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Cemetery wants it neat, but people want memories of departed children

Monday, January 29, 2001

By DAVID FISHER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

EVERETT -- A stuffed holiday moose in a bright red sweater nestles by little Grayson Parot's tombstone in Evergreen Cemetery. A ceramic Santa carries a tree for a Christmas that will never come.

A few steps away, baby Jacob Shireman, who didn't live to see the end of his first day, rests under the trink- ets his young siblings have brought for him: a football pendant, a Jack-in-the-Box car-antenna ball, a handmade Christmas decoration.

	Toys line the grave of a young boy at Evergreen Cemetery in Everett. The cemetery is about to start enforcing a ban on tombstone decorations. Gilbert W. Arias / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

A few steps farther on, every stage of a 22-year-old's life is memorialized with a collection of stuff -- from Lego toys to a bottle of Bud -- that covers the ground near his hand-painted wooden marker.

Starting March 1, it all will be picked up and carted away.

That's when the cemetery's management plans to start enforcing a longstanding rule against gravesite decorations after years of turning a blind eye to the varied, intensely personal shrines that have cropped up around hundreds of tombstones.

Why crack down? Evergreen general manager Douglas Ticknor said small toys and broken flower pots can turn into missiles when grounds crews mow over them. Also, some patrons have complained about the look of all that stuff on the 100-acre cemetery's green lawns.

"We respect everyone's right to grieve in their own way," Ticknor said. "What we hope the community understands is that we are doing this to keep the grounds in a way that they were expected to be kept when they placed their loved ones here."

Some patrons aren't buying that.

Sherri Parot, whose 3- 1/2-year-old son died in an accident in the family driveway three years ago, said she and her husband opted to put him in Evergreen because they couldn't stand the thought of entombing their bright, lively child in a sterile cemetery.

"That's all we have left of our son," she said. "That's all we have is the ability to go up to the cemetery and leave a small token of our love, from our family to our child."

The ways in which American families relate to death rituals have changed dramatically in the last century. The tension at Evergreen reflects that, said Teresa Trebon, a historian who recently finished a manuscript on funerary practices in Washington state.

In the 19th century, families handled every aspect of burial rituals themselves, from embalming the body to building the casket to conducting a funeral in their own family room, or parlor.

The personal touch extended to gravesites, which were considered extensions of the home, Trebon said. Wealthier families erected elaborate monuments, surrounding them with fencing and walls to keep grazing animals out. Families picnicked around their gravesites every spring at Decoration Day, later renamed Memorial Day, when most of the year's heavy maintenance was done.

That changed in the late 19th century and early part of the 20th century, as funeral services -- along with most other key services -- became "professionalized," Trebon said. Professional mortuaries, or "funeral parlors," cropped up to take care of embalming and casket making. Commercial cemeteries took on the job of burial and grave maintenance.

The shift created a tension between the personal touch and the desire for profit and uniformity, Trebon said. In many old cemeteries, gravesite fences came down to ease the path for modern mowers. Some cemeteries banned upright tombstones altogether to facilitate mowing, and cut costs in the process.

Virtually every cemetery, particularly in large urban areas, wrote rules to limit or ban decorations on gravesites.

Human grief, meanwhile, still needs an outlet. And maintaining little shrines can be an important method of coping, said Shirley Murphy, a University of Washington nursing professor who is finishing a five-year study of grieving parents for the National Institutes of Health.

The psychology of grief is complex and individual, but surviving parents tend to harbor intense fears that they will forget their dead children if they don't keep their memories fresh and incorporated into their daily lives, Murphy said. Since friends, neighbors and co-workers tend to shun conversation about a tragic death after a relatively short time, physical rituals can become an important way of "putting a death in a place where a parent can finally move on."

Aside from decorating gravesites, some people plant living memorials, like evergreens or tulips that come up every spring, for physical remembrances. Others put balloons in their yards at certain times, or "find some other way of transferring this to another place, without really cutting it off," Murphy said.

In general, social trends seem to be shifting back to people taking more direct control over death ceremonies, from designing their own funerals to customizing their graveyards shrines, said Heather Andersen, a former teacher in the UW School of Social Work who directed the Hospice of Seattle through the peak of the AIDS epidemic.

"I think it's because we are getting a new generation that is not as afraid of death as their parents were," Andersen said.

Cemeteries have come up with a variety of rules to control the balance between personal grief and the need to maintain huge acreages, said Paul Noel, who spent 33 years as a cemetery administrator before he took his current slot as director of the state Funeral Directors Association.

Some cemeteries move decorations to the nearest tree every mowing day so families can come and pick them up, Noel said. Some will tag items that don't conform to their rules, giving mourners some warning before grounds crews pick their stuff up. Some hang onto items that are cleaned off of gravesites for several weeks or months, to give people time to retrieve them.

All of them post their rules somewhere, either on the grounds or on a policy sheet, Noel said. So it pays to shop around.

At Evergreen, items left on gravesites have included everything from small toys to swing sets, permanent fences and permanent plantings, some of which have grown large enough to block neighboring stones.

The items cleaned off of gravesites on March 1 will be stored for three months for family pickup before they are disposed of, Ticknor said. Anything left after that will be thrown away unless its obvious value warrants a call to a survivor.

People still will be allowed to decorate for two weeks on either side of Christmas, and two weeks on either side of a birthday or death anniversary, Ticknor said.

Baby Schireman's grandfather, Duane Schireman of Everett, said he agrees that some people have "gone way overboard" with decorations.

But he's not looking forward to cleaning his grandchildren's toys off of young Jacob's grave, or to taking the birdhouse off his nearby mother-in-law's grave that one of her great- grandsons lovingly made for her. He thinks the cemetery should lighten up enough to allow a few small items, particularly since people have left them now for so long.

Parot said she still will take things to her son's gravesite, whether they disappear or not. The rule against that, she said, is "awful."

"Grieving is a tremendous task," Parot said. "I think they should just let us alone and let us grieve."

P-I reporter David Fisher can be reached at 425-252-2215 or davidfisher@seattle-pi.com