“Patch of grass marking Brian Warrender’s unmarked grave at Southern Cemetery, Manchester.”
The photograph shows a patch of grass between graves. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might walk straight past it.
Around thirty years after my father’s death, I was living in Wales when I began searching for where he had been buried. The answer led me to Southern Cemetery in Manchester, to plot JJ1621.
I stood there in disbelief. There was no headstone, no name to tell anyone that Brian Warrender lay beneath the ground. Only that sparse patch of grass and a plot number.
I had lived most of my life without knowing my father, yet I had always missed him. Standing at his grave, I cried for him for the first time.
I couldn’t understand why he lay in an unmarked grave.
Had the circumstances of his death made a headstone something to be ashamed of? Was his life not worth remembering?
His family had wanted to place a headstone there. Marjorie, as his widow, had the authority to decide, and she refused. I still don’t know why.
The photograph may show very little.
To me, it shows the place where, after more than thirty years, I finally found my father and allowed myself to grieve.
That visit also left me with questions I couldn’t put aside. They eventually led me to write He Said He’s Sorry and She Never Said Sorry: one book about what happened to our family, and another about the man my father had been before I lost him.
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