A stone’s throw from St Paul’s Cathedral in London is the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park, conceived by sculptor G.F. Watts (1817–1904). It contains 53 plaques dedicated to people who died trying to save others. In November 2022, I went to the park to learn about those who perished in water. But … there was Henry Bristow, aged eight, who burned in a fire. Down leaf-littered paths were nameless headstones in the park’s decommissioned graveyard, and I wondered who was buried beneath my feet. I returned to the plaques and contemplated analogues between Covid deaths and Samuel Rabbeth, who perished trying to save a child with diphtheria, an airborne disease. I photographed every plaque. The aim of this paper is to begin to consider two questions: With cultural and political geographical lenses, what of societal value can be learned from drowning, burning, burial, and airborne crises? What can be learned from critically analysing the effects of such events on people, living and nonliving entities, their cultural and political settings, and the mobile ideas and social and spatial practices connecting them? The paper, I hope, is of use in responding to a call made by Engelmann and McCormack in Progress in Human Geography in 2021 for scholars of elemental geographies research to labour on specific instances and empirical cases that also produce higher order theorisations.