Digging graves for a living wasn’t on the list of career aspirations for Johnnie Haire (left) or his colleague William Belt Sr. But that’s exactly what they’ve done for the past 43 years at Sunset Gardens of Memory cemetery in Millstadt, Illinois.(Photo by Cara Anthony of Kaiser Health News)
MILLSTADT, Ill. — It was a late Friday afternoon when a team of men approached a tiny pink casket. One wiped his brow. Another stepped away to smoke a cigarette. Then, with calloused hands, they gently lowered the child’s body into the ground.
Earlier that day, the groundskeepers at Sunset Gardens of Memory had dug the small grave up on a hill in a special section of this cemetery in a southern Illinois community across the river from St. Louis. It was for a 3-year-old girl killed by a stray bullet.
“It can be stressful sometimes,” Jasper Belt, 26, said. “We have to use little shovels.”
More than 30 years ago, Johnnie Haire and the other groundskeepers built a garden site just for children, separate from unlabeled sections of the 30-acre cemetery where they used to bury infants. They added a birdbath and bought angel figurines, carefully painting each one a hue of brown. Haire wanted the angels to be Black, like many of the children laid to rest here.