What life was like

Virtually all of you my age have a personal connection to the tragic loss of a child, whether the child of friends, family or your own. I am a lucky parent but too many friends have lost a child in childbirth or to illness, accident or other tragedy. Each loss has filled me with grief and I can only imagine how parents and siblings must feel.

I thought of this yesterday as I was driving around taking some landscape photos. I stopped at a church on Sax-Beth Church Road just inside the Alamance line in Orange County where Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina are located. I walked over to the old cemetery and began looking at the tombstones.

There is a large family plot for the Pickard family, I suspect the prominent family that owned the land surrounding beautiful Pickard Mountain.


Within the plot, side by side, lay three marble slabs.

The first one reads:

The second reads:

The third:


Three children, all born a decade apart and none lived more than a year. Sigh.