To pause in graveyard and weep at this

[BellaMagnificat]

Saddest I saw was this (witholding the family name)

In loving memory

Harold 1893-1896

Samuel 1904-1905

Wilfred 1897-1916 Killed in action

Ethel 1891-1917

Mabel 1893-1923

Nora 1900-1929

How utterly cruel. How did the families ever get past it?

Should have said the children were murdered which makes it all the more heartbreaking, 4 young lives stolen. I can't imagine the pain their mother must feel.

no youi shoudl rockmaiden

shouldnt

Salmotrutta I understand what you mean - there is the uncontrollable weeping for my darling sister, and there is the lump-in-throat slightly blurry eye for a stranger.

Oh bugger the weeping has begun again, damn you

Rockmaiden that is awful

Salmo: I too have been overburdened by a series of tragic close losses in my own family.

It's that which makes me empathise I think.

I suppose we all deal with these things differently.

I found an old graveyard in the woods near Baldwinville in Mass.We were camping up there.Turns out that people tried to establish a town there in the early 1800's and it didnt work so the town disappeared into the woods but the grave yard survives in the middle of no where in the woods. It is full of children's graves but what got me was a set of headstones for 1 family,they had lost 5 children in a week,must have been some kinda epidemic but this poor guy lost his wife and 5 kids all under 7 in the space of 5 days.
The grave yard is actually relatively well maintained for all that its in the middle of nowhere,and I mean the middle of no where,the locals respect it and maintain it but its sooooo sad.( also kinda spooky iykwim )

YANBU.

In Edinburgh, we lived in a place called Leith. There's a now small kirk there, there's a sign up in Constitution Street that reads that place has been a kirk since 1483. It is across from Trinity House. Most people just walk by it now, excepting weddings.

But it is a shortcut, if your bus finishes at the Foot of the Walk and you need to walk towards Bernard Street. If the gate is open you can pass through there.

In there you will find many such graves, though the size of the yard is now much diminished.

If you look right on the path you will see one, giving 5 children having all died in one month, June. You will see at the bottom of the stone the name of their father, William, age 28, Lost at Sea, West Indies.

I do not weep and never had, for life is very hard and I know they are all in a better place than a yard in Leith. They're far beyond that now.

But I'd be a liar if I said I did not stop every time, and make the Sign of the Cross, and acknowledge.

There are so many more here, life was and is so hard here. 'Lost at sea . . . ' and then where. 'Shipmaster . . . ' 'Hand . . . ' 'Son . . . '

I go and walk there, when I can be alone, but I never feel alone there. It is a chorus, risen to choir by anyone who acknowledges them.

reminds us how lucky we are in the UK with modern medicine.

However, go to some parts of the world and things are just the same if not worse.....comic relief etc highlights this. Ain't never right in this day and age. People losing young children to preventable disease, women dying in childbirth, babies dying from starvation. How can we let this happen?!

Bella - I never said I was overburdened by tragic losses -

I'm very pragmatic - people die.

YANBU to have feelings about others...
A bit unreasonable puzzling to note down the exact dates and names to post them on here.
You may have noted them for another reason, approximated or have a photographic memory, but I'm a bit puzzled about the amount of detail.

I know exactly that spot, Expat. I used to live only 100 yards away.

Did you, Bit?! I know just the tenement. Oh that is a small world. :) I lived off Queen Charlotte Street, in the HA flats just there as you turn left, across from the nursery. And nearly every day that was not dark I would pass that grave, and also on the left that of a girl called Georgina, age 2.

Many fevers passed through there, the water being close and probably very fallow. Even the park, Leith Links, was a plague pit. Near the bowling green there is a plaque about this, how the bluffs were the ground of the Duke of Buccleuch.

I could list nearly every stone that can be read by heart, and also those in the hill where all till the 8th Duke of Argyll, including the Duchess, who was Princess Louise, a daughter of Queen Victoria, lie - for that is my stomping ground now.

The modern graves are low now, but there are no doubt houses sitting over some, for the chapel is only from about 1811, and when they pulled the floorboards several years ago to install underfloor heating, there were many bones, some with bits of Campbell plaid on them, some of them children. They were not disturbed, only given the rights of the Kirk of Scotland, for Campbell has long been Church of Scotland. It is thought they were victims of the last retaliatory strike by Lamont, but the place had been a holy site from about 750AD, and was an abbey. The adjoining masoleum was deeded to the Kirk by the present duke last year, his grandfather lies there. It is undergoing much-needed restoration.

I should add that Campbell first tried to sell it to the Kirk. They are not 'crooked mouth' for nothing. LOL.

To me, I was always brought up to be respectful of the dead. So when I go there I am quiet in my soul.

There is no harm in honouring the dead.

<a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=farm4.static.flickr.com/3141/2294808093_92ea" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">m2232b0.jpg%3Fv%3D0&imgrefurl=flickr.com/photos/jamspoon/2294808093/&usg=__LvKPorIRfnAtN-A48a1c4KoUWzc=&h=375&w=500&sz=133&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=wzlOigEVO9-2eM:&tbnh=159&tbnw=193&ei=HUSNTeWxDJSyhAfNgtjGDg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dromsey%2Babbey%2Bmemorial%2Blittle%2Bgirl%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-GB:official%26biw%3D1024%26bih%3D456%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=130&vpy=90&dur=186&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=140&ty=136&oei=HUSNTeWxDJSyhAfNgtjGDg&page=1&ndsp=9&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0 this made me cry. It is a memorial toa little girl, IIRC carved by her father, who was a medic. It is in Romsey Abbey.

Mind you I was pregnant at the time and had had a bad time with miscarriages preceding this...

<a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=farm4.static.flickr.com/3141/2294808093_92ea2232b0.jpg%3Fv%3D0&imgrefurl=flickr.com/photos/jamspoon/2294808093/&usg=__LvKPorIRfnAtN-A48a1c4KoUWzc=&h=375&w=500&sz=133&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=wzlOigEVO9-2eM:&tbnh=159&tbnw=193&ei=HUSNTeWxDJSyhAfNgtjGDg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dromsey%2Babbey%2Bmemorial%2Blittle%2Bgirl%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-GB:official%26biw%3D1024%26bih%3D456%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=130&vpy=90&dur=186&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=140&ty=136&oei=HUSNTeWxDJSyhAfNgtjGDg&page=1&ndsp=9&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this

It is very sad, but the culture was different then. Many people were all too aware of the fact that they would give birth to more children than would survive.

Interestingly, this is the way with every species in the animal kingdom. The only exception is humans living in the past 100 years. We're genetically designed to evolve with infant mortality as a main factor. Now that more children are surviving with previously life threatening diseases, our mode of evolution is changing, although, arguably, not necessarily for the worse.

One of the saddest I've ever seen is in Argyll, and it is the grave not of a young child but of an 18-year-old woman, a farmer's daughter, who passed in 1786.

And also in Williamsburg, Virginia, the slab of another young woman who lays buried with the child she died bearing, her first, on Christmas Eve.

For those young women, their families must have thought they were past the worst, their having survived the usual illnesses which used to kill children.

It reminded me of a letter Emily Lennox, Duchess of Richmond, wrote to one of her sisters following the loss of her young adult son, who died of gangrene after sustaining a battle wound, in his early 20s. How she wrote that you expected to lose a baby or child (I guess you did back then, for she lost 11 babies and children), but not a grown child you'd come to know.

My father is a first generation, the child of immigrants, and once on a historical holiday we visited grounds where revolutionary soldiers lay buried. Many were still quite young. And my mother would say, 'This was some mother's son, some woman's husband, some child's father. This man was the light of someone's life. Don't forget that.'

Her words never left me.

'It is very sad, but the culture was different then. Many people were all too aware of the fact that they would give birth to more children than would survive.'

Believe me, their grief was still as heavy as anything you see today. Often enough, they had faith as a buffer, but they felt every bit of it as keenly as we do now.

My own father's mother was widowed by Spanish Flu, age 18, her two-year-old daughter having died in her arms a couple of weeks before she, too, contracted the influenza but survived it. They were buried in pits for the masses of dead, my grandmother so ill she hovered between life and death herself.

She went on to remarry and bear 5 more children, all of whom survived and thrived.

But when she died 75 years later the name of her daughter was the last thing on her lips, and before that when she was delirious she recounted to all of us her clever, strong daughter.

Her second born daughter was on watch and woke her siblings, telling them it was time because their sister was come for their mother.

You are so right, expat; as a teenager my gran lost her father to sepsis in 1941 - sadly just prior to the use of antibiotics. Due to the bombings no-one could contact his family so my gran went to visit and was confronted with the shock of his empty bed. Also ALL the teenage boys in her friendship group died in the war. She has photos of them all playing tennis and dancing, smiling, not knowing what lay ahead. She's 86 but hasn't got over the losses.
My grandad lost siblings to poverty but was a baby himself. He was distressed by the memory of a lad who drowned when he and his mates used to swim in the ship canal as boys. Also by the senseless deaths of comrades in Burma.
Just because deaths happened over 65 years ago in times of poverty and war doesn't lessen the pain for those affected. For many very elderly people long ago events can become very clear as their short term memory fails.

I'm crying now just reading this, so YANBU. Especially those poor dead brothers rockmaiden. Dear God, their poor mother. It's actually a physical ache right now, thinking of how she would feel. :(

I teared up a bit in an antique store today reading a very old Christmas post card- it said, To my darling Lily, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and a prosperous New Year, With Love, Your Ever Jack.

For some reason that "your ever Jack" just got to me; I'm sure they're long dead by now. I think people now think for some reason that those in the past didn't love as keenly as we did, when of course they did. Just because circumstances were different doesn't mean feelings were.

YANBU
I live in the real world and have suffered losses and joys and the ability to empathise and connect and not deny my own emotion is what makes me human, I reckon

YANBU. I always cry in graveyards I can't help it. I think I'm a fairly normal, well rounded person. I just cry easily at sad things.

when I went to the neils grave once there was a lady standing by it silently crying

I didn't recognise her but then \i dont know everyine that knew Neil

but it turns out she just felt so saddened by the girls drawings and cards that they regularly draw for daddy and put in sandwich bags to keep them dry.

she said she felt overwhelmingly sad for three little girls losing their daddy

the girls were with me and she cheered up no end seeing them talking to daddy and laying more pictures

Oh Trinity! Now that has made me teary, I love that your DDs make pictures to take to him.