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?

What a touching thread.
Edgar- I too was thinking of you today and remembering your request that I savour the time I spend with my children- I almost feel as though I am closer to my 3 boys because of your tragic story. I send you all my best wishes.

edgar What a beautifully eloquent and deeply humane post. You and your family have been on my mind all weekend.

I always cry in graveyards. Always. There are war graves in my local churchyard and several for very young children. I didnt know them, no, but I mourn their loss as fellow human beings and for the pain and sorrow they left behind.

Perhaps that makes me silly, yes, but it also makes me count my blessings.

Edgar you and your family have been in my thoughts. Your little Leo looked so mischevious and full of fun.
The fact that I don't know you didn't matter as I had a little cry. You don't have to be personally involved to be shocked and saddened at your situation, and the loss of your son.
And like Mrsmindcontrol it made me really take a deep breath and value what I have even more dearly. xx

I understand-I find some gravestones unberably poignant and dont understand anyone not being moved by the graves of little children.

Edgar-I wept at your post.Dgs is 2.......

In the graveyard where Jack(ds1) is buried there are two other little boys too, i always go to see Callum and Kristian too. Twice when i have been to Kristians grave i have felt Jack nearby. Once a baby rabbit hopped away when i knelt by K, then at Christmas a robin landed on the stone next to K's. My late dh is buried next to his first wife in the local Baptist chapel. A few years ago Wilf (ds2)was going through a bad time and the Pastor suggested that W put something on Daddys grave that reminded him of Daddy. W answered very quickly "a bottle of wine!" The Pastors face was a picture (the Baptists dont drink or drink very little!!) When Daddys next birthday came round we printed off a picture of a bottle of wine with a glass of wine beside it and put it in a plastic folder on the grave!

Gravestones move me, I don't think that is freakish, infant ones especially so. How can they not?

I have picked up on Edgar's story rather late but clearly such a sad and devastating loss, so raw - I am so sorry.

My sister died at birth. Her grave is in "childrens corner" of the graveyard. almost everyone on the patch she is in is under 16.

every time i visit her i take one of her flowers and place it on the grave next to her.
Emily 1976- 79.

It was distressing at first but I actually find it comforting now. I imagine her having lots of friends to play with.

I think it says it all, how the loss of a little one touches everyone, that within a few days of the loss of Edgars Son Leo, almost £2000 has been donated in his name to charity, by people who use MN.

What a shining light he is x

In New Hartley in Northumberland, there was a pit collapse in 1860, something that went on to change the law around working in mines. When the pit collapsed the village lost all it's men and boys. The memorial has great long lists of people with the same surname.

There is a "Murder Stone" in the churchyard near my home. It reads:

"1823 To Record MURDER this stone was erected over the body of Margaret Williams, aged 26, a native of Carmarthenshire, living in service in this parish, who was found dead with marks of violence on her person in a ditch on the marsh below this churchyard on the morning of Sunday the fourteenth of July 1822. Although the savage murderer escaped for a season the detection of man yet God hath set his mark upon him either for time or eternity and the cry of blood will assuredly pursue him to certain and terrible but righteous judgement."

And stands at an odd angle in the churchyard - apparently it faces the home of the person who was suspected of murdering the girl (and was also suspected of being the father of her unborn child) who lived opposite the churchyard.

There's grave next to my MIL and PILs in Leicestershire which is of a little boy, every time we go there is a different Toy Story toy on it. It really chokes us up- especially ds 11.

<a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=kalimonster.co.uk/Web%2520site/Images/William%2520Harsant%2520at%2520daughter%27s%2520grave%25202.jpg&imgrefurl=kalimonster.co.uk/Web%2520site/Peasenhall%2520Murder%2520Page%25203.htm&usg=__Q3CGQLkgD0Glv2cbJz5oF9GzeE8=&h=315&w=279&sz=95&hl=en&start=2&zoom=1&itbs=1&tbnid=hjZ0tCQ6npFJKM:&tbnh=117&tbnw=104&prev=/images%3Fq%3Drose%2Bharsent%2Bgrave%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=BqGPTYfeG5GSOtW3waEC" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this grave is near to me
My late great aunt could remember the murder and she used to talk about it!

'Loss is not less because of age or number of children - the grief of those parentswas hammered out in stone to give permanence to the mayfly-like existence of their child.'

It is so, Edgar. It is so.

I visit cemetaries in nearly every place I go. It's a habit my own parents have and still have.

I find them ultimately places of peace, of recharge. To remember the value of life is to honour those who have passed before us.

Expat I'm glad I'm not the only one. Some people think it's a strange thing to do. I find them so peaceful and reflective. If I ever have time to kill in a village or town, waiting for an appt etc, I always wander round the local churchyard.
I live near Nunhead Cemetery in London, which is extremely old, and there is a society of friends who are working to restore it. One of the saddest memorials there is/was a tribute to a group of boy scouts who travelled from London for a day on a boat in Kent, and they drowned, 100 years this August. Sickeningly, the bronze lifesize model of a scout was vandalised years ago and stolen from the mass grave, but a stone remains in Leysdown here
Two of the boys were brothers, and it makes your heart break to think of all the Mums and Dads who waved the boys off in the morning for a day of fun...

Whenever I am on holiday, especially in the UK, I visit churches and their attending cemetaries, the older the better

I am not remotely religious, but I find peace and sadness there, and a quietness

In our hectic lives, quietness is to be cherished and a reminder of how lucky we are in our own selfish lives

it is not until tragedy strikes, are we jolted out of our inward-looking lens

at Easter, we are usually away and go to our local deeply-countrified church, walk around the churchyard and light candles for everyone we ever lost

my children love it, and feel a sense of connection to the past

wtf is wrong with that ?

there is a stone with several children on it in my local churchyard too,makes me sad every time I see it.
And in St Davids abbey there is one for a young woman that reads (roughly) Remember me as you walk by,
as you are now then once was I,
as I am now soon you will be,
prepare for death and follow me.
Slightly alarming ,but it does hammer home that the person buried there was once living and vital.

expat, I love the story about your Grandmother, I find it strangely comforting.

Edgar, that was a beautiful and moving post. A cherry blossom tree sounds very apt for your gorgeous DS. It's lovely that you can plant one for him.

What about a small rainbow instead of a ball as a compromise between a small picture and the quote you like? (If you are unsure as to whether to go with a quote or not).

My Grandmother had a little girl, her only child at the time, who fell down a flight of stairs at home. The doctor said she was fine. She died shortly afterwards.

Her grave says 'Cynthia Anne, 2 years and 8 months, Jesus called a little child'.

I never really knew much about it. I was quite close to my gran, she died when I was 18, and she never mentioned it to me. I think now that it must have been too painful for her even then.

Now I'm a mum it hits home a bit. When my dd1 was about that age I couldn't stop thinking about how awful it must have been for them. Although it was obviously a comfort to them, whenever I see the 'Jesus called a little child' bit I think to myself he ought to have bloody well left her with her mummy and daddy.

Bizarrely my dd1's middle name is Ann, although this is after mil.

Her name was Luisa. She was two when she died from Spanish Flu in 1920.

But there's no doubt at all in any of our minds that our grandmother/mother is with her now, because she was sharp as a newly hewn nail right till the end. Some may say it was oxygen deprivation of her mother's brain near death, or delerium. I pity such people. I would not want to live in their world, tbh, and so they are welcome to it.

She was there, and she has lived well past her life on Earth in every memory of her.

helly, that St Davids quote is so, so affecting

Its the cathedral btw,not the abbey (we have an abbey here).

expat said it exactly: just because (infant mortality) was common doesn't mean it was felt less keenly.

My husband's grandmother lost her four year old and told me that, at the age of eighty, she had thought of her every single day since. The same of any child I think, whatever the age: I have a letter written by my grandfather describing his mother's grief at losing her still young son at the Somme. They were eloquent with words in those days. Impossible not to be moved. On a different note, the mother of a nonagenarian I know very well died giving birth which affected her baby profoundly (one of the warmest people I know, but haunted too).

I think I know our village graveyard inside out. So many headstones tell stories, almost all of them sad. So many mothers dying in childbirth, so many babies and children too.

OP, anyone not touched deeply by churchyards is lacking something, that must surely be true.

Yellowstone The story of DH Grandmother brought a lump to my throat. Grief and loss just weren't talked about years ago, maybe because they weren't as understood. There certainly wasn't the help around. One of my Aunts had a FT stillbirth in the 50's. They weren't even allowed to hold the LO, let alone bury him.
I can't imagine the pain that must have silently knawed away inside them.
Interestingly enough though, it was the thing to do in the late 1800's to take photos of children who had died as babies, toddlers, pre-teens. I remember watching a documentary on it. The bereaved parents would have a professional take a photo of the child.

My grandmother died giving birth to twins one of whom survived. It devestated a family and my mother and her siblings were sent to boarding school the eldest foregoing her education staying home to help her father at 14 yrs of age :(.

I have visited her grave many times and find her beautiful shining young face in the small photo ( as custom in the country) so sad but yet very, very important. She was only 36 and left a whole family and newborn baby behind who feel the impact as fresh to this day.