Thirteen years ago, Samatha Findley and Brad Jinkinson’s infant son Austin died. Born three months premature, he lived just one month after his birth on Nov. 17, 2004.
Unable to afford a headstone for Austin’s grave, his parents used a small, concrete statue of an angel, given to them by Findley’s grandmother, to mark his final resting place at the Hillcrest Ceremony in the eastern Ontario town of Smiths Falls.
“She wanted us to put it there for him. It’s been there for 13 years. She passed away last year,” Findley told CTVNews.ca during a phone interview from her home outside of Smiths Falls.
On Nov. 22, Findley read a post by Tamara Mosher Wainwright in a community Facebook group that alerted members to a recent cleanup at the Hillcrest Cemetery. According to the message, the cemetery’s caretaker, Eric Graham, threw out decorative objects placed at graves, including flowers and lights.
Jinkinson and Findley had a small pumpkin for Halloween, two solar lights and the cement angel positioned around the flat, engraved gravestone they bought a year ago for their son’s plot. Early the next morning, Findley rushed to the cemetery, where she discovered that the items were gone, including the cherished angel statue, which had served as Austin’s grave marker for 12 years.
“I was bawling my eyes out,” Findley recalled. “I was really upset.”
When she confronted the caretaker about the angel, Findley said Graham told her “it was in the dump” and that he was just following the town’s bylaws. Art Manhire, the town’s manager of community services, told Findley they would look for the angel, but she never heard back from him.
“There’s nothing they can do to replace this,” Jinkinson said. “It’s been there since our baby was buried there. There’s no replacing it.”
Cemetery bylaws
According to section 8 d) of Smiths Falls’ bylaws concerning the operation of Hillcrest Cemetery, “all artificial decorations at ground level shall be removed by the owner on or before the 15th day of November in each year.”
Although the bylaw has been in place since 1998, the annual Nov. 15 cleanup has only been “sporadically” enforced, Manhire explained, as the caretaker role has been filled by different individuals. In an interview with CTVNews.ca, he said that the town was in the midst of reviewing the cemetery’s operations when Graham noticed that a cleanup was overdue.
“[He] realized that there was supposed to be a cleanup done and unfortunately, went ahead and did that without what we think is proper consultation,” Manhire said. “He wasn’t doing anything wrong other than he didn’t consider communicating with people very well before he went out and did it.”
Although the town didn’t send out a reminder about the cleanup, Wainwright told CTVNews.ca on Tuesday that the cemetery has a sign posted on the side of one of its buildings about the Nov. 15 deadline that’s been there for as long as she can remember.
Graham has held the caretaker position for approximately 18 months, and wasn’t aware of the bylaw during his first year at the cemetery, Manhire said.
“It wasn’t the right approach. It certainly wasn’t the approach we would have picked had his supervisor known about the cleanup and we certainly reviewed it with that individual,” Manhire said.
Graham declined an interview request by CTVNews.ca and referred all inquiries to Manhire.
Grave markers
Findley and Jinkinson weren’t the only ones rattled by the unexpected cemetery cleanup.
The remains of Kelley Denham’s stillborn daughter, Julie Jean Denham-Flegg, were buried in the same plot as her husband’s parents in 2010. Her name isn’t engraved on the headstone itself, so the only thing indicating Julie Jean’s final resting place was a metal stand with an insert in it that had her name, date of death and a bunny printed on it.
Denham also noticed the community Facebook post about the cemetery, and went to check on the grave.
When she arrived, some toy trains her son had left on the base of the headstone were still there, but her daughter’s grave marker wasn’t.
“I was horrified,” Denham said. “It never even occurred to me that they would take it. I went looking to check on the trains. I started crying.”
The mother of four returned to the cemetery the next day, to confront Graham in an encounter she recorded and uploaded to Facebook.
In the video, Denham is heard asking Graham where the grave marker went and he repeatedly assures her that temporary grave markers are allowed and that he didn’t remove any unless they were missing an insert or they included the same information as an accompanying headstone. Graham suggested that the wind might have blown the insert out of the metal stand and that he only removed the empty stand as a result.
“I don’t buy that. Not for one second,” she told CTVNews.ca on Friday. “It had been there for seven years and no wind had taken it out.”
Tamara Mosher Wainwright noticed the missing decorations during a trip to the cemetery on Nov. 21. She and her family were on their way to her grandparents’ gravesite to hang a Christmas wreath there. When they arrived at the site, they were surprised to find that a light they had left there was gone.
“We were quite upset that the solar light was gone. We figured somebody stole it,” Wainwright said.
Wainwright said the caretaker told her family that he had thrown out more than 500 solar lights in the cemetery. She said she tried calling the town about it, but she didn’t get a “straight answer” from them.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Wainwright said. “It’s honouring our loved ones. I find it very disrespectful.”
An apology
In response to the public outcry, the Town of Smiths Falls published a written apology on its Facebook page.
“According to the Hillcrest bylaws these decorations are to be removed by November 15th every year to be safeguarded over the winter months. This has come as news to a number of people and we apologize if people were caught unaware,” the statement read. “We will endeavor to remind families in future years so that they may remove these items before the November 15th deadline.”
The town’s manager of community services reiterated that apology.
“It’s really heart-wrenching,” Manhire said. “People are very attached to this stuff and we understand that. It’s certainly not our intention to be arbitrary in this whole process and it’s certainly not our intention to disrespect people’s interred loved ones in the cemetery.”
Although Findley and Jinkinson read the town’s posted apology on Facebook, they said they’re not satisfied. Findley said she thinks Graham should be the one to apologize to the community for his actions.
“You can’t all of sudden take people’s stuff and enforce it just this year. You need to give people notice. We all had stuff that’s there,” she said. “I’d like Eric Graham to apologize to all of us.”
“Their [the town’s] apology says that he meant no ill will,” Jinkinson added. “I just don’t see how that’s possible when you’re going on a baby’s grave and ripping an angel out of the ground and throwing it in the trash. I don’t see how someone could do that and not feel bad about it.”
Manhire said the town will be revising their communication strategy, looking at what other cemeteries are doing and making some operational changes. The town council will also review the cemetery bylaws based on the findings from the service review in February, he said.
