Why a silent prayer at the grave of someone I never met was so exquisitely meaningful

On a Sunday in May, in a cemetery in Gillingham, Kent, in south-east England, on the 105th anniversary of his death, I stood at the graveside of William Bell. My head bowed, I said a silent prayer.

William was a mercantile marine serving with the British merchant navy during World War I. He died from illness in a British naval hospital six months after the Armistice. William was also my grandmother’s first husband, and the father of her son, Jack.

Billie Bell’s grave in Kent.Credit: Jane E Sullivan

We have scant details about Billie Bell, as my Nanny always referred to him, using an old style of spelling. Likely out of respect for her second husband, or perhaps because it was simply too hard, Nanny didn’t speak much about Billie Bell. Nor did she often speak about their Jack, who died just before his sixth birthday. Looking back, Nanny carried her love and grief for her first husband and son close and quietly.

At the foot of Billie Bell’s headstone, in the earth that covers him, I buried a card that Nanny had written to him some 47 years earlier.

My mother and I had tried to deliver Nanny’s message to Billie Bell’s grave in 1977 when we visited England, but, in the days before the internet and digitalised records, we failed to find it. In a sad piece of mistiming, on the very day we were searching, the commander of the nearby naval base wrote to Nanny with details of Billie Bell’s resting place – in the naval section of war graves in that distant cemetery. The commander, in an act of kindness, had enclosed photographs of the grave. His actions brought Nanny much consolation.

Nanny’s card was among my late mother’s papers, and, like Mum, I decided to keep it. When the opportunity to travel came up this year, the thought of resuming the pilgrimage surfaced. That’s how I came to be by Billie Bell’s grave, in that cemetery on that sparkling day.

Nanny and Jack, who died at age 6.

To the dispassionate observer, my visit to the grave of a person I never knew, delivering a card from his long-dead widow, may have looked bizarre. And sure, praying for the repose of souls, leaving flowers, whispering “rest peacefully” at a grave can be discounted as sentimental fantasies or superstitions.

That’s not how it all felt to me. It felt exquisitely meaningful. In secular and sectarian life alike, we relate to and commemorate the dead in all sorts of ways, without question, justification or embarrassment, sidestepping challenging existential or theological arguments.

Our commemorations for the dead take us inevitably into the extraordinary and unknowable. Such acts need that inexplicable sense of connection and empathy, like feeling for a young marine who died far from the comfort of his wife and son.

They create moments and experiences that bypass our minds and the rational, and lift us to something beyond ourselves and the everyday to something transcendent. And sometimes that happens in a cemetery in Kent on a sunny Sunday.