“He was so young. You know, whenever I picture him, I picture a man the same age as Claire is now. He was barely older than us when he died.”

“They were barely older than us when they married. You were only two…”

“They got married not long after her parents died, before she finished college.” I knelt down next to the grave for a moment, not entirely sure why I felt the need to do so. “He’d have been thirty-eight today. Mad, isn’t it?”

“You never told me how he died.”

I stood up again. “Car crash. That’s all I ever heard. I haven’t asked Claire in a long time. Then, I suppose the finite details don’t really matter, do they? I always felt weird when I was younger, that I didn’t feel I missed him. I felt bad. But it was just…how could I miss someone I never knew? Or at least don’t remember knowing.”

Connie shrugged. “That’s better than the opposite though, isn’t it? So many people never get over death. Their losses take over their lives.”

“I guess Claire and I just weren’t built that way, hmm? She misses him, of course, more than I think we could imagine. But she just…gets on with it. She told me before it’d be an insult to his memory to let it hurt her more than it needs to. She’s so much stronger, I think, than I give her credit for. I can’t imagine how it must have been for her, losing her husband so young. Being left behind with a baby, all alone. Never being able to talk about it…”

“You take after her.”

We began to head back the way we came. “Sometimes I think about them. My parents, I mean. And what happened to them. In a way they make me think, you know—our lives really are so short. They’re nothing at all, really. And we get bogged down by the most trivial things. If my parents listened to the people around them, they never would’ve gotten married. And then I would never have been born. They never would’ve known happiness and love together, even if it was only for a time.” I glanced at Connie. Her eyebrows were creased together, her lips pursed. “Do you ever think about stuff like that? About how—all we have, really, is life—and at any moment, any second, it could just slip away?”

“Of course I do. Sometimes I think about how quickly everything just passes by and yet—here we are, not really living it. Just watching it pass by.”

“Carpe Diem,” I smiled, “Seize the day. You’d think people would’ve learned that by now. Instead, we focus on all the little things that don’t matter.”

“We’re still young. There’ll be time to figure that out.”

We walked on a little further, back down the yew tree path, sharing together the silent morning solitude of the old cemetery. As we walked, I thought again of my parents. When I was younger, I often used to think about how I was never going to let anything pass me by—I told myself I would grasp at every golden chance, make something of my life before I woke up one day to discover it all amounted to nothing at all. It takes a certain kind of wisdom to really grasp hold of that one quintessential truth and not just acknowledge it; all we ever really have are speckles of time. That was all that mattered, wasn’t it? Taking every moment exactly as it was, and filling it with something worthwhile. How many moments had I wasted, I wondered, on triviality? How many moments had I filled with nothing of consequence because I was scared, or nervous, or angry, or impatient? How many more would I let slip away, before I started doing things right?