For David Brainerd — and much later Jim Elliot — God chose that their stories would long outlive them. But what about believers who die young, for whom no book is written? What is the power of their short lives? This is a hard and painful question, especially for those, like Edwards, who stand nearest to the grave. I write not to minimize their lingering grief but to brighten their hope. 

Bridge Street Cemetery
Northampton, Massachusetts

I found David Brainerd’s grave today with the help of a friend who knew where to look. Something about the simplicity and obscurity of this spot suits this unlikely hero quite well. The stonecutter didn’t give his work proper attention — he misspelled Brainerd’s name and got both his death date and his age wrong — but perhaps the amateur work was considered good enough for a poor man’s grave. Yet the etched marble still reads with surprising force:

Sacred to the Memory of
the Rev. David Brainard
A faithful and laborious
Missionary to the
Stockbridge, Delaware
and Susquehanna
Tribes of Indians.
Who died in this town
Oct 10 1747 [age] 32

This “faithful and laborious missionary” died of tuberculosis at age 29. The first indication of his terminal disease was when he started spitting up blood in college. He wrote in his diary of this shocking trial that he “looked death in the face” (The Diary and Journal of David Brainerd, 27). Over the next seven years, Brainerd would look into death’s hideous face many times in his sufferings. In the end, his was a slow, retching, suffocating death without the quieting comforts of hospice care. Jonathan Edwards wrote from Brainerd’s bedside,

He was in great distress and agonies of body. . . .

He told me it was impossible for any to conceive of the distress he felt in his breast. He manifested much concern lest he should dishonour God by impatience, under his extreme agony; which was such, that he said, the thought of enduring it one minute longer was almost insupportable. He desired that others would be much in lifting up their hearts continually to God for him, that God would support him, and give him patience. He signified, that he expected to die that night. (Diary and Journal, 255–56)

A few hours later, Brainerd’s tattered lungs and great heart finally gave out.

The Pity

Next to Brainerd is the grave of Jonathan Edwards’s daughter Jerusha, who died just shy of her eighteenth birthday. She served as David’s caregiver in his last months, which were spent in the Edwards’s home; she likely contracted tuberculosis from Brainerd and followed him in death four months later. Just days before David succumbed, they exchanged promises to meet each other in heaven, although they had no idea how soon that rendezvous would be. 

The side-by-side gravestones keep the secrets of David and Jerusha’s affection and anguish, of their sorrow and certain hope, as we have only glimpses of their relationship from Brainerd’s posthumously published diary. Theirs was a short but sweet friendship, built on their shared and fervent love for Christ and his glory. 

As I tug at the weeds and crabgrass that have crept around the old stones, I imagine Jonathan Edwards standing here.

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