Family Heartbroken After Learning They’ve Been Visiting The Wrong Grave For Over 40 Years
In visiting a loved one's grave, you honor their memory, and their existence, evoking memories of their living days and the time you spent together. You reminisce, you laugh, you cry, and you remind both yourself and that person that they're with you every day in your heart.
Finding out that the place you've been experiencing all those emotions at isn't what you thought it was can be confusing at best, devastating at worst, but mostly just shocking.
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A Place In Common
When a loved one passes away, one of the few things we can hope for during that time is to have a place in which we can freely mourn them, where we can return to whenever we want to connect with their spirit again and spend some time in what feels like their presence, even if only symbolically.
For some, this is a favorite location of the person who died. Maybe a favorite hiking trail, a preferred coffee shop, or anything that was integral to their daily life. For most, though, that place is a grave.
All This Time
Going to the place where the person who passed will rest forever more to pay your respects is a centuries-old tradition that gives those who still live a safe space to grieve, as everyone attending a cemetery will understand what you're going through.
That's why it was so shocking for one family when they learned that they had actually been crying over the wrong grave for upwards of 40 years, generations of the person's family all gathered at the wrong spot.
Regular Visits
That's the story of Sylvia Ross and her daughter Lynette, who found out they had spent the past few decades visiting the wrong grave marker at their local cemetery.
The plot they had been going to in Witton Park Cemetery in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, had long since become familiar to them. They believed that Ross' father, John Thomas Thompson, was buried there this entire time, as his name was emblazoned on a plaque atop the plot.
The News Reaching Them
So how did they find out there was a mistake, and Thompson wasn't there? Not through the cemetery contacting them, but through a Facebook post discussing the misplaced plaque that was being moved to the correct spot by Durham County Council.
That's right, for years and decades after her father's death, Ross and the rest of her family had been visiting him at the wrong grave due to a plaque placement mishap at the time of Thompson's burial.
Who Were They Visiting Instead?
The man actually buried in the grave they thought was Thompson's was Frederick Brown, a complete stranger to Ross' family. Brown did share the same year of death as Thompson, but little else is known.
Authorities have now begun looking into the ordeal to see how this mixup even happened, how long it's been happening for, and if it happened to any other graves in the cemetery so other families can know the truth.
Familiar Heartbreak
Thompson passed away just one year before Lynette was born, but even she's feeling the heartache this discovery has caused.
"I never met my grandad, but my mam has been visiting his grave for 43 years and is utterly devastated," she said. "She's heartbroken as she says her dad has laid there thinking not one of us cared about him, with no flowers and no visits, nothing."
She also added, "We're disgusted, and my mam is heartbroken."
Not Their Mistake
"It's just disgusting, how can they get something so simple so wrong."
Durham County Council was only given control of the cemetery in 2009, meaning it wasn't even their mistake to correct in the first place. The original owners, Wear Valley District Council, would have been the ones who made the blunder.
Graham Harrison, Durham County Council's bereavement services manager, put out an apology statement that read, "We are sorry for the distress this error has caused the family."
Enough Apologies
"At the time, the cemetery would have been managed by Wear Valley District Council. Once we were made aware of the historic mistake, we carefully moved the items to the correct grave within the quickest possible time scale," says the apology Durham County Council.
"Although the grave has now been corrected, this does not take away from the pain the family has experienced, and we would like to reiterate our sincerest apologies for any hurt that has been caused."
Always Beside Us
It's a mistake that's hard to imagine happening in our own lives. The pain of knowing you've been memorializing your loved one, especially a parent, in the wrong spot would be difficult to overcome.
But it's times like these that are good for remembering that our loved ones remain with us beyond the confines of their grave. If you believe in an afterlife in which their presence can remain in any respect, that means that presence can follow us, watching what we make of our lives and knowing every time we remember them.
No matter how at peace we are with it and how long it's been, the sorrow attached to death can keep us down for what feels like ages. There are ways to overcome this grief, and you can start today in just 20 minutes.
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