Rose Shadows and Cowpox

All aboard the S. S. Sleeper! She sails tonight. Or perhaps tomorrow, or in the next century or so. Very, very slowly.

There are so many lovely and poignant moments in a walk through Mount Auburn, it's hard to pick favorites. Here's a monument to a man lost at sea. I liked the verse. It's about the lack of closure that goes with such a tragic event:

He sleeps beneath the blue lazy sea

He lies where pearls lie deep

He was the loved of all, yet none

O'er his low bed may weep.

Everywhere, you see graven evidence of people searching for closure, for a way to be at peace with losing the ones they love. It's hardest, perhaps, for people who lose young children, but there was a terrible lot of that going around in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Influenza epidemics, typhoid, cholera, yellow fever...they took an awful toll.

I could hardly look at this little sculpture of two children sleeping, imagining the loss behind it,

for they were often lost in twos and threes as an epidemic swept through a household. The idea of such a thing happening today is very remote to us, but was very real then.

Climbing roses, planted so many decades later, cast a beautiful shadow, a shadow of remembrance and sorrow, and life blooming perhaps again, somewhere.

And here is the grave of someone who did something about it all. Benjamin Waterhouse, of Harvard College, introduced to the United States a vaccine for the devastating disease of smallpox. English physician Edward Jenner had noted that milkmaids seemed to have an immunity to smallpox, and went from there. He hypothesized that their exposure, in the course of their work, to the biologically similar cowpox virus armed their immune systems against the human variant of this horrid virus. My father loved to tell us about Jenner, as a way of telling us that we must notice things, connect things that seem unconnected, and thereby do much good. (Thanks to Tim who gracefully and quietly corrects the S.S. Sleeper's course from time to time).

Waterhouse's stone reads:

In 1800 he introduced to the New World 

the blessing of vaccination,

overcame popular prejudice and distrust

by testing it on his own children,

and thus established a title 

to the gratitude of future ages.

This memorial was erected by his wife, who doubtless appreciated more than anyone the sacrifice he'd made in testing it on their own children.

But I'm getting too ponderous; these stones haunt me. So I'll leave you with the monument Kris calls 

The Celestial Wedgie. Ow! Lemme go!