ONE BEAUTIFUL SUMMER DAY a few years ago, my husband and I were taking a long walk through a picturesque New England village in the mountains of New Hampshire. We have walked 11,000 miles or so together in our 31 years of marriage. Well, that’s what we estimated once. We have walked through city streets and leafy suburbs, on beaches and on empty country roads. No place that we have walked, however, has been more enchanting than this village, with its white clapboard buildings, its dark pond, its emerald common, its turreted inn, granite boulders and crystalline river, all overshadowed by the austere and noble White Mountains in the background. On this day, the sky was dazzlingly blue, and clear.

As we approached the bridge over the river, we saw people, about 15 or so, who were looking down over the stone walls of the bridge. They were gazing into the river and they were not speaking or smiling.

They were not dressed as hikers or other vacationers. They wore nice clothes; the women were in dresses and the men in sports coats. A girl of about 20 — a beautiful girl — turned from the wall and walked toward us. She was crying. She had turned from the wall in distress.

The sight of her tears would, I think it’s safe to say, elicit sympathy from the most hardened heart. She was clearly crying with some deep disappointment. Her youthfulness had been partly shattered, or so it seemed.

When I saw her, I instantly knew why the group was there on the bridge in this picturesque village on a beautiful summer day.

They had just dropped the ashes of someone who had died into the river. The emotion she was expressing was grief. Some in the group walked to the other side of the bridge, as if to watch the last traces of the deceased pass beneath the bridge and vanish down the stream.

The river drains into a larger river that flows to the Atlantic Ocean more than a hundred miles away. Where this person’s remains would ultimately end up is a question no one can answer. They would certainly be widely dispersed. Some particles might stay at the sandy bottom for a while, some might end up in sewers, some might arrive at the ocean on a cold and gloomy night or pass through the intestines of a hungry fish.

We couldn’t know. We don’t know.

What we could know is that the remains of this person were then irretrievable. Gone. “Departed.”

My husband and I came back to the same spot during our energizing circuit around the village. The mourners now had all dispersed. They had gotten into cars and driven away. I looked into the water where the grieving friends and family had stood.

And I saw the most consoling of sights. Those boulders and large river rocks with their rough edges worn away by the action of the water and movement of ice over the course of — only geologists know how long — that I had seen many times before, they were there, like unwitting tombstones.

The rocks spoke of their own immovability. They would stay in this river. Alone and neglected or idolized by people on vacation, they would not wash away.

They seemed to convey this important message to us, in their stoney way. They expressed the essence of those mountains in the distance.

“Some things will stay.”

Beneath this bridge, in this place, and on such a day.

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