Port au Port residents angry after personal items removed from gravesites

A dispute over cemetery tidiness in a town on Newfoundland's west coast has residents saying a local church committee overstepped its bounds.

When Kelly Hickey returned to her hometown of Port au Port earlier this summer from Ontario to visit her family's burial plots, she was distressed to discover several items, including a bench, were missing from her father's gravesite. Hickey told CBC News she has been told by the cemetery committee to remove items in the past few years, but this is the first time items have been removed without her knowledge. 

"They just didn't want anybody to have anything on the graves, benches, flowers, solar lights, angels," she said. "I don't know how anybody could find the heart to do what they did here."

According to the cemetery committee of Maria Regina Parish, the church that maintains the graveyard, items are allowed on gravesites only if they are on the headstone or on the base, in an approved container or holder. The rule has existed since the 1980s but residents say it has rarely been enforced.

Resident Michael McCann says he's concerned about the way the items were discarded. 

"We haven't been able to grieve as an individual, as a family, as a culture. And what I mean by that is, an example would be the little doll that you've seen over on the bank that was discarded carelessly," McCann said. 

"My wife, when she saw that, broke out in tears because it reminded her of our little baby that we lost."

Despite being members of the community, he said, they weren't included a part of the decision-making process for the cemetery. 

Hickey says the only notice was a printed paper posted on the church bulletin. 

"They said they posted papers in the church, but I passed by church Sunday," she said. "There were probably about 15 cars in the parking lot. There's more people that live in the community than 15 cars that went to church that morning."

Denis Burke of the cemetery committee, who has his own family buried at the cemetery, says he and other residents want a clean and tidy graveyard. Some people hadn't been following the regulations, he said, and in some cases were blatantly disregarding them. 

"It was getting to be a problem with so many things being added to graves that it was interfering with mowing the grass that we decided that we would just bring the graveyard up to the regulation standard," he said. 

Burke concedes the move might have been unpopular among some members of the community — "Some people were opposed to that. A lot of people were," he said — but it's a net positive for the cemetery. Items were left at the cemetery for the three weeks the notice was posted in the church bulletin, he said, and then taken to the dump. Any items that were discarded on the grounds itself were not discarded by the parish, he said.

Burke concedes the only notice posted was in the church bulletin but that's all they were capable of providing, he said.