Her Garden Angel - Book 4, The Porth Kerensa Series

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Porth Kerensa, Cornwall, September 2010

Rachel places the pretty stone angel fountain she’s bought in the middle of her patio and stands back smiling. The garden is tiny, but it is a cacophony of bright colours and the scents of a variety of traditional English flowers and tropical plants. It has taken her two weeks to turn the small back yard into the haven of beauty it is now and with the placement of the stone angel it is finally complete. Gratefully she sits on one of her new chairs and gazes around the garden, happily.

The last rays of the evening sun are peeping over the top of the fence and seagulls circle high above her in the pink sky. She reaches for the urn on the table and lifts it into her lap. Tomorrow she will take the urn and join Tom, Max, Jack and Kathy at St. Martin’s graveyard for the burial, but tonight this is for her. She carries the urn to the bed of Lilies and unscrews the top carefully. Reverently, she takes a handful of ashes and sprinkles them into the soil of the Lily bed.

“Tom told me about your Lily, Gran. I hope you found her. Rest peacefully, Garden Angel Gran,” she whispers.

Jack stands at the kitchen window and watches her. He has missed her the last few months. He could have driven up to Norfolk to visit her at the weekends while she sold Evelyn’s house; he had sensed though that she’d needed time alone and she hadn’t told him otherwise. They have talked on the phone and texted every day, but they have not seen each other since the day after Evelyn’s funeral ten weeks before. It has been a long time to wait for her.

He would have waited ten times as long if it meant she would be his in the end, he thinks.

The next morning the small group of people gather together in the graveyard of St. Martin’s church. Rachel carries the wooden urn and Kathy holds a posy of lilies cut from Rachel’s garden that morning. A blue cloudless sky stretches as far as the eye can see and the waves lap gently on the rocks of the cliff behind them. It is a perfect day.

It is not a day to say goodbye, or mourn the loss of Evie. It is a day to be thankful they knew her. It’s a day to rejoice that she loved them and gave them the chance to love her in return. It is the day they are bringing her home for the final time. In the small graveyard next to the house where Evie once lived, they lay her to rest in peace. She will never leave Porth Kerensa again. She has come home to stay.

Rachel places the posy on top of the small freshly filled plot of land. Tenderly, Jack slips his arm around her waist and she lays her head on his shoulder. It is not just Evelyn’s homecoming, she thinks gratefully; for in bringing Gran back to where her heart belonged Rachel has found her own heart’s home.

All the days of her life stretch ahead of her in this beautiful place, with Jack by her side. One day at a time they will make a lifetime of memories together.

The End

By Mary Atkins    10th September 2012

What Is Dying, by Bishop Brent

I am standing upon that foreshore, a ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength and I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, "There! She's gone!"

"Gone where?" "Gone from my sight, that's all", she is just as large in mast and spar and hull as ever she was when she left my side; just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of her destination.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at that moment when someone at my side says, "There! She's gone!" There are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, "Here she comes!"

And that is dying.