For Obvious Reasons

 I often remark about unknown and unknowable stories evoked by visiting this cemetery or that. Usually these questions can never be answered. Those who could answer them did not record the stories nor pass them on. 

Secrets literally taken to the grave.

Then there are cases where the answers are not too difficult to discern. And are poignant. Oh, so poignant. This is one of those cases.

Alone in a wooded area bounded on one side by a field through which electric transmission lines run and on the other side by industrial buildings rest two graves. That of a young mother - some 27 years old - and her only child - a son - who died before reaching age 7. No family near by. Neither parents nor siblings. If there are any other graves nearby they are unmarked and invisible.

Being too lazy and forgetful to take my own photos I stole these from Find A Grave.

All her family rest in graveyards and cemeteries some miles away. Her husband appears to vanish from the record. He does not show in subsequent Censuses and no one has recorded a memorial for him. 

So we have an obvious answer to the question of how these graves came to be all but forgotten. There are no descendants to tend them. Indeed, there appear to be no relatives of any kind. She was an only child based on what can be found in the records today. So the nearest possible surviving relative would have to be a 1st cousin. Or someone as or more distant. And how many people tend the graves of distant cousins?

Any life that ends at a young age is sad enough. And any parent who outlives their child is even more tragic whatever age it may be. Indeed, even someone over 100 years old experiencing the death of their 80 something year old child remains tragic despite the child having lived a long life.

So Harriet losing her only son at age 6 had to be heartbreaking. At least it was a pain she did not have to long endure as she passed almost exactly two months after him. Doubtless, though, those two months must have felt to her as an eternity.

Which brings us back full circle to unanswerable questions. Did she die by accident? Illness? Or did she surrender to something that she could have otherwise survived because having lost Henry she also lost her will to live?