A limestone plaque, cracked clean in two and measuring just over a metre across, carries a Latin epitaph of considerable composure about the nature of dying. Dating to around 1623 and associated with the Fitzgerald family, it was originally set into the east wall of a church nave in Kilkea Demesne, County Kildare, most likely positioned above a Fitzgerald table tomb, the kind of flat-topped chest monument common to Hiberno-Norman gentry burials of the period. When the wall collapsed, the plaque came down with it, and it has remained cracked ever since, the fracture running through the inscription like an unintended punctuation mark.

The text, rendered in Roman letters in low false relief, meaning the lettering is raised only slightly from the surface to create a subtle shadow rather than a sharp projection, opens with a kind of riddling address to the reader: "I live, yet I die; do you wonder at these little words, reader? On earth I die; a second life is at the pole." The verses then name three individuals buried together in the same tomb. Joanna Keating, described as joined to a pious husband, William Fitzgerald. Cecilia, identified as his wife. And a third figure from the Geidon line, whose name the Latin constructs with slightly more difficulty. The inscription concludes with the statement that these three are laid together in this tomb, a formulation that raises quiet questions about the arrangement, since a table tomb would not typically accommodate multiple interments unless the vault beneath it did. The Fitzgerald and Keating families were both prominent in Kildare across the late medieval and early modern periods, and the plaque's date of around 1623 places it in the decades after the Elizabethan conquest reshaped much of the region's Gaelic and Old English aristocratic networks.