There are few words I find more poignant on a tombstone than “baby” or “infant,” and the effect is strengthened when that word takes the place of the name. It isn’t, I now realize, always the case that the baby hadn’t received a name or been christened yet. The “baby” sometimes wasn’t a baby in the sense of being in the first year of life: some of the Collinwood school fire victims are listed as “baby” on their tombstones, and they were of school-age! Baby seems to serve as a shorthand, though, for all the lost promise that goes with the death of a child. Using that term as opposed to a name brings out starkly the feeling of a life cut terribly short.
A Grave Concern 