[Louisiana Cemeteries] Holt Cemetery in Mid-City gets a clean up
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- Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 09:30:47 -0800 (PST)
EARTH ANGELS
http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-33/1235888470228480.xml&coll=1
An unlikely assembly of sailors, mortuary trainees and high school students
join to clean up Mid-City cemetery
Sunday, March 01, 2009
By Katy Reckdahl
Staff writer
Seashells and gravel crunched under Linda Lagarde's heels Saturday as she
walked into Holt Cemetery, the city-owned potter's field in Mid-City. Stopping
at her family's plot, Lagarde's mind wandered as she watched a white hearse
carry the body of her cousin, 71-year-old Arthur "Bubbie" Ware Jr., toward its
final resting place.
"I can just see us as children here, bustling and running around, while the
older people whitewashed tombstones and pulled weeds," she said.
All around Lagarde, a similar scene unfolded Saturday. But unlike her memory of
relatives gathered at ancestors' graves, these caretakers comprised a diverse
bunch that spent the day caring for the crypts of strangers.
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Part of a cleanup sponsored by Save Our Cemeteries, the volunteers armed with
rakes, weed whips and trash bags hailed from the Belle Chasse Naval Air
Station-Joint Reserve Base, Lusher and Brother Martin high schools, and the
funeral service and mortuary science program of Delgado Community College,
which abuts the overgrown cemetery.
"It's our calling in life not to just take care of the dead when they die but
to give them perpetual care," said Bobbiann Lewis, an instructor in Delgado's
program, whose students have been required to do cemetery upkeep since late
last year.
On Saturday, Ware's name was added to a long list of engraved names on its
plot's formal granite marker. But throughout Holt, wooden and hand-painted
markers are more common, and the plots no longer follow geometric lines.
Instead, catawampus rows are only occasionally dotted by well-tended plots
covered with white gravel and outlined with freshly painted wooden frames. Most
remain unmarked and overgrown with weeds.
"The whole point of this cemetery is budget," said Crystal Sasso, 24, a
first-year funeral service student who stopped to examine a human vertebrae
that had been unearthed during a recent burial at Holt, where dozens of people
can be buried in the same standard-size plot, one atop the other.
During Saturday's cleanup, Sasso and fellow student Lexie Guilbeau found some
bones: a femur, a carpal, part of a rib cage, a coccyx and a scapula. They said
they found the disinterred bones disrespectful to the dead -- but "very, very
interesting."
In Louisiana, tombs can be reopened after one year and one day, said volunteer
Bert Lodrig, 51, a Delgado alumnus whose paternal grandparents are buried in
Holt. Because it's a below-ground cemetery, the site only allows wooden
caskets, which can disintegrate, leaving behind only bones, he said as he
walked by a grave marked only with a faded sign hand-painted with the words "I
love you, Mom."
Standing near the Ware family plot, gravedigger Terry Gardner saw the hearse
carrying Bubbie's body headed in his direction. He spread a weathered green
nylon strap across the hole he'd dug about 4 feet into the earth.
When the minister finished the graveside service, Gardner wrapped the ends of
the strap around the gray casket and grabbed one end. Longtime cemetery
employee Henry "Red" Nelson took the other end and the two swung the casket
into the ground.
The sight didn't bother Lagarde, who was always taught that this was natural,
she said.
"We always knew that when people in our family died, we had to bury them,"
Lagarde said. "And we knew where we had to bury them in Holt Cemetery."
.. . . . . . .
Katy Reckdahl can be reached at kreckdahl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or 504.826.3396..
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