This one comes to me from r/AskHistorians on Reddit. Supposedly, all the graves at Old Tonopah Cemetery in the US State of Nevada have the same inscription: "life became a burden", all buried between 1901 and 1911 before the town moved to a larger cemetery when all the plots were taken up and there was no more room left for dead.
Well, truthfully, it's not all the headstones; it's only some of them. A great many of the headstones read things like pneumonia (possibly related to the "Tonopah Plague" of 1902), or the Belmont Mine Fire, or the grave of one "Big Bill" Murphy, who "died in mine fire while saving others":
Heroic, I guess.
There isn't really an answer for "life became a burden", so I wasn't able to comment in the original thread, but it's an interesting case nonetheless. That subreddit doesn't like speculation, for obvious reasons of historical fact over biased interpretation, but really, all I have is my interpretation on this one, because it makes for a good story, doesn't it?
From its founding in 1901 to the cemetery's transfer to a new one in 1911, and beyond, Old Tonopah was fraught with drama. Gunfights. Mine fires. Pneumonia. Plagues which "only affected grown men". The town filled up its cemetery with 300 graves in just ten years. Ten years. A decade. People dying left and right in a town trapped in desert isolation, a mine in the middle of nowhere, with nothing left but the bones they buried.
Life becomes a burden; to stay alive a constant weight. For the residents of Old Tonopah, though I've never known them but through the names hammered to wood on antique metal plates, it seems when there was no other cause, perhaps some simply gave up. My first thought was, "life became a burden" was a pleasant way of saying suicide. I don't know how true that is to the situation, I'd have to look up individual burial records for names inscribed with that epitaph and see if there's a common connection which can be made, but it makes sense, doesn't it? How else would you say it?
In the modern day, "unalive". Perhaps, in 1901, in the town of Tonopah, Nevada, it was "life became a burden", and the sadness and woes of frontier life in a town which mined silver simply caused some to just give up. I don't blame them, and I don't think anyone in that situation ever could or should.