Remembering the dead

The day after my father died I went with my mother and my son to the for-profit cemetery where my father had purchased eight plots in the 1950s. Buried there are his parents; his sister, her husband and their child; my brother, who was stillborn; and now my father. Although my family had owned plots there for more than 50 years, this was the first time I had ever had any dealings with them. It was a rude awakening.

My mother knew that she had to have a check for $1,000 in hand because friends had told her so. This was the fee to open the grave for my father’s ashes. Without that check, nothing would happen. The young man who sat across the table from us wanted us to come back a few days later. The purpose was to sell us additional things to preserve the memory of my father. I told him that we would not be returning. Whatever needed doing would have to be done now. It took a solid hour to sign the papers and get out of there.

I felt sorry for the cemetery employee. As we walked out the door, I asked him how long he had been working at this job. Six weeks. Just six weeks. I speculated that his salary was partly based on commissions, and our refusal to buy various services and trinkets meant it was going to be harder for him to make ends meet.

This cemetery has been purchased by a local funeral home, which has probably become part of a chain of funeral homes. The employees may work for a big corporation. The whole encounter left a bad taste in my mouth that did not go away when they took weeks to get a replacement stone on the grave; the original one had been lost.

Waynesboro is going to have to make decisions about Riverview and Fairview cemeteries at a time when few municipalities own cemeteries anymore. Maybe the basic question is not what do we do with the cemeteries, but rather what options should our citizens have when it comes time to bury their dead?

There are nonprofit cemeteries in which the money made is kept in an endowment for maintenance. A board of trustees is charged with the responsibility for its operation and care. Thornrose in Staunton is such a place.

There are church cemeteries with their own rules about fees and who can be buried there. Many of those also have an endowment of sorts.

There are family cemeteries, particularly on farms or what used to be farms. Obviously the problem all cemeteries face is what happens to them if the current arrangements are no longer possible. What if the corporation goes broke or simply fails to keep it up? What happens to a family cemetery when there is no family left? What happens if the city wants to shed this responsibility? What happens a hundred or more years from now? 

Archaeologists and construction workers run into burial sites — abandoned and forgotten hundreds or even thousands of years ago — all the time. Finding human remains is both creepy and fascinating. Who were these people? When did they live? How were their graves forgotten? What do we do now?

More and more people are cremated and the remains scattered — they always say “scattered” — in a river, an ocean, in the woods, in a garden ... ashes to ashes and dust to dust. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is an old-fashioned part of me that wants a stone or plaque somewhere with the person’s name on it. I know full well it will probably not last a thousand years, but I want it anyway. I want to be able to walk among the graves of those who went before me, to remember who kept faith alive in this congregation, to remember who kept this town going. I want the opportunity to place my own little story in the much larger story of a particular place, to see my generation put alongside the generations before me.

How we do this may be a decision we need to make together and not leave entirely to happenstance or the vicissitudes of the marketplace.

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.