MEMORIAL DAY
Day ceremony honoring the nation’s war dead.
It will be a chance for the cemetery to showcase itself as an important part of the community and return to its roots from when it was founded more than 150 years ago.
“This is a beautiful, peaceful place,” Mefford said. “Back decades ago, families would come. They would have picnics, and the men would set and clean the stones and the women would plant flowers.”
Especially since Mefford arrived two years ago, there has been a greater effort toward holding events in the cemetery, said Randy Rogers, a member of the Green Lawn board and chairman of its grounds and historical preservation committee.
It is, Rogers admits, a balancing act. Take, for instance, the Easter egg hunt a year ago. People didn’t understand the concept and called in, concerned that someone would be hunting for eggs hidden behind Grandpa’s headstone, Mefford said. That wasn’t the case, of course. And this year’s hunt proved a wild success, she said.
“Managing a cemetery, you are always walking a fine line because everyone has such different ideas about death,” Rogers said. “You see that in the different way that people hold funerals or are interred, the different ways people mark individual graves, the personal markers. We deal with it all the time.”
He agrees with Mefford, however, that events like the one this weekend are a nod to the cemetery’s past and its designers’ intentions.
“The idea was to enjoy nature — to walk the wide trails and find peace in the water features, things like that — when you visit your loved ones,” he said. “These cemeteries were built to be like parks.”
Linda Ellis, a cemetery preservationist from the Cleveland area, said cemetery events, especially things like ghost walks and historical tours, are not uncommon. And because foot traffic is never greater at cemeteries than on Memorial Day weekend, it’s a great time to welcome in the public.
“If your cemetery isn’t looking good on Memorial Day, then it most likely isn’t going to be looking good ever,” she said.
Cemeteries are businesses, of course, so a certain aspect of this is marketing. No one denies that. But that’s certainly not the primary focus, Mefford said.
Instead, she said, it is about recognizing that people grieve differently, maybe even especially now. Drugs — the heroin epidemic in particular — mean an awful lot of young people are dying. The families who visits graves, then, are a different dynamic: more young children are brought to visit their young parents, more young parents come to visit a child of their own gone too soon.
“We want this to be a comfortable place,” she said. “Not a sad one.”