a rooskie in dublin

Family History At A Glance

By Irina Kuksova

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This week I had the privilege of saying the last farewell to someone. I didn't know her well. This fact allowed me to study the first Irish cemetary I have ever been in, instead of mourning only. But hey. This little article is not supposed to be sad. You are likely to consider yourself lucky by the time you have finished reading it.

To me, cemetaries are a place to practice counting skills. On a Russian tombstone you normally find two dates. The birth date and the death date. It's up to a casual wanderer to calculate how long the departed lived, come up with a certain average for that particular graveyard, and hope to do better. At least that's what I usually do. Such counting quiets the mind.

In Ireland the tombstones are different. No birth dates just the death date and age. Sometimes many ages as members of the same family are buried on the same spot. (Just different levels.) A whole new game is available. To study a family history all inscribed in one stone. But the challenge of counting is gone.

At the Irish funeral last week I spied one particular grave that mesmerised me. Its arithmetic seems to have more in common with literary tragedies than real life. Here is the story it told me:

Picture a couple. He is 40. She is 26.

They get married. (Love? Convenience? Last chance?)

A year later arrives their first baby only to die at age 1 year and 1 month.

3 years later their second child dies aged 1 year and 1 month.

7 years later another child dies aged 2.

3 years later another child dies aged 2.

7 years later he does.

1 year later she does.

1 year later their last child dies at age 17.

The family ceases to exist in 1897.

I am not sure how long I stood their adding and subtracting, trying to find myself an explanation of this ironic and sad dance of numbers that measured lives. An hereditary disease? Medicine underdevelopment? Poverty? What was that family like? How did they live?

Their names are too common to be easily tracked through the archives or googled. 100+ years later to all my questions, I have only a hint of an answer. The gravestone snapshot of a tragedy.