Letter to the Editor: Angry over cemetery procedures

By Sun Advocate

Editor:
I am infuriated after receiving a call from my mother in Price on Tuesday, June 3. She had gone to the Price City Cemetery that morning to collect memorials and flowers from our family plot and discovered that all flowers, etc., including two U.S. Veteran bronze flag holders had been removed and destroyed that morning. This is a scant week after Memorial Day.
What kind of misplaced patriotism is this, in that Price City feels it is only required to recognize its dead and veterans for a week and then destroy all memory of it! Furthermore, there was no need for items to be removed that early, since apparently the cemetery didn’t water or mow the lawn for several more days.
The only person in the cemetery who showed some compassion and tried to help my mother, who was of course in tears, was a young man who was working in the cemetery that morning gathering up the flowers to be taken to the dump. This young man actually took my mother over to the mountain of flowers and memorials in an attempt to find some of the sentimental items placed on our family graves. This was, of course, a futile effort. By the pure volume of this heap of items, other patrons were not aware that their memorials should have been removed in a week.
When my mother stopped at the cemetery office, the woman at the desk told my mother that the notice to remove items had been printed in the paper. Is that it? Why wasn’t notice put in city water bill mailings, or more prominently posted somewhere? Residents of Price have grown accustomed to having two weeks to pick up items at the cemetery, and it’s hard to break such habits. My mother noticed a heap of American flags on the floor of the office (more disrespect to veterans, but at least the flags had been saved), and while this woman was on the phone my mom finally got fed up and took several flags to replace the ones that were removed from our veteran’s graves.
I feel this situation was entirely mishandled. Fortunately our family can monetarily afford to replace items but I feel especially bad for the older people of Price who cannot afford to replace items.
I sincerely hope other Utah residents with family buried in Price are as upset as I am.