Gilliflowers Read Online Free Page B

Vincent Van Gogh suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy and some of his strange behaviours and visions were in fact seizures, but no one really knows.
    Clutching the frail flowers I resumed walking. IEM was in full ascendancy so it perhaps wasn’t surprising I ended up in a churchyard, the one where Eileen’s parents, husband and child lay buried. When Eileen’s time came she too would be interred there.
    It was eerily quiet within the cemetery walls. Even the birds were hushed. I walked towards the oldest and most deserted part of the churchyard where the ancient graves were lichen stained, lopsided and barren of tributes. Those who had once mourned these dead had now joined their ranks. There was no one left to lay flowers.
    We all pass out of time and memory in the end.
    I crunched over the frosted grassy ground, twigs cracking and creaking underfoot like antique voices. A movement caught the corner of my eye. I turned, goosebumps pinging my skin as something snaked down from a tree like a wisp of smoke. I took a shaky breath. It was a cat, a long skinny grey creature. It stared at me for a moment standing perfectly still and then it streaked away, weaving among the graves with easy grace. Perhaps it thought I was a ghost.
    The surroundings were conducive to morbid thoughts. My dad didn’t get to make old bones, not living ones anyway. My mother won’t either, a bit older than dad’s, but hardly ancient. Penny’s spiteful words came back to mind. Let’s hope you die first.
    What a horrible thing to say, but what if it happened? I didn’t want to die young. I didn’t want to die old, but better later than sooner.
    There was a cracked headstone in front of me, green furred with moss. The name, date and the inscription had been eaten away by time and the elements. It was physical evidence of a life long gone. The cemetery dated back to the seventeen hundreds. Whoever lay in the grave had done so for decade upon decade, the world changing around them. All that they had been had passed to dust, their laughter, their thoughts, their pain, their hopes, all gone and forgotten. It made me sad.
    Removing the elastic band binding the fragile blooms together I knelt down and placed one on the grave. Closing my eyes I offered a prayer for the life that had once been. I hoped it had had its share of happy moments, love and pleasures and that death had not been painful and filled with fear. I hoped they were at peace and they didn’t mind a stranger laying a flower in their memory. I laid another one beside it, for my father, begging the pardon of the unknown grave dweller for hijacking their resting place to pay homage to my dad. I wished him peace and spoke of my regret and sadness for never having known him and for a life cut short.
    Strange as it sounds I then walked around placing daffodils here and there on neglected graves that seemed to draw me. I wanted to offer the interred, these shadow people, a renewed link to the world they had once lived in via a thought and a flower.
    It seemed important to remember them. Perhaps I’d be the last person to ever do so.
    I discovered one grave half hidden in the shade of a Yew tree. It was the grave of a soldier from the First World War. He was an early casualty of the Somme, dying in 1916 at the age of twenty-one, the same age as my father and not so far removed from my own age. His life, his ambitions, his dreams had perished in the noise and mire of a brutal battle. What must it have felt like to be in amongst so much carnage and to know death was stalking you? His last moments must surely have been saturated with fear.
    The stone detailed his regiment and rank and paid standard homage to his bravery, but what made my tears spill over and fall were the simple words at the bottom of the stone cross. ‘Our son. Home again.’ It was as if his parents were reclaiming him from that which had taken him. I couldn’t help but wonder if it might have been better to leave him with his