On Graveyards
Jul. 16th, 2015 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danieldwilliamMy new job has offices across the road from a graveyard. I often take my lunch there, trading the chance to be outside in the sunshine for the slightly meloncholy air of a burial site.
Partly through curiousity and partly to respect the implicit deal between the living and the dead that when you visit a graveyard the living read the stories of the dead I have spent some time each week reading the memorials.
Some speak of happy lives, generations of prosperous Edinburghers living, working and dying and being buried in approximately the right order and increasing intervals, or something about the words speaks of a well lived life filled with love or respect or admiration leading to a sense of lose from those left behind.
Others are sad, sadder, young men and women who died before they had had much chance fully be loved, respected or admired, who died out of turn, buried beneath their parents. There are some dozen or so memorials of Great War soldiers who names are etched above their parents but whose bodies are buried in places like Baupame, Gallipoli, Gaza, Flanders, Yypres or whose bodies are not buried there but are missing, still.
Saddest of all are the small children, young children from long ago, young children from yesterday, who lived a year, a month, a day. All marked with recent flowers. Birthdays still remembered. Even today, childhood is risky business and life is fragile.
And with the sadness comes the fear of looking at the grave of a man of my own age and class, dead before he reached 40.
Partly through curiousity and partly to respect the implicit deal between the living and the dead that when you visit a graveyard the living read the stories of the dead I have spent some time each week reading the memorials.
Some speak of happy lives, generations of prosperous Edinburghers living, working and dying and being buried in approximately the right order and increasing intervals, or something about the words speaks of a well lived life filled with love or respect or admiration leading to a sense of lose from those left behind.
Others are sad, sadder, young men and women who died before they had had much chance fully be loved, respected or admired, who died out of turn, buried beneath their parents. There are some dozen or so memorials of Great War soldiers who names are etched above their parents but whose bodies are buried in places like Baupame, Gallipoli, Gaza, Flanders, Yypres or whose bodies are not buried there but are missing, still.
Saddest of all are the small children, young children from long ago, young children from yesterday, who lived a year, a month, a day. All marked with recent flowers. Birthdays still remembered. Even today, childhood is risky business and life is fragile.
And with the sadness comes the fear of looking at the grave of a man of my own age and class, dead before he reached 40.
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Date: 2015-07-16 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-16 01:33 pm (UTC)Which is probably solved with life assurance.
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Date: 2015-07-16 01:33 pm (UTC)What was that like?
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Date: 2015-07-16 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-16 04:18 pm (UTC)