Oddly enough, I took my lunchtime walk/photography expedition in a graveyard today. As I walked around the grave sites, it just seemed natural to step around the area where I presume a body had been buried, to be respectful. I took pictures of interesting monuments, but no more than that. No child of mine would be permitted to climb on a headstone. So, I say negligence, stupidity, and disrespect–all of them.
I’d let my kid horse around in a graveyard, but wouldn’t let my horse kid around in it.
Well it is 27 years since 1985 and if ‘It’ didn’t die, then Pennywise is due for an appearance anytime now.
Are you kidding? Almost everyone who spends a significant length of time in a graveyard is dead!
I can’t get the video to work, but the headlines below the article include another story about a man who got upset over his own bad grades and punched his cat to death. Definitely getting a Pet Sematary vibe.
I was brought up Catholic, and some of my happiest childhood memories are of playing in the cemetery behind Grandma’s house and the nearby convent. Grandpa and some other relatives are buried up there (Grandma and few more now too); being around their graves made me feel more connected to them. Even when I go back there now as a grown-up, I still feel that connection and still find the old cemetery a pleasant place to be.
I recall us jumping over tombstones and hiding behind them as children, but don’t remember climbing up on them.
No, I don’t think I would.
We have a graveyard right next to our town playground and the most I ever did is show my son the graves from colonial and federal times and point out that a lot of the dead were kids. Creepy, yes. I just wanted to illustrate the advances in healthcare.
Because a lot of these stones were slate and in bad shape I didn’t want him to be the one breaking any of them for good. So, I made it seem like gravestones in general were fragile.
That being said, it never occurred to me that a large monument wasn’t strongly anchored into the ground like a statue or something. The main danger, to me, was always falling off.
Anybody who says, “What kind of idiot lets their kid play around in such an obviously dangerous environment,” is crazy. Possibly disrespectful, sure, but who thinks that gravestones might fall over? How many people die of this every year? One?
We’re in the car for three hours. We finally arrive at the little cemetery in the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania – where Great-great-great-great Grandfather Map happened to live and be buried, back in 1794. Half of the 200 gravestones bear the Map surname. (Thanks, Uncle Map, for researching this! Well worth the trip. Beautiful site.) Our car-ful (Mr. and Mrs. Map, two in-laws, and nineteen-month-old Lil’ Map) are the only ones visiting that day.
Lil’ Map is running around, enjoying the sunshine and grass and freedom after being stuck in a car for three hours. Makes for some precious photos, illustrating the poignance of ancestral connections and sacredness of place and memory.
Anyway, kids should, in general, be allowed to celebrate their ancestors. For a toddler, that might mean running around (assuming you have the cemetery to yourself). For eight-year-olds, it might mean learning about the solemnity of quiet contemplation.
The safety aspect didn’t occur to me – now I realize maybe it should have! But generally, gravestones are no more hazardous than a hundred other things young kids interact with in the course of a typical day.
The pedestal might be anchored to the ground, but the stone may not be. A lot of the older ones are like this.
One thing I don’t see mentioned in all this discussion is that unless these stones being played in/on/around belong to you or your family, you are messing around with someone else’s property. I think that at the very least should deserve some respect.
I wonder what the grave resident was like in life. Probably some mean old codger who spent his days on the front porch rocking chair with a shotgun yelling at kids to git off’n his lawn.
Unfortunately, this kid din’t hear him yelling at him to git off’n his grave so he did what he had to do.