A few years ago, the local nabobs were considering taking a large area that was unused in the cemetery and building a senior housing facility on it. I asked one of the town board members if the developers were sending a subliminal message.
The cemetery business is as crooked as any other business.
A few decades back, I used to walk with my half dozen mutts through what is called a Forest Preserve. This Preserver was in a suburb right outside of Chicago.
One day, our long walk along a river bank brought us to a cemetery which was up on a hill about a ten or fifteen higher than the river bank. What I saw in the muddy clay of the river bank were dozens of tombstones thrown about helter skelter. The dates on some were from the late 1800s through some dated only about a decade before.
I knew immediately that the cemetary owners had dumped them to resell the grave sites to new customers. I knew better than go to any local politician or "enforcement" group. Those people had already proven to me what they were and weren't. What they weren't was trustworthy.
Instead, I phoned the news department of a local television station. They seemed very interested in the story. However, after some days went by and I never heard from them or saw the story on their station during their prime time news, I called them back. What I got in return was hokum bukum excuses.
A further fact, I had remembered a few of the names on the tombstones. After finding a few of the surnames in the local phone book, I called the numbers and found that indeed two of the people called were indeed relatives of the deceased.
Now, to shorten the story, I found later that these two families had gotten together and had spoken with some "Community Leader" or other.
Well, I was invited to a meeting among not just the two couples I had disclosed the problem to, but quite a few other families who had also visited the site I had found. None of them could find the graves of their dead relatives, but they did find their tombstones exactly were I had said they were. Long story short, no legal action was to be taken because they cemetary had made a $$$ deal with the families.
Quite a number of days later, I again visited that river bank and the tombstones were gone, and when I scouted around the cemetary itself, I could not find any grave of any of those deceased.
That told me that those "loving" relatives were simply out for the $$$ and little else. Plus, I never heard the incident reported on the news of the television station to whom I had given the story. I was left with the solid suspicion that the cemetary was politically connected and bought off more than just the families of the deceased.
Lessons learned throughout life are numerous, and most of them we can learn to accept and move on, but this complete rejection of the worth of those deceased by their families is of such perfidy it lives with me to this day.