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She wanted his grave to have trinkets that a boy would play with so she placed a toy truck and a pinwheel there.
“I didn’t want it to be bare; I didn’t want it to be dark,” she said.
She wanted it to be a place she could visit and give her peace as well, but those well intentioned plans were left behind when the cemetery took up the trinkets to tend to the graves.
Another family has been asked to take away flowers left at their parents’ and nephew’s grave.
What’s an appropriate way to honor the dead? And who should decide that?
The questions are spiritual and intimate for many people but, in Victoria cemeteries, the answers have become a fight over items or articles left at graves.
“There’s really no one-size-fits-all way to mourn,” said Susan Satava, a Victoria mental health counselor who specializes in loss and grief. Families, religion, culture and relationships influence how people mourn the dead, she said.
Some families complain cemetery rules restrict them from paying tribute to loved ones. Staff at the cemeteries say they want to create a peaceful place for all families, but they also want workers to maintain the grounds without problems.
Baby land
Gonzales, 29, was five months pregnant with her first child when she learned he was not going to make it and she had to make funeral arrangements. His toes had grown no bigger than grains of rice.
The nurses reviewed her options: she could hold him or not; she could arrange a funeral; they could have a service in the room; or she could do nothing at all.
“I didn’t know what they were going to do with his body,” Gonzales said. “He was nine inches long. He had everything.”
Resurrection Cemetery’s low cost attracted Gonzales, but so did its affiliation with the Catholic church, in which she was raised.
Along with three cemeteries in downtown Victoria, Resurrection Cemetery is owned and operated by the Catholic Diocese of Victoria.
Gonzales left DeTar Hospital with a memory box filled with Garrett’s single outfit, his footprints and pictures.
“That was probably the hardest part,” Gonzales said. “You plan to leave the hospital with a baby in your arms and you leave with a box.”
Garrett went to baby land – a strip nestled against the mausoleum. Many graves there bear one date: birth and death.
Though sadness there seems magnified, patches of cheer sprout in baby land. Pinwheels spin in the breeze. Stuffed animals, religious figurines – even a bag of crunchy Cheetos – lie as tributes to the babies that have died.
Gonzales bought pinwheels and a solar-powered angel that lights up at night for Garrett’s grave.
She visits there daily, often to say a prayer and wish Garrett goodnight.
“I don’t want to come here and see nothing,” Gonzales said.
Then, one day, she did. At first, she did not recognize it as the spot her son was buried. She thought she was lost.
When Gonzales learned cemetery workers had removed everything from Garrett’s grave, she felt like her son had been disrespected.
Gary Rangnow, the director of Victoria Catholic cemeteries, is the man responsible for moving Garrett’s toy trucks and his neighbors’ teddy bears. And to some, that might seem like the work of a melodrama villain. But Rangnow’s passion about baby land shows as soon as he steps past the crape myrtles that surround it. He planted the trees to ring the babies with colorful flowers.
“To me it’s very important to take care of our infants,” Rangnow said. “Just think, we have this many little saints up there, praying for their families.”
The plots in baby land aren’t much bigger than a checker board. That makes it impossible to run a lawnmower between the rows. Instead, maintenance workers use a weed trimmer to trim the grass, Rangnow said.
It the past, a worker clipped a glass sculpture and shards hit him near his eye. Plastic flowers or teddy bears can get shredded during the mowing, Rangnow said.
So Rangnow asks staff to pick up anything that’s not propped inside the PVC pipes the cemetery provides. The tributes are put inside a storage unit, unless they are broken, in which case they’re thrown away, Rangnow said.
Gonzales found a few of her items in the garbage – including a pinwheel that still spins on Garrett’s grave. Many of her things were stored in the shed. She propped them against Garrett’s marker again, but picks them up each time she notices workers are mowing.
What irks Gonzales most is the pickup doesn’t seem to be uniform.
Rangnow said he encourages families to buy markers, because they can put whatever they want on the granite slabs.
Gonzales plans to buy a marker for Garrett, but it costs $500, she said.
‘There’s no way I could just not go’
It’s been years since Glenda Blanton Copenhaver’s parents died, but the pain remains fresh.
She cared for her father, Virgle Blanton, before he died in 2004. She then for her mother, Mary Blanton, who died two years later.
“I come out here as often as I can emotionally handle it,” she said as she stood by her parents’ graves at Memory Gardens on U.S. Highway 87 North.
Copenhaver’s nephew is buried beside his grandparents. Last year, Memory Gardens’ management wrote Copenhaver’s sister a letter, asking her to remove some items from her son’s grave.
The family took away some flower arrangements.
The family wasn’t notified before flowers disappeared from the Blantons’ graves in August.
Staff at Memory Gardens directed questions to the owners at Gennis Group in Port Neches. Several calls requesting interviews with managers there went unreturned.
Copenhaver still keeps flowers at her parents’ and nephew’s graves, but now she clips the lawn around them to try to keep workers away.
“We are a very close family,” Copenhaver said. “Very tight knit. There’s no way I could just not go.”