The historical picture below speaks to me. It is the grave memorials of a Catholic woman and her Protestant husband, Holland 1888, holding hands over a wall between a Catholic and a Protestant cemetery.

My family was Catholic, and Protestants are not allowed to be buried in Catholic cemeteries. At the time of my mother’s death when I was two, cremations were also not allowed. My Protestant father died a few months before I was born, and my mother had the urn with his ashes in her possession. When my grandmother (a VERY strict and devout Catholic) planned my mother’s funeral after the car accident that killed her, she had a dilemma. What to do with my father’s ashes? She spoke to the funeral director and asked him to secretly put the urn into my mother’s casket.

So – my parents are buried together, although the grave marker bears only my mother’s name. How sad to be forced to reach over a wall as in this historical picture, or to have an incomplete gravestone like the one my parents have. Yet another reason why IT IS WRONG TO BUILD WALLS BETWEEN PEOPLE!