Introducing ‘Gravestones - a collection of short stories’
Introducing ‘Gravestones’ - a collection of short stories based on the inscriptions found on headstones in the cemetery next to my home.
The idea came to me in early 2025 as I was walking my old dog around the cemetery. Bless him! Poor Tommy was almost 19 years old, deaf, blind and very arthritic. He still loved a walk, but he could only just manage a short one in the cemetery. Gone were the days when we’d happily walk for 5 or 6 km - and then some. As he pottered around on the end of a lead, sniffing at the headstones, I read the inscriptions.
Many headstones contain stereotypical inscriptions, as if chosen from a list of suitable epitaphs. There are many ‘Treasured Memories’ and ‘Passed Away’s- and they don’t tell you very much about the human being who is interred there. There are names and dates, and that’s pretty much it. Others are more cryptic and you think that, underneath those words, there is a real story to tell. One stone carries the words ‘A Truly Proud Man’. Another simply says ‘Artist’. In one grave, for instance, there are two 34 year olds who died on a single day, leaving three children behind - the headstone tells us that much. It screams ‘car accident’, but we cannot know that for sure. And, as I wandered among the rows of headstones, I spotted the same surname a couple of rows beyond and it took only a moment to see that these were the grandparents of the children left behind on that tragic day. The grandparents who had almost certainly erected the first headstone in the names of the three bereaved children and, most likely, were the ones who ended up raising them. But … I am inferring, for none of this is overtly inscribed on the stones in front of me.
Then there are those which plainly reveal a tragedy. There is one which has three infants who were born and died on a single day. Clearly, triplets who did not survive - and I imagine the poor mother interring her three stillborn children in this, now ancient, plot of land. There are military graves. Some are the recognisable white stones which fill every wartime cemetery in France and have clearly been erected by the MoD. But there are others, often relating to those who fell during The Great War. Their names are inscribed on family stones. Yet, when I investigated, their remains are not actually in this cemetery. They are interred in one of those memorials in France - probably in a plot without a specific name, an ‘unknown’ soldier. But they were anything but an ‘unknown’ to the grieving family left behind who, being unable to visit France, chose to inscribe a memorial on their own family stone. Often, these inscriptions include the military citations or the battles in which their loved one died - young men, often not out of their teens. The story here is as much that of a family, a community and a nation experiencing both a private and a collective trauma.
But, behind every inscription, fulsome or brief, there is a story. One grave bears the name of a man I once knew. He died by suicide - but the headstone does not record that, just his name, dates and that he was a much loved husband, father and grandfather.
It struck me so forcibly that each name was once a real person with a real life.
The other thing which is surprising about these graves is how short some lives actually are. You expect to see the graves of people who died in their 70s, 80s and 90s, but there are an awful lot of people whose lives came to an end in their 50s and 60s … or even earlier. There are children, teenagers, and young men and women. Every one of them would have had their hopes and dreams, just like we do.
‘Gravestones’ isn’t an attempt to tell the stories of real people. Rather, it is a collection of fictional stories intended to remind readers that every inscription is only the last word on a life which was far more complex than any short epitaph can convey. My favourite illustration of this is the word ‘Also’. How many family graves have added the word ‘Also’ to the end of a long inscription, and followed it by just a single name? A whole life reduced to ‘Also’?
Thus, one of my stories is called ‘Also’ and it attempts to reconstruct a life which deserved more than to be reduced to one word on a headstone.
My stories may be fictional and there is no intention to suggest that any one of my stories is based on the real life of an individual. I have imagined all the scenes and details in each one. But, together, I hope that they convey a rich tapestry of life in many forms and invite the reader to reflect on what it is that really matters in life - because life is all too short.
Please find extracts from ‘Gravestones’ on the Instagram account @gravestonesstories or on the Gravestones section of this website.