" The words are from the Book of Job, chapter nineteen, and whoever commissioned this chest tomb mensa slab, the flat covering stone that would have formed the top of a box-like funerary monument, chose to let scripture speak entirely in place of a name, a date, or any other mark of identity. The person beneath it, or intended to lie beneath it, remains completely unknown.

The slab came to light during test-excavations at St Mary's parish church in Kilkenny, carried out by archaeologist Claire Walsh in 2012. It was found out of its original position, overlying the north nave aisle wall of the church, which suggests it had been moved or disturbed at some earlier point, perhaps during one of the many phases of alteration that medieval and post-medieval churches routinely underwent. The stone itself is fossiliferous limestone, a material common to the Kilkenny area, and the blackletter script, a style of lettering associated broadly with the medieval and early modern periods, is the only decoration it bears. In 2015, the slab was relocated to the nave, where it is now on display.

The church of St Mary's in Kilkenny is one of the city's older ecclesiastical sites, and visitors who make their way into the nave can see the slab at close quarters. The inscription, incised at one end of the stone, is compact and easy to miss if you are not looking for it, but the repetition of that appeal, "have pity upon me" twice over before the address to friends, gives it an urgency that centuries have not entirely worn away.