An unhappy Mother’s Day surprise: Cemetery visitors incensed by conditions of grounds at St. John’s

Local residents marking Mother’s Day this year by visiting their deceased mothers’ graves at St. John’s Cemetery in Riverhead should be prepared for a shock.

And it’s not the removal of momentos and memorabilia from the gravesites, which had family members upset just before Easter.

The grass hasn’t been mowed in weeks, maybe longer. It’s eight to 10 inches high throughout the cemetery and has gone to seed. Weeds and dandelions abound.

“This is a disgrace, just a disgrace,” said Frank Zaleski of Riverhead, who was visiting his mother’s grave this afternoon. He was there with his father Jim. His mom Connie passed away in 2000.

“I’ve never seen it like this,” Jim Zaleski, a retired Rivehead police officer, said. “When you buy a plot, they say you get perpetual care. What kind of care is this? It’s a wreck.”

The Diocese of Rockville Centre took over management of the parish cemetery in September in an effort to alleviate St. John the Evangelist’s financial distress. The changeover brought higher plot prices and burial fees as of Nov. 1. With new management also came the enforcement of established but previously unenforced cemetery rules that bar memorial decorations and perennial plants. When the diocese abruptly removed decorations and plants this spring, there was an outcry from family members who complained they had no warning.

“When we complained, we were told the items and plants made it difficult to cut the grass,” said Grace Conklin of Riverhead, who lost her son Mark at age 30 in 2012. A daily visitor to her son’s gravesite, she’s carpeted his plot with sod and has taken it upon herself to mow the grass not only on his plot but on all the adjacent plots. “It’s important to me that it looks good.”

Others have done the same; individual and family plots around the cemetery are pockets of mowed and neatly trimmed grass.

Conklin said she’s been carting 10 gallons of water to the cemetery every day, because there was no water from the spigots until Thursday, May 7.

“They said a pipe was broken,” Conklin said. It finally got fixed.

In addition to visiting her son’s grave, Conklin’s daily routine now includes calls and emails to the diocese asking for the grounds to be maintained. It hasn’t produced results.

“They keep telling me they don’t have the manpower,” Conklin said. “Then they should get the manpower. Why would they take over another cemetery if they didn’t have the people to maintain it?”

The diocese’s cemeteries office was closed today and a voicemail message for customer service manager Deacon Al Pickford elicited no immediate response.

“The cemetery was in terrible shape when we took it over,” Pickford told RiverheadLOCAL last month. “The roadways are horrible, the trees are horrible – just one disaster after the next. We had to start working on those things, but after the brutal winter we had, with two feet of snow on the ground, we didn’t have a chance to until recently.”

The cemetery’s dirt roadways remain rutted and pocked with large holes. Pathways between the rows of gravestones are overgrown with calf-deep grasses, as are the plots themselves.

Dave Fulton of Riverhead, who was planting flowers at the grave of his in-laws, said he couldn’t believe what the cemetery looks like now. “When my wife sees this, she’s going to be very upset,” Fulton said.

“It’s very disrespectful,” Victor Prusinowski of Riverhead said. “Never in my whole life have I seen it like this.” Prusinowski’s parents and grandparents are buried there. His parents were killed in a car accident in 1956, when he was a small child.

“When my grandfather bought the plot when my parents were killed, he paid for perpetual care,” Prusinowski said. “Until now, this cemetery has been maintained.”

Prusinowski has been mowing his family’s plots as well as his wife’s family’s plots once a week.

“The church should find the funds to get this mowed,” Prusinowski said. “We’re not talking thousands of dollars. There are plenty of people who are out of work who you could pay $10 or $20 an hour to mow this. It’s not that big,” Prusinowski, a former Riverhead town councilman said.

“It’s respect for the dead,” he said. “It looks like a jungle.”

There are several hundred acres of cemetery property in the diocesan cemeteries system, according to the diocese’s website.

“Catholic cemeteries image the care of the Church for her people which does not cease when death occurs. The members of the Communion of Saints lie in God’s Acre, the consecrated space of the Catholic Cemetery; they are family, friends, fellow parishioners, all believers in Jesus Christ eternal,” the website says.

Conklin said she recently visited some of the other diocesan cemeteries “and they were pristine.” She questioned why St. John’s Cemetery isn’t even being mowed, let alone maintained to the same standard.

“It’s very sad that people have to come here on Mother’s Day and find this,” she said. “It’s just wrong.”