Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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COYNER SPRINGS -- Shebri Stacy didn't know where her father was buried until she visited the Roanoke municipal cemetery at Coyner Springs in Botetourt County several months ago.

Gary Lee Stacy was 21 when he was struck and killed by a vehicle while trying to cross Interstate 581 in Roanoke near the Elm Avenue overpass.

The date was Dec. 27, 1983.

Shebri Stacy was 2 months old.

On her first trip to the cemetery, Stacy, 23, was shocked by what she found.

"The cemetery is horrendous," she says. "I left it, crying, and sent out a mass letter ... about my visit."

She sent an e-mail to Darlene Burcham, Roanoke's city manager, and attended a meeting of the citizen volunteer beautification committee that was formed before she found out where her father was buried.

Nothing has changed.

Now living in Martinsville, Stacy has resumed her mission to have Roanoke's potter's field improved. It lies in Botetourt County and contains more than 900 graves.

But the treasury is stretched thin, Burcham says, and the city already has many acres of grounds to maintain.

"The cemetery certainly is not on that priority list," she says.

Just basics

Most jurisdictions do not operate cemeteries for people who can't cover their burial expenses, and whose relatives, if known, either can't or won't, Burcham says.

The ground at Coyner Springs "was never intended to be a cemetery along the lines of a privately managed cemetery" with a perpetual fund for maintenance.

Indeed, it provides ultra-cheap burials, thanks in part to funeral homes, mostly Oakey's in Roanoke, that provide cremation or a coffin and graveside service for far below the market rate.

Deep discounts

Jane Conlin, Roanoke's social services director, estimates that her department pays about $600 for a private contractor to open and close a grave and less than $300 to Oakey's for a simple coffin and service.

"That doesn't cover the funeral home's cost," Conlin says.

Roanoke County, which has no cemetery, pays a flat $500 from its general relief fund for the indigent dead.

The county paid for five burials last year. Roanoke paid for about 30.

"I can't justify in my budget huge amounts of money" to beautify the cemetery, Conlin says. "... I have living people I have to worry about. It's a hard choice."

On a recent Sunday afternoon, beneath a hot sun accompanied by a warm breeze, the cemetery appeared recently mowed.

Stacy walked among the numbered grave markers, pointed out sinkholes and said that sometimes, the place even smells bad.

Two large tombstones marked mass graves for bodies of the dead from the City Farm and Old Lick cemeteries, relocated because of road improvements.

More recent burials take place on a grassless slope that rain quickly turns to mud, she says.

Stacy bridles when people assume that everybody buried at Coyner Springs was homeless.

"My father was a hardworking man," she says.

After his death, Stacy lived with her mother for a while but spent more time in foster homes.

"I was very troubled due to the abuse and neglect that went on in my life," she says. " ... A social worker really fought for me. She knew deep down inside I was OK. I was very angry, very hurt."

She began to feel better at 16, graduated from high school and now has two young children and a fiance.

The man who started the beautification committee left the area earlier this year, and Conlin believes the members have not convened since.

At the meeting Stacy attended, the committee drew up a plan and discussed possible contributions of plantings and shrubs.

The committee will have to reconvene if anything is to be done.

With her neat notes filed in a red three-ring binder, Stacy says she intends to make it happen.