Margaret Ashley
My frequent collaborators the McKees shared this fine image from Westfield, MA. It is a bespoke verse that adds new layers to a familiar recurring trope.
Love Wells
A fine monument in the Lenox MA Church on the Hill Cemetery beautifully integrates, in its imagery and its text, the old Calvinist warning to prepare for death with a fine optimistic assertion of the deceased’s virtue and heavenly reward.
Rebekah Hunt
Here is an admirable epitaph from Concord, Massachusetts. This is a bit further east, and closer to a big city, than my usual collecting. But I have been studying a Concord-based carver, Ithamar Spauldin, who left an account book detailing everything about his business — except, maddeningly, the source of his epitaph texts! In this case, I am fairly certain he was given this bespoke memorial to carve.