When Meg Solera visited Maplewood Cemetery in March 2020, it seemed like a nice resting place for her granddaughter, Wren, who had been stillborn on the 16th of the month.
She picked out a plot and, after the burial, went on to visit Wren’s grave weekly. Like other families with loved ones buried at Maplewood—one of two cemeteries owned and operated by the City of Durham—Solera and her husband, José, placed totems on or within a few inches of Wren’s marker: heart-shaped stones in a small bowl; real and artificial flowers; a metal post with a sculpture of her avian namesake.
“It was just lovely,” Solera says. “It felt like we were protecting her.”
Then one day this spring the Soleras pulled through the cemetery gates for their routine visit and saw someone who seemed to be in a heated discussion with a groundskeeper. When they parked the car, they realized why: almost all of the decorations on graves across the cemetery had disappeared.
It was April Fool’s Day, so the Soleras thought it might be some kind of ghastly prank. But when they went to the cemetery office, a staff member informed them that the sweep was city policy.
“It felt like losing her all over again,” Solera says. “We always knew where to find her by looking for her little wren, so we literally could not find her.”
Maplewood is situated at the intersection of Chapel Hill Road and Morehead Avenue, near the Lakewood Shopping Center. On one side of Chapel Hill Road, a number of prominent Durhamites are interred in crypts, including George Watts, Bartlett Durham, and several members of the Washington Duke family. Across the street, infants are buried in a pasture lined with saplings.
Solera picked out Wren’s plot during the week in 2020 when almost everything except cemeteries had shut down due to COVID. Her daughter and son-in-law, Wren’s parents, live in New York but wanted Wren to be laid to rest in Durham where Solera lives because the alternative was to bury her at a cemetery in Long Island that the family could only visit a few times a year. So Solera donned a mask and made her way over to Maplewood, where a staff member put her in the backseat of a golf cart and drove her to the part of the cemetery where most of the grave markers only have one date.
What struck Solera most about the baby section of Maplewood when she first visited was that nearly every headstone and grave marker she saw was decorated with flowers or mementos.
“Small angels were resting on markers,” Solera says. “There were solar lights, which are like garden stakes with little discs of light on top. It felt like somewhere where Wren wouldn’t be alone.”
That’s part of why it was so jarring to find the cemetery bereft of trinkets. Solera and her husband went to the cemetery office and a staff member told them that items were removed from gravesites so that landscapers could abate weeds, Solera says. When Solera asked why she didn’t receive notice of the cleanup, the staffer told her that the contract enumerates what is and is not allowed to be used as a grave decoration, Solera says. Then the staff member guided them to a shed where hundreds of objects taken from gravesites were piled on a table and on the floor.
Solera says she doesn’t recall a cleanup like this happening in the past four years that she has been visiting Wren. But Al Walker, a division manager for the Durham’s General Services Department whose portfolio includes cemetery operations, says cleanups happen every spring and fall.
“On March 1, our cemetery maintenance staff conducted their regularly scheduled bi-annual facility cleanups, ensuring the grounds maintain a neat appearance while also removing hazards for maintenance staff since the mowing season begins in mid-March,” Walker wrote in an email to the INDY. “As part of their routine, they remove old and non-compliant decorations (glass items, rocks, borders, windmills, etc.).”
“Only one flower vase and one arrangement are permitted on a grave marker,” Walker added.
Solera says she agrees that breakable items should be prohibited and also appreciates the cemetery’s commitment to landscaping. But the stringency of the regulations raise some questions for her, particularly the bar on rocks, given the Jewish tradition of placing stones on graves.
“It feels like Durham doesn’t care about protecting the sanctity of gravesites,” Solera says. “By taking away everything that was watching over her, they desecrated her plot.”
Mostly, Solera says, she wishes that the city would’ve given her notice ahead of time.
“I might not have liked it, but at least I would’ve been prepared for it,” she says. (After the INDY reached out to cemetery management with a request for comment on April 12, a note about an “annual spring clean-up” was added to the Cemeteries Management web page requesting that lot owners “remove any non-spring seasonal decorations or items not compliant with our regulations before March 1.”)
Grief experts say it’s crucial for cemeteries to notify plot owners of imminent cleanups.
“For people to go to the cemetery to visit their loved ones in a space that’s highly charged with memories and emotions, and to see that what they’ve created to memorialize a person has been taken away—it’s quite traumatic,” says Marissa Holsten, a bereavement counselor at Duke Integrative Medicine. “It has a lot of psychological and emotional harm.”
Hoslten says that decorating grave markers or building memorials at places where loved ones have passed is a common and “healthy coping mechanism for people to process their grief.”
She’s never heard of this happening at a cemetery before, she says. She even did some digging after hearing about what happened at Maplewood, Holsten says, and could only find anecdotes of people who had been given notice of coming cleanups so that they could move their ornaments to a safe place and return them after landscaping was completed.
“That’s the only method that makes sense,” Holsten says.
Holsten says a risk of Durham’s current approach is that it could lead plot owners to form negative associations with a sacred space.
“Distrust, fear, a lack of safety: those are feelings that you absolutely do not want linked with the experience of trying to honor or memorialize your loved one,” Holsten says.
That’s what Solera is dealing with. The staff member who led her to the shed of items told her that she was allowed to restore the flowers and the wren sculpture to Wren’s grave, so she’s put those back. And she’s started to place the heart-shaped stones directly on top of the marker instead of collecting them in a bowl. But she feels anxious when she approaches the cemetery now, Solera says.
“This isn’t the mindset I want to be in when I come here,” Solera says. “I just want to feel the love I have for Wren and her spirit.”
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