Memento Mori...

I'm always impressed by the fortune of a nearly three-hundred-year old sandstone monument, made of soft, porous stone when it was original carved all those years ago, has both physical wholeness and entirely legible carving remaining after all this time. This person was born barely at the beginning of the 18th Century (1702, I assume, if she died aged 27 years in 1729), and yet whatever Providence carried her or her monument to legible and unbroken state in our time, captured by GiC's recording, we can still witness what detail it might provide and its almost-total intact state, these three-hundred years later.

The sadness, of course, is that she died not even reaching the end of her 30th year; of course, things like influenza and its kin (if it was even determined to be the cause or what it was and how it affected the body, none of which aside from potential diagnostic inference from symptoms of the disease were either clear or at all determined in her era) made easy prey of anyone not nourished well or were that much more susceptible to even minor illnesses; that perhaps a sister or brother or neighbour would survive, and Mary did not. A keyboardist and organ composer, living not long after her era in a Roman Catholic parish just outside of what is now Lisbon, Portugal, named Carlos Antonio Seixas, was recorded to have died shortly after contracting a 'rheumatic fever'; which would I assume be a generic way of saying 'difficulty breathing, coughing up phlegm, delirium', basically a catch-all about some variety of disease or respiratory infection that was not in his time within the medical establishment's ability to determine, rather than pronounce what probably would've ended up being certain death anyway.

In a way, Mary was fortunate: Seixas was buried in a monastery's churchyard shortly before 1750 once he had passed on, but his actual place of burial is unknown: in the second half of the 1700's, what was probably the greatest severity of earthquake to impact Portugal in recorded recent history, hit the Lisbon area and surrounding countryside, and quite literally destroyed almost every stone or wooden building and disrupted most of the ground in the area, including the Graveyard of the Santissimo Sacramento, where Seixas was buried. As it would be recorded by the 1800s, the only record of the man and his existence is derived from the second-hand recordings compiled in the Bibliothequa Lusitania, a Portuguese 'Domesday Book' put together from a variety of sources near the end of the 1700s, when rebuilding had progressed far enough and the dead from the quake buried, that things could in some way get back to a new normal. Some of these records include Seixas' application to Rome to become a Knight of Christ (which he was accepted into the order of), others include the bulk of his surviving keyboard manuscript-form compositions in the Vatican Records in Rome.

But he has no grave marker, nor will he ever. We don't even know today where the Brotherhood's monastery was located, the damage done to its grounds was apparently so severe. So again, for Mary to have a burial, and a stone describing her existence and limits thus, is its own fortune.

-2Paw.