Hello friends and family,
I don’t know how to comment about this story. It’s very personal to me. Dad, I believe, was writing about himself through much of this story. He used his dash like there wasn’t enough time to spend it. I also think about mom, who passed away last spring. She used her dash very fruitfully. More recently, a good friend and mentor passed away yesterday morning after a long illness. His dash looks like a shooting star to me. I hope people don’t mind if I dedicate this story to my friend and brother from another mother, Chris White . . .
I keep imagining what dad might have been thinking at the moment his life ended from a massive heart attack. Did he wish there was more time to finish some project or help someone who needed helping? Did he feel that he’d done enough? That what he’d accomplished was good enough? Did he have a new story he was working over in his mind? I’m willing to bet that dad was surprised and hurt that there wasn’t any more time left. I will also bet that dad finally decided he could leave the rest of the story to his family to write. His dash lives on . . .
Here’s the story:
Thanks for reading,
David Tschirhart
What’s in the Dash?
By Don Tschirhart
Sometime ago I was visiting my son’s grave in the small, picturesque Dryden cemetery.
As I drove slowly along the roadway I concentrated on the grave markers. On each there was the name of the deceased and a birth date followed by the date of death. All of us who have visited cemeteries have noticed that.
I wondered: Who are these people who share the sacred ground with my beloved Kevin?
Some tombstones date back to the mid-1800’s. I bet many are the graves of Dryden area farmers or local storekeepers. I personally knew many of those resting in the cemetery and attended their funerals.
If they sat in front of me on their headstones, what wondrous stories would they tell about their lives? What kind of epitaph would they want on their headstones?
Were they business people who became workaholics and wonder now where all their time on earth went, time that they could have spent with their families?
I asked myself if some of the women homemakers might have resented their lives so filled with children and housework that they were not able to share exciting adventures? Or could they say their lives were happy and fulfilled while raising children and watching their grandchildren grow up.
Did people under the grave markers live happy lives or were they unhappy? Were they angry youngsters who were taken from this earth at a tender age and were unable to experience the triumphs of life?
Were they good people, bad people, ordinary people? Did they follow their hearts and do good? Did they follow their hearts and do evil? Did they enjoy their daily job or did they resent their work?
Maybe the question should be: Was what they did in their lives all that important? Did they volunteer their talents and services to some worthwhile group? And also, after death and burial where are they spending their eternity?
A few days after my musing I received an E-mail message from a newly married young woman.
The E-mail message had an “Author Unknown” at the bottom. Reading just the heading I saw its importance. It zeroed in on what I had been thinking as I visited the cemetery.
The title: “How do you spend your dash?”
Immediately, I thought of all those people whose earthly remains lie near Kevin in the Dryden cemetery and all others throughout the world.
Their lives meant the “dash” between the date they were born and the date when they died etched on the monument.
Each of these headstones had the beginning and end of a life. Everyone looks at those figures.
How often, though, do they notice the “dash”. The most important part of that figure, because it represents a childhood of mischievous behavior, a teenage life filled with wonderment and trials, young adulthood with an amazing way of giving new life, a middle-age life with its busy-ness and hectic days where there never seems to be enough time for anything of real pleasure.
That “dash” also means a time when the person wondered why there wasn’t more time in the day or enough time to sleep. It also includes a period when the hectic life was over and the person was able to relax away from the hard work-a-day world to concentrate on what they had always dreamed about doing.
And that “dash” means the times when someone wondered what happened during their life, how it went so fast that there was no time to get off the whirl and enjoy the time that God gave them on this earth. The “dash” also could mean a time when illness crept up or an accident occurred making the last set of figures stand out.
Now, as that person lies in a coffin under the earth, visitors to the gravesite, people who loved him or her, no longer think of the eight numbers as they stand or kneel to pay their respects and pray.
Instead, they think of what that little “dash” separating those numbers means, what that person lying under the soil was like when they roamed this earth.
The truth. As written in the last lines of the E-mail message:
“So, when your eulogy is being read, with your life’s actions to rehash . . . Would you be proud of the things they say about how you spent your ‘dash’?”
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