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?

YANBU. Graveyards are full of testaments to how much people have loved each other, mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives, just as we love these people in our own lives today.

I really don't see how it's any more productive to cry for someone you know, than out of empathy with a stranger. There is no right and wrong in this. But I agree that if fewer people had the 'well if it's not my relative/friend then why should I care' attitude it would be a good thing.

YANBU at all . We all know life can be harsh but seeing the headstones with stark details of curtailed lives is really poignant.

We used to live in a house with a child grave just outside our living room window. The stone had fallen over and I am unsure why the grave was alone like that because there was proper church graveyard just a few hundred yards away. There were really modern childrens graves there. Children and babies who had just died with things like teddy bears on them.

I am not a religious person and feel myself quite a pragmatic real world person but it was incredibly sad and I used to stand there with tears in my eyes thinking about my own living children and how lucky I was.

Why on earth would you be angry about people you don't know crying over people they don't know?

Seems a little hypocritical.

Isn't it part of the POINT of graves/headstones that future generations are aware that that body was once a soul, once a person? I am not religious in any way shape or form, but I actually think it is lovely that there are people out there who actually look at headstones and spend a second to think about the person/people/stories involved.

It does make me sad but because i think that still happens there are parts of the world where a mother has had that loss and we live in a civilised world that makes me sad.

Oh slippers your story of your friend with the blanket on her lap made me so sad, what a long long time to live without someone you love

What about all those people in Wootten Bassett who line the streets when soldiers bodies are repatriated? That is very moving. I understand all here who feel emotional about gravestones and memorials. A family (father and two children) perished in a fire near me a few years ago. The mother was out so survived. I could not be in her shoes. She had a bench made from stone and carved as a memorial. It is making me choke up even thinking about it, and the first time I saw it, I couldn't even hold back the tears, even DH was very quiet and moved by it. So YANBU.

Oh Rockmaiden, the grave of the four little boys killed by their dad is the plot next to my dad's grave, I was just about to post about it when I read your post. It always brings it home to me what a full life my dad had when I read the dates of birth and death. He was born in the 20's and died in the 00's, while those poor boys were born in the 90's and were dead before him....

do not ask for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for you

I am always moved by the Wootton Bassett support.

I watched a dramatisation a couple of months ago about the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, following a Dutch family (had Rupert Penry-Jones in it). I sobbed buckets when I realised their baby has been killed - the nurse had her and she didn't get to shelter in time. Apparently they did go on to have another child as well.

I don't think it is odd being moved when you see/hear of strangers dying very young, it is sad and it reminds us of our own mortality.

I admit when I see threads on here from heartbroken parents telling us of the loss of their child, I find myself grieving for them. I just keep it to myself.

YANBU. And Toddlerwrangler makes the point v. well re. the whole point of memorials being that future generations would think on those interred and remember their stories.

Yes, tragedy strikes - and strikes often. Death in infancy and early childhood was incredibly common years ago but that doesn't make the stories of individual families less poignant and doesn't make it wrong to shed a few tears for them.

YANBU. I quite like walking through graveyards and reading the stones, it's interesting... like a window to the past.

My great grandma had 8 children who made it into adulthood, and lost 6 in infancy or childhood (one set of twins). According to my gran she was pregnant constantly from the age of 17, it was the norm in those days, I can't begin to imagine how painful it must have been.

OK - I'd like to make it clear that I do have compassion and I do feel sad when tragic events occur. That obviously wasn't clear from my posts.
I just don't weep - it's not the way I'm made. And in all honesty that is not always a good thing - it means I tend to internalise everything and not be able to let my feelings out.
I only shed actual tears when it's relatives or people I know.
Apparently that makes me unreasonable.

rockmaiden....i remember that case with the 4 young boys so,so clearly. i never forgot it as my ex h turned round and told me 'thats what he would do with our 4 if i ever left him'

i did leave him,and mentioned that case and ex's threat to every legal person i came into contact with when he tried to gain contact. he got none.i i think the horror of that has stayed with alot of people. very very difficult

graveyards hold some fascination for me....and my children,as we often walk in them reading the stones. the dc do like to look at childrens graves and read them and feel sad. and the war graves....dd always looks out for these. she visits the somme regularly with school,and went to Aushwitz. almost as if she enjoys making herself sad and tearful. always respectfull tho

i love visiting the pere lachaise graveyard in paris.......many stunning graves there

BeenBeta "We used to live in a house with a child grave just outside our living room window. The stone had fallen over and I am unsure why the grave was alone like that because there was proper church graveyard just a few hundred yards away. There were really modern childrens graves there. "

Sometimes, if a child died without having been baptised, some vicars wouldn't allow them to be buried in the church yard - the grave stone in your garden could have been a burial just outside the church walls, and subsequent owners left it there. (this is speculation, but it is one explanation)

I cannot cry for myself I have not cried for myself in years, but I always cry if I hear about anothers pain. I am weird though.

I think it's part of the general human condition to feel sad for other people's loss. Because it could so easily be you and yours - there but for the grace of God and all that.

Where my grandparents and mum are buried (all in the same grave) there is a child's section just a few yards down. Every time I pass it, tears well up in my eyes - the tiny graves are just so tragic, with all the toys and love that has been showered on them. I always felt sad going past them, even when I wasn't a mum myself; now I am a mum, it's doubly hard.

there is a very moving monument on the outside transept wall of Ely Cathedral, detailing several children dying young in a single family. I was affected by that.

And this beautiful monument in St Oswald's Church, Ashbourne, Derbyshire, to the memory of a little 6 yr old Penelope Boothby - www.derbyshireuk.net/ashbourne_church.html - the inscription reads "She was in form and intellect exquisite, the unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark, and the wreck was total`."

I used to walk up to St Mary's Whitby sometimes and sit by the C19th grave of a father and son, John and Jacob Havelock. The son died when he was 5, I think.

expat I have been through that graveyard with the baby in the pram many times. I like it as a quiet shortcut although there are steps at the Bernard Street end which I always end up lugging the pram up! I often visit the grave of someone I know in the graveyard just off Easter Road as well. They are such peaceful places and somehow I like the juxtaposition of the graves and the tiny baby in pram.

my great grandmother had 15 babies, 8 died she lived in London. My other great grandmothers had 4 and 3 babies and they all lived - they lived in rural Devonshire and Somersetshire

I live in the East end and have been researching the history of the local area

Some of the stuff is horrifying really:

The Registrar General reported in 1841 that while mean life expectancy in Surrey was forty-five years of age, it was only thirty-seven in London and twenty-six in Liverpool. The average tradesman died in his mid-twenties, and the average age of "labourers, mechanics, and servants" at time of death was only fifteen years. Mortality figures for crowded districts like Shoreditch, Whitechapel, and Bethnal Green were typically twice as high as those for the ?respectable? middle-class areas of London. These life expectancies appear shockingly low because of the accelerated mortality rate of children; 62% of all deaths recorded in 1842 London were of children under 5.

i'm with you Bella. you shouldn't have had to explain in your 2nd post. I would have been the same. It doesn't matter how long ago it was. Grief is timeless, and you were empathizing with the parents of those children. I would be the same, and still am. I watched a documentary on titanic this morning, and i cried as i listened to the real recounts of the survivors, of how children and babies were taken from their parents, how women sobbed as they said goodbye to their husbands.
I looked at my DD and the tears came.

There's nothing wrong with feeling. It just shows you haven't been de-sensitized by the horrors in this world. You have a soul, and you empathize with the suffering of others. Don't change that because of some hard nosed moron making a negative comment.

I found an entry in a parish burial register one day, a couple had buried there daughter on Monday, there son on Wednesday and their second son on friday - how do you not have emphathy for a couple 300 years ago who buried three children in one week - they loved their children as we love ours regardless of the years, decades and centuries that have past it is sad. The three chidlren died of small pox