‘club that no one wants to be part of’
the friends changed the subject as quickly as possible.
For some of the parents, the pain is still too raw to talk about at all.
One father, after opening the door of his home to a reporter asking about his son, suddenly lost the color in his face and spoke in a halting, heartbreaking cadence.
“It’s too hard for me. Just too hard for me,” he said.
The father, before shutting the door, apologized for using an expletive.
Seen from above, the plots of the Oceanview victims look no different from the hundreds of others nearby.
The view at ground level is more personal, more poignant. A photo etched into the headstone of a 40-year-old opioid victim, whose family asked that he not be identified, shows him with a gleaming smile and a sparkling diamond in his ear.
“You are my sonshine,” reads the message on the tombstone.
The young people lying beneath Oceanview grew up as close as 4 miles away and as far as 6,890.
They hail from Brooklyn and Staten Island, Uzbekistan and Albania, as well as the former Republic of Georgia.
Ermal Zylaj’s fiancée was preparing to travel to the U.S. from Albania on June 5, 2015, to prepare for a wedding. She instead arrived in New York to attend his funeral.
Some grieving relatives can tolerate visiting the cemetery only on birthdays and death anniversaries.
For others, visiting the graveyard has become a part of their daily routine.
Every other morning, Howard Pachter, stepfather to Joseph Gentile, drives 10 minutes to visit the boy he treated as his own.
Pachter shows up with a pair of scissors and two giant jugs of water. He typically goes to work right away on the tiny lawn in front of Gentile’s grave, snipping the grass before dousing it with water.
“I usually spend a good hour here, talking to him while I’m working,” Pachter said, his hand grazing the tips of grass. “He was gifted. He was a plumber. He had hands of gold.”
Show up at the cemetery anytime after 10 a.m. and there’s a good chance a member of the Kunz family will be there. Bobby’s father sometimes visits twice a day. Each time, he lies on the ground directly above the body of his son.
“I have what’s left of him in this world right here, and that I find comforting,” said Robert Kunz Sr.
The Kunzes often see another father visiting a plot on the same row about 40 yards away.
He often shows up about 4 p.m. stands in front of his son’s grave and genuflects. He takes a seat in a red folding chair and stares at the headstone.
Sometimes he and the Kunzes exchange waves. Sometimes they don’t.
Nicole Kunz, Bobby’s sister, arrived at the cemetery several weeks ago to spend time with her brother.
Before reaching his plot, she walked past the grave of Nikoloz Telidze.
Past the grave of Dimitri Grammatikopoulos.
Past the graves of Sharissa Turk and her unborn child.
While seated in front of her brother’s plot, Nicole reflected on the relatives her brother and all the others left behind.
“We’re all part of a club,” she said, “that no one wants to be a part of.”