Greenford Cemetery

‘We took a long time to organise the gravestone. I think part of that was the pressure of choosing a small number of words for someone who meant so much to us. We’re a big family and we all knew him differently so in the end we kept the words simple. 

My mum and I suffer from a horrendously bad sense of direction. I wanted the name to be big enough for my mum to see it from the path. Her name is longer than my mums so we wanted the letters to also be small enough to fit the length of her name one day at the same font size.

Photos on gravestones are the marmite of cemeteries and I love them. We picked a black and white one that my mum had taken on my dad’s film camera and my dad probably developed himself.

All of my grandparents are in this cemetery too. My aunt who lives even further away visits and does the gardening far more often than we do. I feel closer to my dad in other places.’ – Maria