John Mendel Monument, Union Dale Cemetery


An ordinary stone, but with an interesting German epitaph. Unfortunately the last two lines are buried in the ground, and Father Pitt was unwilling to dig for them.

Ja du hast jetzt überstanden
Manche schwere harte Stunden,
Manchen Tag und manche Nacht
Hast du in Schmerzen zugebracht.

Standhaft hast du sie ertragen
Deine Schmerzen, deine Plagen…

Old Pa Pitt’s German is sketchy at best, but this is how he translates it:

Yes, now thou hast withstood
many heavy, hard hours;
many a day and many a night
hast thou spent in pain.

Steadfast hast thou borne it,
thy pain, thy plague…

This appears to be one of those circulating funerary poems of the nineteenth century that were like Facebook memes today: they keep showing up on monuments in slightly different wording, and nobody knows where they came from.


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