Crossbones: Sometimes The Dead Need The Living And The Living Need The Dead

 Below is a link to a place I've always felt hugely drawn to: Crossbones Cemetery in London, England. It's a 19th century mass burial ground for female sex workers who died impoverished. At that time and place in history these were so many in number. I've always had a huge sympathy and rapport with female sex workers, although I've never been one, (in this life?). A site of neglect in their era, in contemporary times it's a shrine to them erected by caring members of the public. I believe that sometimes the dead need us and sometimes we need the dead. This is one theme of the novel I'm trying to write. I believe that love, from the angle of a deep understanding, empathy and appreciation, heals, and often people don't get that on earth. Perhaps we're born into gappy families where there's no one around for us, or not enough bonds or bonding, and that continues. It certainly is possible not to be meant to be born because there's no one and nothing around for you, which is a topic for another day, but because of that, sometimes we die having been uncherished or as person destroyed without justice vindicating us and sometimes as humans we're living uncherished, trapped and victimised lives, and in these cases, the living can try to fill the gaps of what the trashed dead suffered, while the dead can become to the living the loving bonds that they don't have. Through that, there can be some beautiful healing experienced and support for the blossoming we are all born for given. 

Though I've long been drawn to it, ever since I heard about it online, for years I've never yet managed to visit it in the flesh. I always had someone to be a carer for who couldn't cope without me or travel with me, or overwhelming crisis business around my daughters, (and my IVF attempts to have another daughter), to deal with. A piece of my heart is there in Crossbones, though. In dreams, I've added crimson rosebuds and silken baby shoes trimmed with ruffled white lace, to the shrine wall that runs besides it.

May the sex workers whose mortal remains lie in Crossbones, and their children and babies buried there, Rest In Peace. And may the Lord bless all those who lie in mass graves, particularly the unmourned. 

https://youtube.com/shorts/bXlb378rhCw?si=mu25nbDxRYsyaDVJ 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction

 I'm in mourning for my baby daughter, who died some months ago. The time before she died, when she was very ill for many months, was very traumatic too. For the past year I've been trying to write a novel as an escape from all the pain and trauma. It started as a reason to go into another world, where the most devastating reality of her disabilities, and of other extremely devastating losses that had happened over the last few years, didn't exist. I’d been a hobby writer, and at one time a poet published here and there, throughout my life, and periodically a journaler, and so to a pen and notebooks and the document apps on my phone I turned. This has continued to this day. I’ve been writing about characters who had been in my head for decades; characters invented when I’d so much wished my unhappy life was different and started to imagine an ideal one in my head. I started writing with a scene I’d once written out of a sudden compulsion about twenty seven years before in m...
Read more

Music As An Aid To Writing

 In order to write, I have to be in a relaxed state, sort of in a trance. Maybe actually in a low beta, trance state. Then the scenes and the dialogue - tons and tons and tons of dialogue, so fast I can't get it down on paper - it usually only works with pen and paper - appears. I hear the dialogue in my mind, just not with my outer ear - with my inner ear. Sometimes it's an intro to the characters. "Let that be a lesson to you Stanley" = terrifying, icy Granddad Golden. " You tell that disgusting nephew of mine! ... Go die in a ditch!" = super-bitch Granny Sue. "Mother isn't very sympathetic" = angelic aunt Goldie, (Marigold. Marigold Mercy Stratton).  And so on. More often it's just reams and reams of dialogue that is so much I have to leave it after a while.  That's all good. It's obviously stuff that needs to come out. Maybe the characters are facets of my own psyche? But what happens when I've had a stressful day and am not...
Read more

Facebook Memories On My Novel Again

A couple of days ago a post associated with my novel writing again popped up on my Facebook. In memories, of a year ago. It was a summary of what I'd felt the novel was going to be about. It wasn't the first summary I'd written; there had been one previously a month or two before, when I actually had just started writing. This was one when I was feeling my way into it a little more. What struck me about it, what was interesting to me, was how little I understood - that was how I would put it - about one of the chief romantic interests at the time. The facts I wrote about who she was to the (possibly could be described as), main character were different to the deeply felt facts of now. I then remembered, though I had forgotten it till then, not really knowing what to say about that character, how to pad that bit of the summary out, and doing what I often do in those circumstances; putting a place saver in so to speak, by writing something wooden and dead. I'd felt at the...
Read more