A heartbreaking disturbance

As a family member of someone buried in the Plainview Cemetery in Big Piney, I am disturbed.

Every year, our family gathers to visit our loved one at the Plainview cemetery. We go up several times a year to pay our respects.

On June 25, we went up to celebrate what would have been our loved one’s 16th birthday. We were horribly saddened to find his grave stripped from everything we had put there throughout the years.

We lovingly tidy up the flowers, hanging baskets and small memorabilia we have put there. We came up Memorial Day and spent time repainting hanging baskets and cleaning up leaves and debris. Our ritual of visiting our loved one for 16 years has been drastically changed. We can’t take our loved one to the store to buy a popsicle or go to the park to throw a football, so we do what we can every year to deal with our grieving.

Remembering the passing of our loved ones is an important part of our lives. Visiting the gravesite of a family member or friend brings us full circle with their lives, causing us to remember them, their life and their part in our lives. One mark of respect and memory is often to decorate the gravesite with appropriate items. Every person grieves differently, but I know that our family finds comfort in being able to maintain and decorate our loved one’s gravesite.

That plot is paid for by the family, and we should be able to remember the way we want.

No one should ever be able to deny a family a simple act like that which brings them comfort in their grief.

I’m very disappointed we were not notified this was going to happen so we would have time to prepare and remove what was ours ourselves. Families put so much time and thought into what goes on our loved ones’ graves, and to have it removed without our knowledge was devastating.

We realize that the director of the cemetery works hard to keep things maintained. However, the sites that are taken care of by loved ones should be left alone.

When we called to find out why our gravesite had been stripped of the items we placed there, and where they were, we were informed the Cemetery Committee had decided that you couldn’t have anything but flowers and that they would be removed after five days. Our other items had all been put in a box and we could come and find what was ours.

I look at the other gravesites around ours, and it saddens me that the other gravesites have also been disturbed. I know how we felt when we pulled up and felt emptiness. For the other people who do not know that their loved ones’ graves have been tampered with, we decided to write this letter for their awareness, as well as a way to express our anger and sadness of the way it was handled. n



The Long Family, Marbleton