Jan 11, 2022
Having the Last Word
© Yehor Vlasenko | Dreamstime.com
✟Here should lie the body of John Mound
Lost at sea and never found.
✟The little hero that lies here
Was conquered by the diarrhea.
✟Here lies the body of Samuel Proctor
Who lived and died without a doctor.
✟When present useful, absent wanted
Lived respected, died lamented.
✟Death is a debt that's justly due,
That I have paid and so must you.
✟Grim death took me without any warning,
I was well one day, and stone dead the next morning.
✟God takes the good too good on earth to stay,
God leaves the bad too bad to take away.
✟The pale consumption gave the mortal blow.
The fate was certain although the event was slow.
✟He got a fishbone in his throat
And then he sang an angel's note.
✟Some have children others none,
Here lies the mother of twenty-one.
✟Ebenezer Dockwood aged forty-seven,
A miser and a hypocrite and never went to Heaven.
✟This corpse
is Phebe Thorps.
✟Here lies a man never beat by a plan,
Straight was his aim and sure of his game,
Never was a lover but invented a revolver.
✟Here lies a man beneath this sod,
Who slandered all except his God,
And him he would have slandered too,
But that the God he never knew.
✟Here lies my wife in earthly mold,
Who when she lived did naught but scold.
Peace! wake her not, for now, she's still,
She had, but now I have my will.
✟After cremation:
And this is all that's left of thee
Thou fairest of earth's daughters.
Only four pounds of ashes white
Out of two hundred and three quarters.
These are part of a collection of epitaphs that was started by Susan Darling Safford, and published in ©1895. Ms. Safford searched all the graveyards near her Vermont home for quaint inscriptions upon old tombstones. She had a fondness for studying human eccentricity as revealed in whimsical epitaphs.
This is part of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Quaint Epitaphs in the Public Domain. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22518/22518-h/22518-h.htm