A short condensed story

The Remembrance of Death

Even back as a boy I used to mount the hill over the town. With hurried steps, jumping over two or three shabby staircases, winded and in a sweat, I went to my grave. I was getting very near to it. So near that I would have touched its cold stone verge with the top of my tiny shoe, only if I had, by some miracle, dared to make one single step more.

With time going by and me getting older, all more often I rushed impatiently to that place, turning my back to a beguiled medley of this world.

It would be wrong to think that it is a metaphor in question, or that the said grave was empty, or, yet, that it tells of a family crypt, placed in the shade of centennial trees, whose rocky nature covered in moss patiently waited the day when it would receive me under its safe wing. No, it was really a lonely grave among similar lonely graves, on the sunny rise over our drowsy town, and in it all the time there was laid me, and that as a very truly deceased.

The only change throughout the years of this unusual pilgrimage was reflected by the fact that the irrevocably dead me was all more intimate and closer to myself. But, at a greater wonder, instead to feel a relief, this only increased my discomfort.

Finally, it looked to me that I reached the point at which, being totally enthralled and sedated by the void, I only waited the moment in which this me, who was visiting his own grave, would utterly identify himself with that me, who was in rest for so long under the gray, granite slab, decorated with inconspicuous little white specks.

And then, unexpectedly, in my heart, on my forehead, on my eyes, on my nostrils, on my lips, on both ears, on the chest, on the hands and on the legs, on whole me is impressed the seal of resurrection.

And though from then, thanks to the gentle smile of the Sense, almost everything has changed, I still practiced the old habit: I kept going to my grave, but I didn't observe that me in it, rather I tried to look beyond the grave, at me that I am to be with the turn of the fullness of time and when the Lord announces the resurrection of the dead.

father Nikola Milovic