I'm hoping to take the kids to the open day at the cemetery tomorrow. This particular cemetery is near the beach I like to take them to and we have often gone for a little wander among the headstones or the crypts after a morning swimming. They are fascinated, as I am, with the stories behind the stones, the stories we will of course, never know.

I always leave thinking about how little our gravestones say about us. When we were born and when we died place us on a timeline but they don't say anything about who we were.

Mother of...... , wife of........ , daughter of....... list the people we loved and who loved us and that is important but it still doesn't say who we really were. If I'm nobody's wife, nobody's mother, does that make me nobody? I think not.

Gravestones are neccessarily abbreviated representations of a life but why couldn't we, say, list a persons five best qualities or even list them as a cantankerous old eccentric ?

What do you think a gravestone should say?

And what might yours say?