Here lies buried, Varney and
John, sons to Mr. John and
Mrs. Sarah Putnam. Varney
died June 25th 1794 in the 5
year of his age. John died
July [illegible] 1794 in the [illegible] year
of his age.
Death is a debt, to nature due,
Which all must pay, it must be true.
“Death is a debt to nature due / Which I have paid, and so must you” is a very widely recurring epitaph in these burial grounds. Death as a debt to nature was a commonplace expression in America at the time these epitaphs were carved. In 1702, Cotton Mather wrote in one of his histories: “He did, at length, pay one debt, namely, that unto nature, by death” and in 1731 a journal-writer noted: “Death was a Debt due to Nature, and that we must all pay it.” In various anthologies of epitaphs, I have found many earlier references to Death as a debt.
James Hervey, in his Meditations Among the Tombs, contrasts the death of a soldier with the far greater sacrifice Christ made for all mankind, musing: “[The soldier] only yielded up a life, which was long before forfeited to divine justice; which must soon have been surrendered as a debt to nature, if it had not fallen as a prey to war.”
So the trope of death as the unavoidable price to be paid for life has a long tradition. But who, we can only wonder, took the step of rendering this commonplace observation into a concise, and widely popular, quatrain of funerary verse, which was then distributed, read, and used all across colonial New England?
Here, there must have been a contagion that killed both Varney boys within a month of each other. It is an interesting variation on the recurring text; the person who composed this epitaph seems not to be just quoting “death is a debt”, but commenting on it, really engaging with the text. The anonymous writer to modified the text is telling us it is more than a cliché, it is a somber truth worthy of our consideration.
And by the way, take another look at the marvelous carving. Where on earth do you suppose the carver got the inspiration for the facial expression of the soul effigies, that astonishing abstraction of wings and hair, and that starburst design? The same carver did several other stones in New Salem in the same style; it is well worth a visit to see them.
