How fragility honors the dead

I’m currently reading and almost finished with Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker. One of the main characters, Blackburn Gant, is a disfigured polio survivor and the titular caretaker of a church graveyard in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn, owing to his occupation, his outsider status in the town, and the events of the novel, has a mind consumed with death, regret, and his quiet duty to render proper respect to the dead in his little patch of ground.

Late in the novel, as the plot builds toward a climactic confrontation, Blackburn walks into town and has this small moment:

“As he neared Middlefork, Blackburn saw to the left where, among broken slabs of stone, small blue flowers bloomed. If you came upon periwinkle in woods or a meadow, Wilkie said a graveyard likely had been there. It had always struck Blackburn how something fragile as a flower could honor the dead longer than stone. Longer than memory too, a lot longer.”

A beautiful and evocative passage. Sarah has told me that daffodils, which might surprise you in scattered clusters or even great bright patches in the middle of the woods as you drive through the rural South, often mark the sites of old homeplaces. Ever since she pointed that out I’ve noticed them everywhere, vanished homesteads, without even the usual stone marker of a lonely chimney, and I’ve often felt something of what Blackburn feels here.

At least in the South, businesses that cut tombstones describe themselves as selling monuments. One wonders just how much of our purposeful effort to remember or be remembered—no matter how monumental—will survive while the small, accidental, fragile things with which we’ve marked a loss or even just the passing of time will outlast both them and us.