Equal in death

As mentioned in a previous post we spent Saturday last week walking around Windsor castle with some friends who were visiting from elsewhere in the country. We obviously went to look at where Queen Elizabeth is buried but since we were being escorted round by a Windsor castle "insider" we got to have a look at the outside of the structure as well as the more well trodden inside view. From the outside you can see how much of a modern "add-on" this is, not quite matching the ancient architecture of the original chapel and nowhere near as ornate. It struck me how futile, in the fullness of time, these kinds of monuments are. In death we're all pretty much equal, just atoms being re-absorbed into the fabric of the universe, one way or another.

The chapel at Windsor is full of marble slabs (and tombs) like the one belonging to Elizabeth II, more Georges, Edwards and Williams than you can shake a stick at, and most of whom are utterly lost to the mists of time, i.e. the vast majority of people walking past their slab or box have no clue who these people were or what they did, thought or believed. I suppose that's true in the end for everyone, although I guess normal people don't get their life highlights studied and memorized in order to answer pub-quiz questions..