Maybe you’ve read my earlier post on Beverly National Cemetery. Now it turns out that every few years as the headstones start to deteriorate, they are replaced by new ones. Proper procedure call for the old headstones to be ground up and recycled. However, last week, a homeowner in Burlington Twp got his hands on several dozen old stones and stacked them up in the form of a wall around his property. The stones have since been recovered and are being recycled according to protocol. How the homeowner obtained the stones isn’s clear. But now it turns out that old stones were apparently geven away to local residents for whatever they wanted them for – steps, landscaping, to build a patio.
No one really knows how this happened. Did a worker not follow the disposal procedure? Was the procedure never strictly enforced? Did a procedure not really exist until now? My only question is – wouldn’t you feel a little guilty or disrespectful by using an old headstone with someone’s name on it as a step into your back door a little weird?
