Double coincidence

My name is Nigel C (an uncommon surname), I live in Cambridge, and in 1995 I was 49 years old. At that time (and ever since) I had never seen my family name on a gravestone. In that year I took my family to Finchingfield in Essex for a Sunday trip, merely because I had heard it was a pretty place to visit. In the churchyard by the green I came across the headstone of Kenneth and Eva C. To my considerable amazement the date of Eva's death was exactly the same as my own father's: 12 February 1986. Consequently my daughter took a photograph of me at the headstone and we put it in my family album. It struck me as astonishingly improbable that the very first C I ever found in a graveyard would have exactly the same day of death as a close member of my own family, but the story does not end there. Ten years later, in December 2005, I had a woodburning stove fitted in my front room. The man who installed it, Peter Wakeling, looked afterwards at my cheque, with the surname C on it, and said (I do not recollect anyone ever making a remark about my surname before): “C--that's not a common name, is it. My dad was friends at school with a Ken C. They’re both buried in the churchyard at Finchingfield. Four generations of Wakelings are buried there, and quite a few Cs.” I was immediately able to fetch out my photo albums and show him the grave (this is, unsurprisingly, the only photograph I possess of a headstone) of his father's old schoolfriend. How you calculate the chances of something like this I have no idea. This story is all verifiable by the photograph and by Peter Wakeling.