A place to grow wise in?

Philip Larkin's poem Churchgoing refers to how so many dead lie around church buildings, even disused ones, that they are places to grow wise in. I don't know if a day spent weeding the church walls before going on to cleaning moss off old gravestones has made me any wiser, but it has brought home to me how short life is, and how much shorter it was a hundred years or so ago.

On more than one stone, I found myself clearing moss from the foot of the stone, below the main inscription, and finding another name - the name of a child, usually in the first few years of life. And so many people died before they reached 60 ...

All these inscriptions, carved to immortalise a loved one. All these stones, overgrown with trees and brambles, obliterated by moss, showing only that immortality doesn't come easy.