Published: June 25, 2008 01:21 am            

WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM: Abandoned markers tug at conscience

The complainant has an issue with St. Mary’s Cemetery, but the problem can be found in almost any cemetery.

Amid well-groomed grounds and well-kept grave sites, there is the occasional marker doing no honor to the one it memorializes. Maybe the marker is slipping off its foundation, has toppled over or it’s sinking into the ground.

If descendants of the deceased aren’t taking care of the grave site, there’s a good chance nobody else is, either.

At St. Mary’s Cemetery on Niagara Street, grave sites here and there definitely seem neglected.

Jim Donner points to a row of three toppled markers near his dad’s grave site and questions why the cemetery association hasn’t acted to repair them. Not too far from the Ethel and Theodore Donner stone, there’s a row of 12 stones memorializing deceased from the mid-1930s, and many of them are weather-eroded, moss-tinged and sinking into the hill they’re set on.

Caring for markers is the job of the deceaseds’ survivors, not the cemetery management, according to Jerome Kern, president of the St. Mary’s Cemetery board of directors. A one-time lot fee is paid per grave site into a fund for cemetery maintenance, but that money pays for grass mowing, driveway maintenance and other care of common areas. The cemetery is an entity separate of St. Mary’s Church, and the cemetery board does not assume responsibility for individual memorials.

“It’s up to the families to take care of them,” Kern said. “Some people don’t want to spend the money on their relatives. Other times there’s nobody left (in the family line). ... All cemeteries have this issue, especially the (oldest) ones.”

The St. Mary’s board did arrange for two abandoned markers to be restored by Orleans-Niagara Monument about five years ago, Kern said, but does not arrange that care on a regular basis.

Kent Harrington of Gasport isn’t content to let marker abandonment be someone else’s problem. He’s been tending dutifully to five family plots at the cemetery’s southwest edge for years and, when he sees problems with neighboring markers he gets management’s permission to address them himself.

St. Mary’s Cemetery is on hilly, soft ground, and Harrington once brought in a load of dirt, at his own expense, to fill a sinkhole and stabilize some foundations. After planting annuals across the family plots, he’ll pull weeds at all the plots in the vicinity and recently arranged for the removal of brush and small trees that were starting to encroach on memorial space.

“My mom was a very strict Catholic, so I know about respect,” Harrington says. “I think more people should be concerned about this. Just because someone is deceased doesn’t mean they’re not here in spirit.”

Contact reporter Joyce Miles at 439-9222, ext. 6245.

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