Achi news desk-
For more than a year, an urn holding the ashes of Bridget Heffernan’s brother remained in her Montreal-area home instead of being buried in a plot at Notre Dame des Niges cemetery where her family members were laid to rest for nearly a year. century.
With her mother’s death last September, Heffernan now has two sets of remains to bury in one place.
But months after the end of a long strike that brought operations to a halt at one of Canada’s largest cemeteries, Heffernan says she still can’t get an answer on when burials can take place, despite repeated efforts to reach management.
While she doesn’t mind keeping the urns in her home, she looks forward to the moment when her mother and siblings can be buried in the family plot, with several family members present and a priest on hand to say a prayer.
“Technically, they’re supposed to be in the ground, back in the ground,” she said.
The cemetery was largely closed to the public from mid-January to mid-September last year due to a strike by some of its employees, at one point more than 300 bodies were kept in warehouses awaiting burial.
The cemetery reached a deal with maintenance workers in July and with office workers in December.
The cemetery’s management did not respond to requests for comment, but it said in a press release at the reopening in September that it hoped to resolve the backlog of burials by the end of 2023.
Dennis Martin, a resident of Oka, west of Montreal, said his mother, Eileen Ashford, died last April in Vancouver, just shy of her 100th birthday.
For months he tried to arrange for the ashes to be buried in the family plot at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges in the presence of her extended family, which included seven children.
They had originally hoped to hold the ceremony in April, the one-year anniversary of her death, but Martin was told the backlog at the cemetery was too long to secure the date.
According to him, the process was emotionally difficult for the family, and especially for those who could not attend the funeral last year.
“My mom has been around for a long, long time,” said Martin, who is now hoping for a date in September. “I’m in my 70s, so it’s very rare that you lose your mother in your 70s, so she was a big part of our lives and trying to get closure on that was very difficult.”
Heffernan, who first came to the cemetery shortly after her brother’s death in March 2023, said she was most frustrated by the lack of answers and guidance.
While she has received responses to some of her emails, she said it is not clear what she needs to do to get a burial date, or where she is on the waiting list.
In frustration, she posted on a local Facebook page, asking if other people had similar experiences.
Several people responded with their own stories of trying to get a burial date, including some who had waited as long or longer than her.
Andy Masterson, whose mother died in August, was among those who shared frustrations.
He said he and his sister tried to get to the cemetery about 10 times, often waiting on hold for more than an hour.
While the people he manages to talk to are kind, he said he found the whole process frustrating.
Masterson understands that there was a strike and that a burial cannot take place in the winter, but he feels that the way families are treated is unacceptable.
“It just seems to me that someone would take some kind of initiative to bring in additional staff, approve some overtime, try to find a way to get caught, given the very, very sensitive nature of what they’re doing,” he said. .
According to him, his mother’s remains are being stored at the funeral home until they can be buried in the plot his family has owned since the 1930s.
He said he wanted a burial date – even if it wasn’t until next year – and for someone to take responsibility for proper communication with families.
“People need this closure and we all just have to do it,” he said.
Martin, however, received some good news.
Less than an hour after speaking with The Canadian Press on Wednesday, he received word from the cemetery that his mother’s burial could take place on September 6 – one of the dates he had requested.
— This report by The Canadian Press was first published on May 23, 2024.
