Frosts are gone.

My great-grandmother's engagement ring was set with five diamonds. When she died, her daughter Maud insisted it should come to her, as she was the only one of the five children not to have married. (Family legend has it that this was her own fault, because she thought herself too good for the local gravedigger--as indeed she quite possibly was.) She met her match in her siblings, who decided to have the five diamonds set in five separate rings, one for each of them.

The story came to light 16 years ago, when we were clearing up after my great-aunt Nina's death and found a ring identical to the one her nephew's wife was wearing. Fortunately the story had been passed down in that line of the family, and so it has not been lost.

When someone dies, their story goes with them. You're left with hints and clues, with questions you could so easily have asked, but now never can. You find the sorrow and joys of a lifetime compressed into a handful of carefully preserved letters and photos.

In Auntie Nina's case, these papers were all stuffed into a tiny wicker box. Through them I met her husband, who died two decades before I was born. Here were the love letters he wrote her from work on Friday afternoons in 1906, to tide them over until they met on Sundays. And a lifetime's worth of special occasion poems and rhymes, both tender and funny. They brought to life a man I never knew--and the young girl at the core of the old lady I never knew well enough.

Now both my parents have also crossed from this life to the next. Like Auntie Nina, they left behind them small mysteries and surprises, as well as memories. Who, for instance, composed the letter from Santa Claus to the little boy who grew up to be my father? My mother was in her forties when I was born--letters describing her as a young woman open new windows on my picture of her.

There's something both joyful and sad about these discoveries, because those lives in earthly terms are over. But Good Friday and Easter are about an end which turned out to be a beginning. This time of year, in northern temperate climates at least, bursts with metaphors of new life and rebirth.

A poem by the 17th century English poet, Henry Vaughan, sums it up for me:

Unfold! Unfold! Take in his light,

Who makes thy cares more short than night.

The joys which with his day-star rise,

He deals to all but drowsie eyes;

And, (what the men of this world miss),

Some drops and dews of future bliss.

Hark! How his winds have chang'd their note!

And with warm whispers call thee out.

The frosts are past, the storms are gone,

And backward life at last comes on.

The lofty groves in express joys

Reply into the turtle's voice;

And here, in dust and dirt, O here,

The lilies of his love appear!