My epitaph for Bert Crowle

We only had one assignment for this course and that was to write an epitaph for one of the stories with a limit of 66 characters including spaces between words.

For this assignment, I chose to write an epitaph for Herbert Crowle from week 1 of the course. His story stayed in my mind from the very beginning. Injured in the eye as an ANZAC, nursed back to health, then fired upon on the Somme and hospitalized again. So open in what he was telling his wife in his last letter home. Written on his deathbed, yet precise in what he mentioned about gangrene and pain and becoming unconscious. I’m not sure how many soldiers would have been that open with family.

My epitaph – didn’t count spaces at end of each line

Upon his deathbed

Final thought, caring for family

Our loving Bert

The message

As the epitaphs were written by family, I had to think as if I were Beatrice and other family members. What was it that they appreciated about Bert? What had he done to make him a hero in their eyes? How could they convey that in 66 characters?

On his deathbed his final thoughts in his letter home were of caring for his family. This showed me what sort of family man Bert was. He could have written about remembering him as he was before he left to go to war, but he was thinking of them. How they were going to survive without him as he knew he was dying. So Beatrice would have appreciated those final thoughts from her young husband.

I didn’t find this very difficult as I am used to using Twitter with its limit of characters and after reading the epitaph the family did actually write, I wanted this one to be more personal.