David Preston added 3 new photos.
The Children’s Room
.In the old days they used to set aside sections in graveyards for all the little children who’d passed. When the parents died, the family could have the children’s remains reburied with them, but there were cases where the parents moved away in the meantime or where the family decided to leave the children where they were. I guess they figured dead children would prefer the company of each other over that of adults, just as living children do.
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My brother Mark and I were raised in a culture that paid a great deal of attention to the dead. One time when Mark was 7 or so, he was visiting my grandmother in her small town, and she took him along one day when she was decorating graves. Seeing that he was bored, and thinking, perhaps, that he would appreciate the company of his own kind, she sent him to the children’s cemetery.
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That was quite typical of Grandma, who was famous for poor judgment. Had it been me there that day instead of Mark, no harm would’ve come of it. Like Grandma, I was the odd, unflappable type, and I would’ve thought nothing of having a make-believe chat with the ghosts of dead children. But my brother’s personality was opposite to mine. He was a fearful, impressionable boy, and he never forgot the horror of seeing all those children’s headstones in one place, as if they had all perished together in some calamity and were beckoning him to join them, like those hideous twins in The Shining. To this day, whenever we visit a cemetery, he relives the horror of that moment, as if he’d been puzzling over continually it for these last 50 years: How can the grown-ups be so cruel?
[Headstones from the Saar Pioneer Cemetery in Kent, Washington]
