When I created the “Desecration” category on the original blog A Gravers Journal/Gravers Journal blog, it was my honest hope I’d have no cause to use it - and that, even if I did, it would not be very often.
Despite my hopes, however, I am here again to tell you of the saddening defilement that has taken place, once more, in my native state of Louisiana.
Family members aren’t the only ones to be interred and remembered in cemeteries. Though rare, it’s always a pleasure to come upon a memorial marker - or even an actual grave - of a beloved pet.
I honestly can think of no way I would prefer to have spent the evening this past Saturday, such was the marvelous time I had at the Foundation for Historical Louisiana’s production of Magnolia Memories V at Baton Rouge’s Magnolia Cemetery. The events were scheduled for Friday, March 7th and Saturday, March 8th; it was the 6:45pm Saturday show that we attended.
It was with great interest that I watched this video on a piece done by WBRZ reporter Michele Krumm. The report was about Clinton, Louisiana’s Ward 3 Justice of the Peace, Dewey DeLee, and his painstaking efforts to save a dying and near-forgotten cemetery in East Feliciana Parish.
On March 6, 2008 at approximately 8:45am MST, the mother of one of my dearest friends, Gaylene DePorter, lost her courageous battle against Medullary Thyroid Carcinoma; a rare form of thyroid cancer that spread, unchecked, into her liver.
Surrounded by her loved ones, Gaylene was aware of what was happening to her and before she slipped into a hepatic encephalopathy coma, she was able to tell them all that she loved them.
Between Friday and Saturday, March 6-7, The Foundation for Historical Louisiana will be putting on a “show” at the chronicled and venerable Magnolia Cemetery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
On Saturday, March 1, my boyfriend and I set out to get some information on cemeteries in and around the parish seat of Plaquemine, Louisiana. I was able to borrow a GPS receiver from my mother, and after packing up my camera, a notebook and pens, I plotted out my course.
Shafted. That’s the term that came to mind when I stumbled across the grave of James Pas Hankston at a small, unmarked church and cemetery off the River Road (Hwy. 405) in White Castle, Louisiana.
