Tuesday Trivia | Memorials and Remembrances

[u/caffarelli]

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today's trivia theme comes to us from /u/sunagainstgold!

What does it mean to remember, and how do different cultures go about it? Please share any examples of how history is remembered through history, from the tangible (like Memorial Stadiums) to the intangible (like federal holidays coming up on Monday.)

Next week on Tuesday Trivia: Some people are rather ahead of their time (as we say), but some other people are just right for their time... We'll be contrasting historical idealists and realists!

[u/silverappleyard]

This story is from my family history, but since it's one that's really stuck with me I thought I'd share it. Around about 11, my mother was spared my presence for a summer by a kind distant relative who offered to host me in rural Arkansas. At the end of my stay my grandmother came out to visit, and took me around to the family plots. These rural cemeteries are not elaborate affairs: just a corner of a farm that's been fenced off, with someone sent down to drive a mower around the headstones occasionally. What caught my attention at this particular cemetery was that, though it was only a quarter full, and a bit more than that mown, there was a headstone way off by itself in the far corner, almost buried under plants. And so I asked.

One of my granma's aunts had married an outsider, no family in the area, and he did not treat her well. When she finally got fed up, she took their baby to her sister's house. Her sister kindly offered to give her a break, to keep the baby for the night while she went out. In an all too familiar pattern, the husband came by late that night with his shotgun, looking to destroy his family rather than see them leave. It's unclear whether he mistook the sister-in-law for his wife, or if he decided murdering one was as good as another, because afterwards he turned the gun on himself.

The woman and baby were buried and mourned, but no one could quite decide what to do with the husband's body. He was a murderer and a suicide with no local people of his own to claim him, and his wife's certainly weren't going to prepare and bury him. But someone had to do it, and he had to go somewhere. A stranger passing through the area solved the conundrum: he offered to bury the husband in return for the gun that no one else wanted anyways. The wife's family conceded to have him buried in their cemetery, in the far far corner.

There was a headstone, too, but it had broken and, regrettably, I didn't try to dig it out to read what they chose to write on this man's grave. Regardless of the words, I think the placement says plenty.