“As you are now, so I once was; as I am now, so will you be”

“As you are now, so I once was; as I am now, so will you be” is the inscription on a medieval gravestone in the old church at Manham. Read by David Hunter during a service for Sally Palmer, the words turn a familiar statement about mortality into a direct encounter with the dead, and briefly make the passing of all things seem comforting rather than merely bleak.

The Inscription and Its Setting

The message is carved beneath a skull on the grave slab nearest David in the church’s central aisle. The uneven stone floor is worn smooth, and ancient gravestones are set among its slabs; the inscription belongs to a physical landscape shaped by generations of burial. Its paired clauses imagine an exchange across time: the dead once occupied the living person’s place, and the living will in turn occupy the dead person’s.

The setting sharpens that meaning. The old church is cool and musty on a warm evening, while blue and mauve light falls through stained glass whose ancient panes are warped in their leaded frames. The inscription is not presented as an abstract maxim detached from its surroundings: it is cut into a stone among other graves, in a building that has held generations of worshippers and mourners.

Meaning in the Scene

David notices the words while attending a service for Sally Palmer and praying for the deliverance of Lyn Metcalf. The deaths and danger named in the service make the gravestone’s reminder of mortality immediate. Yet the inscription does not single out the victims as uniquely marked for suffering. Its symmetry places every reader within the same passage of time: those now living were preceded by the dead, and will eventually follow them.

The message also sits beside David’s attention to a statue of an unknown saint. The roughly hewn figure has endured for centuries, watching generations experience joy and tragedy beneath it; David takes comfort in the thought that everything passes, good or bad. The gravestone and statue offer complementary measures of time: the inscription addresses each person’s mortality, while the worn religious figure suggests that objects may outlast those who gather around them.

Narrative Function

The inscription gives the church scene a concise language for grief without explaining away its particular losses. Its balanced first and second clauses make death reciprocal rather than exceptional, while the skull beneath which it is carved keeps that idea anchored in the material fact of a grave. In the midst of a service shaped by fear and unanswered questions, the words provide David with a momentary source of consolation: suffering and life alike belong to a world in which nothing lasts forever.