Graveyard within a graveyard: Where some silk flowers and trinkets go to die

Windsor Morning8:19An unexpected kind of graveyard is growing in LaSalle

If you've ever wondered what happened to the heartfelt mementos you left at a loved one's grave site that seemingly disappeared — it's not always the work of thieves.

At some Windsor-Essex cemeteries, they're removed as a policy by staff.

At Heavenly Rest in LaSalle, you will find strewn along the edge of the employee parking lot piles of hundreds of faded silk flowers, birthday cards sealed in plastic and teddy bears with weathered fur. It's become its own kind of graveyard.

Every spring, staff clear these tokens from the outdoor graves to make way for lawn mowers and maintenance crews. Instead of throwing them away, they give them a second resting place. It's like a lost and found for grief itself. 

Steve Dugal is the grounds manager at the cemetery. He says work begins in early April.

"We start with the Christmas decorations that we remove after Christmas." he said. 

"After Easter, we get Mother's Day. We got to remove all that. After Mother's Day is when we start to really strictly enforce the silk flower removal out of the vase."

The cemetery has a policy that states silk flowers are not allowed from April 1 until October 31.

"[It's] so we can turn down the vase and continue with the maintenance. If they were all left up, there is no way that we could keep up with the grass cutting, weed whacking around the vases, to have it look slightly," said Dugal.

Linda Rochon Perrone, the general manager of Windsor-Essex Catholic cemeteries, says only fresh flowers are allowed in the warm months, but it hasn't always been strictly enforced.

"Which is why … there's so many that are here," she said.

Perrone says a lot of people like to personalize their loved one's grave.

"There's not a lot of things that you can do when somebody dies, but one thing you can do is you can put keepsakes out at the site."

It's for that reason, Perrone says, they don't want to throw anything out right away. 

"We want to keep them and give people the opportunity to get them back, but we just can't keep them all at the grave, unfortunately."

Dugal says some of the stuff left behind is intricate and personalized to the deceased.

"We've got a candle holder with a deer on it and a forest scene. Pretty much just personal to what the people like."

"We do have the right to dispose of this, but we're holding on to it for as long as we can," he added.

They come across a lot of "cute" stuffed animals, says Perrone, but they need to be collected quickly because they get wet and moldy.

"We try to keep things there, especially when it's a child or somebody young. We try to leave it there as long as we possibly can before it becomes a maintenance issue."

Different areas of the cemetery grounds can have different rules for what's allowed — including inside a mausoleum. Only artificial flowers are permitted there, not fresh flowers.