to the ether. These stones, which once stood to you as a taunting of a most despair ridden form, were now a memory of the ones that were no longer with those they left behind to mourn their them. Most of the stones shared the same general message, left by their deceased wards they valiantly guarded, of their love for their close ones, and some, sparingly, were the cursings of maddened souls, and yet this one, the one that in the rain your eye fell on said, simply, “I am not afraid, I have loved, and was loved.”