Memento mori.
IN memory of
Aaron Bowers, son of
Mr. John Bowers & Mrs.
Lydia his wife.
who was instantly kill’d
by a stock of boards Sept.
12 1791 AEt 2 yrs & 10 Mon.
Parents dear your idols
All take down
Lest God should still
upon you frown.
There is a lot to unpack here. Start with the image on the tympanum. This is the work of Ithamar Spauldin, a prolific carver from Concord MA who left a wonderfully detailed account book that provides a rich store of information on the workaday business of creating gravestones. Here, Spauldin carved little Aaron Bowers and two of the stock (or stack) of boards that fell and crushed him to death.
He added that scroll across the top -- Memento Mori can be translated as either “remember Death” or “recall that you will die”, either way a fitting call for the reader to ponder the transience of life and the prospect of eternity to come. Note another little bit of Latin: AEt or Aetatis means “at the age of.”
The verse is an amazing piece of work. It is almost like a little sermon, taking as its text a passage from the First Epistle of John, 5:21: Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen. But it reverses the role of child and adult; here the unfortunate toddler admonishes his parents to stop their inappropriate grieving and resign themselves to God’s will.
And the threat of God frowning upon you is dead serious– for a religious reader of the time, to be frowned upon by God is to perish forever.
Of course these are not little Aaron’s words, they are the work of yet another now-anonymous local writer. I think this is a moving example of the original creativity these people were capable of summoning in order to express their attitudes towards life and death.
