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Not pleased with cemetery

To the editor:

I am here visiting from Washington state, having been born in Iowa I still have many relatives living here. My family has been hit with some tragedies in the last year with one cousin lying down for a nap never to wake up, another nearly losing his life and two members fighting cancer.

I stayed with my cousin, LeAnn. Last week we went to Fort Dodge and on our way out of town decided to stop at the North Lawn Cemetery, where six family members are laid to rest. We parked the car next to the tree that we knew to be the “marker” of where their headstones are. We walked a ways in and that is when things started to get very upsetting for all of us.

We had to get on our hands and knees, literally, to wipe off dried built-up grass to even tell where headstones were. The grass was mowed but then the clippings were just left on top of the headstones, and it appears as if they have done this time after time. I felt so sorry for my cousin, she has been through so much in the last year, she really doesn’t like to go to cemeteries but since I hadn’t been to my cousins grave before she stopped just for me. It took us about 10 minutes or more to find our family members, our hands were filthy, our knees were dirty, and we were a sweaty mess. Her dad’s headstone had grass grown up around it so you couldn’t even read his name. Her brother’s vase has been covered with dried grass so many times family members can’t get the vase out to put flowers in it.

It was heartbreaking watching my cousin on her hands and knees pulling weeds and doing her best to clean up the headstones with her bare hands, because we hadn’t come prepared to do any work on them. They were told when they purchased the plots that it would always be taken care of. Not.

I don’t understand how this was allowed to happen. I don’t know how someone who was not as able bodied could have ever found their loved ones, and that would be terrible. Shame on you to the cemetery is what I have to say. Thank you for your time,

Denise Hawkins Dahll

Sequim, Washington

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