SPOKANE, Wash. – From cleaning up damage left by July’s Upper Cemetery Fire to honoring the lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001, hundreds of community members showed up for people they don’t know, people they can’t even see, on Monday in Greenwood Cemetery.
“We’re not only helping the cemetery, we’re doing a good service for the families of those that aren’t here to do this, so it just feels good,” Caryl Briscoe-Michas, a volunteer, said.
From the small scrapes of a shovel on stubborn headstone moss, to big chainsaws hacking away at dead tree limbs, and every brush of soap and water in between, Monday’s volunteer work by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints touched many hearts.
It was all part of Spokane Stake’s annual service project. Alongside many others, from the same ward or another, Caryl Briscoe-Michas spent her day tending to the graves of strangers.
“It gives you a new perspective on life when you look at the dates on these, the people in here, and how important families are,” she said.
But Monday’s clean-up is personal for her. After all, having grown up in Spokane – having family buried in Greenwood Cemetery is not much of a surprise.
“Spokane is home, other places I’ve lived in have been home to, but I’ve been here the longest,” Briscoe-Michas said. “I have my parents, my aunt and uncle, and a couple cousins, and they’re on the upper level. And it’s particularly fascinating to see the older headstones, these go back before the 1900s some of them.”
Tim Cobb, the Spokane State president, was proud to see so many people part of this community showing up in waves for multiple reasons. Honoring those who came before us, for one.
Cobb said they were expecting 200 to 300 volunteers within two clean-up windows on Monday.
“It’s a special thing to come somewhere where your family members rest, and we’re grateful for a chance to join Greenwood and this community effort to clean these graves,” Cobb said.
Whether it be to scrub fire retardant from the names of those gone or cut down charred trees from this summer’s flames, Monday’s help was time well spent.
“Time is the priciest commodity. We all are running very fast in everything that we do, and to see people take a couple hours out of their day… for someone they don’t even know is an incredible outreach,” Cobb said. “It’s an incredibly moment of purification.”
A day of cleaning under the sun that brought everyone, both the living and the gone, together. For every grave in the Greenwood Cemetery, there’s a meaning behind the name and the date engraved into the stone.
“It would be nice to know the history of all these people, everybody has a story,” Briscoe-Michas said.
