Seven years ago my aunt and uncle, in their eighties, died within a week of each other. A double funeral, in the church where a couple got married, must be unusual, but for them it could not have been more appropriate. They were kind, unassuming, self-contained, and devoted - all the more so for having no children.

Today I opened the Times Literary Supplement and found their epitaph:

Here lye two Bodyes happy in their kinds
the rich Apparel of two noble minds
All blessings they familiarly did know
Wch either earth or Heaven could bestowe.
The first deceased, He for a little try’d
to live without her, likt it not & dy’de.
They had noe children, whence we truly say
the good of all their offspringe in them laye.
ffor they ingross’d thir Heyres right. & did prove
their owne Inheritors in Grace, in love.
Neither to others nor to themselves a trouble
Whose solues are one, & yet reward is double.

The lines:

The first deceased, He for a little try’d
to live without her, likt it not & dy’de.

are, as TLS writer James Doelman points out, almost flippant, but I think none the worse for it. I can well imagine my uncle saying something like "Sod this, love, I'm coming too."

What's strange is that my aunt and uncle's epitaph was written, by George Herbert, more than three hundred years before they were born. Come to think of it, much of what is true about us was written before we were born.

How did they know? And do we know anything future generations don't, or is it too early to say?