I've walked in Oakwood Cemetery Annex, an historic cemetery just east of I-35 off MLK, many times. But one day a while back, I stopped to look at the headstones along the southern edge of the property. They were small and the grave sites didn't seem to be spaced like those in the rest of the cemetery. I realized why when I looked closely at them. It's a children's section.
What made me particularly sad, apart from empathizing with the agonizing loss that each of these markers represented to a family at some point, was realizing that by being buried in this designated section of the cemetery, each of these children, these babies, were buried apart from any other family member. They weren't laid to rest in a family plot somewhere, given the sense of place within a family that represents.
It's possible these families had no such plot. Maybe it was all they could to pay for a tiny grave in this special section of Oakwood. But it made me sad - like I was in a graveyard orphanage of sorts. Each marker has a story attached to it - a story I'll never know. Some markers don't have full names or dates. Some are clearly hand-carved. I tell myself that the very fact that there is a marker means that even if there was no family resting place for these babies, each one was loved.
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