A reminder of life and death

Our innkeeper told us we had come to Gettysburg at a propitious time: Remembrance Weekend, during which throngs of period-dressed Civil War enthusiasts march through town, remembering President Abraham Lincoln, and decorating the centuries-old graves with fresh flowers.

He added that if we wanted a seat in the Dobbin House restaurant that night, we’d better call right away. The restaurant, housed in the oldest Gettysburg building (circa 1776), is still decked as a private domicile. Our table—which we miraculously secured—was tucked into the farthest upstairs corner and curtained with a canopy to mimic an old-style child’s bed. Three somber children in puffy antique dresses stared out of photographs on the wall beside us, seemingly shocked that such badly dressed strangers should be sitting in their bed eating lamb chops and crab.

My husband and I were here for our six-month wedding anniversary. But my feelings as I stared at the portraits of the children belied the happiness of the occasion. Wasn’t it horrifically odd that these children had not only died but had died 200 years before we could have met them?

“It is so wrong,” I told Jonathan, “that anyone who was once a child should die.” Which, I realized upon further rumination, is everyone. It is hard to go to Gettysburg on Remembrance Weekend and not think a little about death.

The next morning in town, you could imagine by squinting that you had passed through a portal into 1863. The past surged to life in front of us, not sepia-toned, as I am prone to imagine it, but in full color. Gray and blue marched the streets, bayonets slung over shoulders, ragged flags raised. Hundreds of women darted along the walkways, dressed in enormous hoop skirts. Their figures were veiled and even exaggerated to roundness—revealing an old, alien set of cosmetic priorities. Their huge dresses, coupled with the legions of lawn chairs set out at curbs for parade spectating, made passing along the walkways difficult. But we did pass, pressing through the crowd and against the November cold. The parade marched toward us, sincere in its memory for the long dead.

And the Gettysburg monuments are, of course, all about death. How many fallen, how many wounded. You stand gaping at the stones and can only think to yourself, “That is too many.” At night the moonlight drips over the rocks and memorials, and tour guides call from street corners, offering visitors a tryst with the neighborhood ghosts.

The whole weekend, a celebration of our love, turned out also to be a sensory reminder of the way life and death meet each other—not in books, but in breathing flesh. I read in the Bible this week the story of Adam’s fall. When God banished Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life, He secured their physical death so they would not have to live forever in a fallen world. You do not have to look long at history to realize that God was being kind.