Epitaphs

Left Handed Compliments

Afton Enterprise, October 22, 1891

We may class among curiosities a certain epitaph of a Roman husband on his departed wife.  he mentions the years, months, days and even hours that they had lived together, and then concludes, "On the day of her death I gave the greatest thanks before gods and men."

I have not come upon any inscription so heartlessly frank as this.  But a good many husbands seem a little formal in the expression of their grief. The Latin epitaphs especially tend rather to conventional phrases when the virtues of a wife are to be set forth.  "Incomparable" is a favorite epithet.  "Of whom I make no complaint" strikes one as rather faint praise--Cornhill Magazine.

Bainbridge News & Bainbridge Republican, June 27, 1935

It has been sort of a hobby with me to visit cemeteries to note the various inscriptions and to visualize, if I might, what sort of a person the departed may have been, with due respect and reverence for all such.  One amusing inscription in particular was the following:

"A dear one from our home is gone,

A voice we loved is stilled.

A place is vacant in a chair

That never can be filled."

This was from a widower, but in four short months the chair was again occupied--by another wife!

In a very old cemetery in Plattsburg, N.Y., some fifty years ago was an expensive monument with the death record of five departed wives; the widower's name was "Moore" so I do not know whether there were any more since or not.

The most charitable epitaph I noticed, an done quite unselfish, was the following:

"Teach me to feel another's woe.

To hide the fault I see.

The mercy I to other show,

That mercy show to me."

Compact with the Dead

Afton Enterprise & Harpursville Budget, June 4, 1936

When Francis Spies of Mt. Vernon, N.Y., a collector of names and epitaphs on gravestones, pushed aside the tall grass in front of a monument in an old cemetery near New Haven, Vt., he suddenly drew back with a startled exclamation.  For he was looking straight into the face of a dead man!  He looked again, No, it wasn't an optical illusion. There was the face clearly apparent through a thick slab of plate glass.  Here's why:

The man, a resident of New Haven long before the Civil war, had a horror of being buried alive. So he made arrangements to be buried in a hermetically sealed coffin with a plate glass window in the top.  In his will he gave the town a small fund, the interest on which was to be used to employ a man to go to the graveyard twice a day and look through the plate glass to see if he was still dead and to rescue him if he came back to life. For nearly half a century the town faithfully spent the income from this fund for hiring men to go to the gave. Eventually they decided that the man was safely dead and these men were just wasting their time making the twice daily visits. But it was necessary to go to the state legislature and have a special act passed in order to permit the town to break its agreement with the dead man and spend the money from his fund on some much needed public improvements.

Afton Enterprise, January 2, 1941

Jared Van Wagenen says that one of the things he likes to do is to wander around old graveyards, read the epitaphs on the stones, and speculate and philosophize on the folks who walked the roads of the world in other days.  I, too, like to do that.  Maybe I shouldn't laugh, but I often do at the funny epitaphs on the stones, some of them so old that one can only with difficulty spell them out.

In an out of the way corner of a Boston graveyard stands an old stone, showing marks of age and neglect.  It bears this inscription:

"Sacred to the memory of Eben Harvey, who departed this life suddenly and unexpectedly by a cow kicking him on the 15th of September 1853.  Well done, thou good and faithful servant."  American Agriculturist.