Digging a grave. They found an old coffin. When they opened it, they were shocked. The fear of your child dying before you is something that’s constantly in the heart of every parent I know. It makes us Hover over over COTS, listening for tiny breaths.
A few years later, it makes us steal ourselves. When our child shouts, hey, mum, look at me. I have no words for the pain I felt the day I lost my son or the pain that’s come with everyday sense. Your child represents hope and future. They’re your flesh and blood.
When your child dies, your hopes for the future are severely altered. That money in their College account now has no designated purpose. If the child was young, you may never have grandchildren. Future vacations that you had planned, places to see, and things to do no longer hold the same meaning. One of the joys in life is introducing someone to something that you love.
For example, when one of the newer Star Wars movies came out, it was a chance to take my daughter to the theater to see it. I have great memories of seeing the original in the theater. To watch her. Watching it unfold on the big screen was something I’ll never forget. It was all new to her.
There’s no comparison between the two because of the expectation factor. Currently, we do not expect to outlive our children. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. We also believe that it’s just plain wrong for a child to die, no matter what the cause. Few of us ever think that such a thing could happen to us or our children.
That it can and does happen invariably comes as such a shock that people quite often never completely recover. It’s truly a horrendous thing to have to live with as your parents get nearer to the ages where your grandparents or that of your most old people, you kind of anticipate that day will come. The first parent’s death kind of prepares you for the other parent. I remember constantly watching over my father after my mother passed away, fearing he had stopped breathing during his sleep. Scary on for a few years.
I would get up to look at him when he stopped snoring in his sleep. But because they leave suddenly, you just can’t get over the loss. Not knowing the loss of a child, I can’t compare. The intensity is definitely more intense to that of your grandparents. Perhaps the proximity and intensity of relationship has a lot to do with that.
The uncontrollable grief hit you whenever memories arise, and frequently sudden realization of your parent is lost forever. Other times you feel deep pity for they should leave so early. You miss the feeling of the person living with you and your interaction. What’s left is the empty feeling, but the intensity eventually lessens in intensity and frequency over a period of time. But it can be years before you actually address the person as being deceased, you sort of tiptoe around mentioning your parent initially not knowing how to deal with emotionally.
A University archeologist, city librarian, a genealogist and even a psychic are trying to solve the mystery of the little girl in the coffin. Last month, a construction crew unearthed the small cast iron coffin in a neighborhood here that once housed the Cemetery. Thousands of the city’s dead were removed in the early 19 hundreds when politicians and developers pushed for more housing during the distant tournament project, a 37 inch coffin with curved glass windows was left behind. Inside the coffin was the body of a perfectly preserved child, about three years old, wearing a white embroidered dress with a bow and a cross of lavender on her chest. Rose petals and eucalyptus leaves lay beside her.
In today’s more complex world, where a girl killed by a stray bullet might receive a few tweets, the mystery of a child long gone has garnered international coverage. At a ceremony last weekend, the little girl in the coffin was nested into a larger coffin of handmade cherry wood and buried in coma, a necropolis for San Francisco’s dead, where others from the Oddfellow Cemetery were reenterred mothers and their daughters. Parents with small children and older couples came, they said, because they were touched by the little girl’s story. We felt for her getting left behind, said Heather Reynolds, who came with her mother, Barbara. We wanted to give her a nice send off, she said.
Engraved on a small headstone was the name Miranda Eve, given to her by the young children who live in the house where the coffin was found. In a city administrator who helped arrange the burial, the back of that stone was left blank so that if the girl’s true identity is discovered, her name can be added. Before her second burial, a few strands of the girl’s hair were removed for analysis. Gilmer Erkins, a University of California Davis archeologist who is more accustomed to working with materials from ancient Peoples along the Nile or from Native Americans in California, offered to investigate. I read they were planning to just rebury the body without any analysis, he said.
As an archeologist, I thought, that’s not right. At some point, these things from the past become our collective heritage. All human societies recognize the importance of ancestry and history, Dr. Erkin said. But rather than a general story about war and history, this is a story about an individual person people can understand and connect with how sad it must have been to lose a young daughter.
Dr. Ergon’s, who specializes in isotope analysis, said a strand of hair is like a tree ring. By using a mass spectrometer, he said, we’ll be able to learn from the moment she died and going back in time, maybe in two weeks to one month intervals where she was living because of the food and water that gets incorporated into that hair. In 1800, people generally ate food available in their immediate environments. Also, there are slight differences in the composition of water, which enables archeologists to determine a biochemical signature of where someone’s from, Dr.
Erkin said. If her DNA survived and if genealogist can determine the little girl’s name, he said, it might offer us the possibility to track down modern descendants of this person. Dr. Erkins said he does not expect to be able to determine the cause of the little girl’s death. The small coffin was found in early May in the backyard of Erica Carter’s home in the Richmond District, in the Northern part of the city.
Ms. Carter, who grew up in the Spanish style stucco house, said part of her was not surprised by the discovery. The house was built in 1938, top what would once be Odd Fellow Cemetery, and the city’s residents living in old Cemetery properties occasionally still find bone fragments, chipped marble and sometimes even headstones in their yards. In the late 1008 hundreds, San Francisco politicians, backed by aggressive land developers, campaigned to rid the city of its sprawling cemeteries. According to a 1924 article in The Richmond Banner.
It was believed these cemeteries could lead to plague and pestilence if they were not removed. Thousands of bodies were disinterred and taken to nearby Coma for rebuild. A photograph of the digging at Oddfellow Cemetery appears to show a methodical process, but somehow at least one small coffin was missed. Somebody loved this child tremendously, said Alyssa Davy, founder of Garden of Innocence, a nonprofit organization that buries abandoned children. Ms.
Davy arranged for donations of the coffin and the burial plot at Green Lawn Memorial Park in Coma. The child’s family must have been pretty wealthy, Ms. Davy said. Instead of a $2 wooden box, the little girl was buried in a windowed cast iron coffin that cost fifty dollars to one hundred dollars, she said. The coffin, Ms.
Davy added, was manufactured in 1858. If a child’s identity is unknown, Ms. Davy insists that a name is given before burial. As a genealogist conducting her own research, Ms. Davy has examined old maps from the Oddfellow Cemetery and collected the names of more than 100 girls who were buried there.
Shortly before 1890, the year the city passed an ordinance outlawing burial at the Cemetery. Mortality among young children was common then. In 1900, children under the age of five accounted for nearly a third of all deaths in the United States. A century later, that number was reduced to around 1%. There were even more names of children who were buried at the Cemetery, but Miss.
Davy said she’d given up. Ms. Davies fielded calls about the little girl from as far away as London, Rome and Australia. A lot of people are calling us who say they know who it is, she said. A psychic once told her that her hair was standing on her arm.
She knows what the child’s name is. Ms. Davy discounted that claim and is not hopeful of finding the girl’s identity, saying those chances are slim to none. Thomas Kerry, a librarian and archivist with the San Francisco Public Library’s History Center, may be closer to solving the mystery. Mr.
Kerry compared homestead maps of the odd fellow Cemetery With more detailed Cemetery plot maps from the California Genealogical Society, closing to within 100ft of where the coffin was found. Researching other documents, Mr. Kerry looked for names of young people Buried in that section of the Cemetery. He has identified four girls, aged five and under. Using city directories and digital versions of San Francisco newspapers, he plans to search death notices.
It was the naming of the child that motivated Mr. Kerry, Whose father died recently. He had a name and he knew who he was. I had a bit of an issue of renaming the girl, he said she once was someone, he said. Someone ought to figure that out.
The girl cries out to me, said Janet McDonald, One of the mourners at a burial service. Ms. Mcdonald wants to know what took her life and how could they forget her? You lose making more memories with your child. It hurts because you love them so much.