Highgate Cemetery #7: Michael and Sasha Young

'MICHAEL YOUNG

'Social Visionary
and Innovator
1915–2002

'Never the spirit was born
The spirit shall cease to be never
Never was time it was not
End and beginning are dreams
Birthless and deathless and changeless
Remaineth the spirit forever
Death hath not touched it at all
Dead though the house of it seems.'

The above words, on immortality of the soul, are from The Bhagavad Gita.

Sociologist Young is perhaps most noted for his books Family and Kinship in East London (1957) and Family and Class in a London Suburb (1960) (both with Peter Willmott), and The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958).

 

In 1960 he married Sasha Moorsum.

 

'SASHA YOUNG 1931–1993

 

'Ah the
company of the birds
I loved and cherished on earth
Now freed of flesh we fly
Together a flock of beating wings
I am light as feathery
As gone from gravity we soar
In endless circles'

The writer, artist and sculptor Sasha Young wrote poetry and published two novels – A Lavender Trip (1976) and In the Shadow of the Paradise Tree (1983) – the second of which was inspired by a stay in Nigeria.