The final resting place …

… The Sincerity of a Single Fresh Flower – Quadrant Online. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In this cemetery was a section set aside for the graves of children. There was here a little grave of a child aged two who had died nearly fifty years before. On this grave was a vase with a single fresh flower in it; and two years later, when I visited again, the vase was still there, and still with a fresh flower.

What a wealth of grief and suffering this simple sign suggested, that (I surmise) of a hopeful newlywed couple who perhaps had no further children to comfort them in what must now have been their old age! How small were my daily irritations compared with their grief! What impressed me also was the dignified lack of exhibitionism, that is to say the sincerity, of the gesture, very different from, say, the sensibility (or lack of it) shown in the immediate aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, when extremity of expression was mistaken for depth of feeling.