Magpie Tales - Limbo

Photo courtesy of Tess @ Magpie Tales

Margaret didn’t know exactly where her sister was buried, most other Limbo babies were the same, lost somewhere without a gravestone.

Her sister Lily died two years before Margaret was born, a part of the past that drifted in night whispers through her childhood, muffled adult voices talking aloud and at times, the faintest change of air as she warmed herself beneath the blankets, never feeling completely alone, thinking perhaps she had a guardian angel.

In life she never understood her mother’s anger, it was only after her mother's death that Margaret learned the full truth.  At school she'd been asked to pray for Limbo babies, the ones with original sin who could never enter heaven. Older, she’d heard stories of how some arrived at graveyards in shoe boxes, given to men whose job it was to find a place beyond the consecrated ground.  And then others, the ones that arrived in the dark of night; a father burying his son or daughter as close to the holy earth as he could manage it, tight against a fence or graveyard wall, a limbo land beyond the boundaries.

In the end it was her Dad that told her, him still grief stricken after her Mother's loss, his old stories coming out in waves.  The spot her parents chose for Lily was a special place, picked for its beauty, in the hope that being somewhere beautiful, they would bring the baby close to God.  Her Mother was too sick to leave her bed, but together they agreed on Cooley Woods.

Growing up Margaret only ever seen the woods from a distance, and even when she learned the truth, she thought it pointless then to go.  She told herself, her sister Lily could be anywhere.  It took a while for her to understand, that knowing the exact spot wasn’t ever necessary, that the very act of going there, was all that really mattered.

Today, wrapped in her heavy coat with autumn leaves underfoot, she breathes in the crispness of late September.  In the distance there are cut down trees, fallen soldiers into the landscape.  What intrigues her most are the scattered openings in the forest, flattened pieces of earth with walls of trees, like secret rooms compiled by nature.

The rustling of branches become louder, but it does not unsettle her, the opposite in fact; it’s like the forest has its own language and for the first time in a long time she is at peace.

Amongst such beauty, she feels the sense of eternity that her parents must have hoped for and standing there in Cooley Woods it’s as if the final missing piece of jigsaw from her life, has somehow fallen into place. 

As she knelt down, touching the hardened soil, she feels warmth from the forest floor, in their own way, just like in childhood, when she thought perhaps she felt her guardian angel,  the sisters meet once more.


Background

The above story is fictional.  However while I was growing up, part of the teaching of the Catholic Church was that any baby who wasn't baptised, including stillborn babies, still had original sin on their souls, and therefore could not go to heaven, instead they went to a place called Limbo.  The latter is no longer Catholic teaching, but one of the aspects of this belief was that the babies could not be buried in consecrated ground.  BBC did a documentary about this and it stayed in my head for a very long time afterwards.

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