A Little Bub in Heaven
Oh this is a tough one...
I enjoy visiting cemeteries and trying to piece together fragments of people's lives and losses. In my youth I once dreamed of writing a novel based on the lives of people buried in a local cemetery. Perhaps the photographs I have taken here, and at other places like Evandale, are doing precisely that.
I always find it hard not to shed a tear when I come across a little grave like this one. There is the obvious empathy for the pain inflicted when Alfred and Thora Rothwell lost their dear little Desmond Keith, aged just 4 months, "A Little Bub in Heaven".
But for me a child's grave always brings back memories of a day seared deep within my soul. In my second year of High School I lost a close friend. We eventually came to understand that it was a teen suicide, but of course the knowledge of that was hidden from us for a long while. I remember his classmates, all of us, brokenhearted and uncomprehending at his graveside.
It took many years to visit his grave again. But one day I was at another funeral in the same cemetery and I thought, I must go and see my friend. But I knew what would happen. And as I found his resting place again and read the plaque I began to shake with emotion. It had been many years, but I remembered him like it was yesterday. He was the first friend - in fact the first person I was really close to - who had ever died.
I looked up through eyes filled with tears and the whole children's section of the graveyard seemed to be filled with light. I remember those little colourful windmill things blowing in the wind and it was like I'd suddenly had a revelation. I didn't know these words at the time, but I later came to understand they were spoken by the English mystic, Julian of Norwich (1343-1416), "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well".
There are so many things in the life we do not understand, and a child's death is right up there at the top of the list. In the 19th century the mortality rate for children could be as high as one in two in some places. But equally I am certain that there is a "sure and certain hope of the resurrection". Otherwise the universe is truly without meaning and purpose, and to believe that my friends is a fate worse than death.
A Little Bub in Heaven
Oh this is a tough one...
I enjoy visiting cemeteries and trying to piece together fragments of people's lives and losses. In my youth I once dreamed of writing a novel based on the lives of people buried in a local cemetery. Perhaps the photographs I have taken here, and at other places like Evandale, are doing precisely that.
I always find it hard not to shed a tear when I come across a little grave like this one. There is the obvious empathy for the pain inflicted when Alfred and Thora Rothwell lost their dear little Desmond Keith, aged just 4 months, "A Little Bub in Heaven".
But for me a child's grave always brings back memories of a day seared deep within my soul. In my second year of High School I lost a close friend. We eventually came to understand that it was a teen suicide, but of course the knowledge of that was hidden from us for a long while. I remember his classmates, all of us, brokenhearted and uncomprehending at his graveside.
It took many years to visit his grave again. But one day I was at another funeral in the same cemetery and I thought, I must go and see my friend. But I knew what would happen. And as I found his resting place again and read the plaque I began to shake with emotion. It had been many years, but I remembered him like it was yesterday. He was the first friend - in fact the first person I was really close to - who had ever died.
I looked up through eyes filled with tears and the whole children's section of the graveyard seemed to be filled with light. I remember those little colourful windmill things blowing in the wind and it was like I'd suddenly had a revelation. I didn't know these words at the time, but I later came to understand they were spoken by the English mystic, Julian of Norwich (1343-1416), "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well".
There are so many things in the life we do not understand, and a child's death is right up there at the top of the list. In the 19th century the mortality rate for children could be as high as one in two in some places. But equally I am certain that there is a "sure and certain hope of the resurrection". Otherwise the universe is truly without meaning and purpose, and to believe that my friends is a fate worse than death.