My best friend visited with her fiance and children this weekend, and we took them to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. Even though most of my photos are of plants, butterflies and children, I did find a few memorials of sorts. The more you walk around parks or gardens or zoos, the more you realize that little tiny memorial plaques dedicating objects to people are everywhere. This one was on a bridge between the Japanese garden and the woodland garden.
There was a also a birdbath with a dedication nearby.
The last one I photographed (because walking around a garden with children who are 2, 6, and 9 does not leave a lot of time for such pictures) was on a bench in the Hershey Children’s Garden.
These kinds of plaques are all around us. They are on benches, under trees, on sculptures, on bricks, and many other places. For many people they are probably more familiar than tombstones because not everyone walks around in graveyards. What does it mean? For a culture where death has evolved from a common part of everyday life to something compartmentalized and very separate, they hint that some people crave more immortalization than a traditional burial or cremation offer.
A Grave Concern 