When I was back in Ireland I helped my mother gather material for a book she was writing. It is a memoir and a life story.
We went to a graveyard in search of the spot where her grandparents had been buried. After uncertain steps through overgrown grass we drew a blank. No headstone had been put up to mark the burial spot.
The photo shows a military cemetery outside San Francisco from a succession of wars. My wife and I noticed some headstones had different inscriptions on either side . The wives of the soldiers had been buried on the other side of the plot.
Poets have long mused on remembrance and loss. The German poet Rilke asked if the space we dissolve into tastes of us . Keats asked that no name or date be placed on his headstone - only the oft quoted (and wonderful ) " Here lies one / whose name was writ in water". The rest of the inscription including the date was added by others railing against Keats treatment by critics.
Headstones are for the living. They have nothing to do with the dead.
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