Orrin, A story I read this morning caused me to reflect on Chris' earlier recording. I suspect you'll know the specific one after reading the attached below: Take care, WAM Mike Jovica, 1866- by John Fischer Suffer me one last visit to Holy Cross Cemetery in Butte, Montana. As you can see, I finally got the name of the place, which explains the preponderance of statues and rosary beads. I understand this town was originally settled by a large contingency of Irish Catholics. Also, one of our readers shed some light on those "luggage tag" markers. She has a similar thing on her husband's grave right now while she is having a permanent marker made -- something she calls "a work of art that depicts a day in his life" that his children and their children can come and see (a pretty neat idea, I thought). I wonder if those tags I saw were temporary markers that never got a permanent stone for some reason. Well, Friday morning on my last run, I saw something even more negligent than that. I passed a headstone with "JOVICA" carved in large letters and then "Anna" and "Mike" underneath. Anna's dates were 1884-1925. Mike had one date 1866- . That's it. Nothing more. Now it's not unusual to see a shared stone with one of the parties still living, but not someone born in 1866! Unless Mike Jovica is alive somewhere setting all records at 142 years old and still going, I'm afraid this person has somehow dropped off the map. I'm going to speculate here. Mike probably had the headstone made shortly after Anna's death in 1925. She was 41 years old when she died; he was 59, and being almost 20 years older than his wife, he probably never thought she would die first. It could have been a blow from which he never recovered. He had his name and birth date engraved on the stone, intending to be buried next to her, something commonly done with married couples: you purchase a joint plot. But something prevented him from being buried there. Here's my guess. Mike Jovica died somewhere where no one knew who he was, or cared. No one bothered to find out where his family was, if he had one, or if he even had a wife, much less a burial plot already purchased. People like Mike are the homeless and skid row people, uprooted from everything. Who knows how they got there (it doesn't matter), but the tragedy is, they're going to die without anyone to remember them. Next time you encounter someone like this, think of Mike Jovica,1866- , and try and think of something you can do to help someone like this gain back some dignity before they are just a blank space at the end of a dash.