Missing headstone at heart of the matter

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This article was published 09/08/2016 (3573 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Having contacted everyone else she could think of who might help, from a church cemetery to the Better Business Bureau to the Funeral Board of Manitoba, a 63-year-old East Kildonan woman turned to a familiar face from the Free Press.

“I am writing to you,” June Feakes said in an email, “in hopes that you can give me some guidance in who I can contact about a missing headstone.”

They had a photograph to prove the headstone existed. At least, it once existed.

June tried to explain the inexplicable.

On July 7, 1995, her mother, Nellie Yosyk, purchased a small black granite headstone from what was then known as Young’s Memorials, prepaying $795.72. The cost included the inscription of her name and birthdate — although there is now some dispute about whether the date of death was paid for at the time.

But that isn’t the primary issue.

The heart of the matter is when, at the age of 93, Nellie died this year — and was cremated — her two surviving daughters expected to find the headstone in the possession of Young & Yaremchuk Memorials, the company that now occupies the same property as the original Young’s Memorials.

June and her younger sister, Brenda Winning Jensen, expected to find the headstone because their mother told them it would be there and so did the now-21-year-old bill of sale, which reads: “To stay in yard until notified.”

But the sisters discovered Young & Yaremchuk had no idea where their mother’s marker was, and the company had been in the process of closing shop since at least October 2014. That’s when Young & Yaremchuk had a “surplus auction” of everything from a garage to a forklift to a slab polisher. And “various” granite slabs.

On Monday, I called Mark Young, who owns and operates the company.

He told me what he had told the sisters: he doesn’t know what happened to their mother’s marker.

I asked if he had any record of the headstone. Or, more specifically, of it being sent, basically across the highway, to a plot Nellie bought at All Saints Cemetery.

“We don’t keep records of everything we do,” Young said. “I might have installed it. I don’t know.”

Since there was still nothing on the mother’s plot when the sisters visited Monday — except an orange road marker the cemetery caretaker set there to help them locate it — it seems highly doubtful anyone installed the headstone. Or would have made off with it in the night.

Young also made something else clear at the beginning of our telephone conversation: “I bought this company 10 years ago and it’s a separate entity.”

Which means, according to Young, he is not responsible for whatever happened to the 100-kilogram-plus headstone with Nellie Yosyk’s name and birthdate on it.

“Not legally.”

He said he only bought the assets.

Then, Young mentioned something that surprised me. He said he offered to sell the daughters another headstone for the price of what it would have cost them to have their mother’s date of death added to the first stone.

“I guess they didn’t tell you that,” Young said.

It was a good “guess” because Nellie daughters said he didn’t tell them that; only that they would still have to pay more than $400 ($450 plus GST, according to Young). But nothing about offering to replace and add the death date for that amount.

June said the replacement amount Young quoted was more than $1,500.

“So,” I asked Young, just to be clear, “you’re going to replace the stone for free and just charge them for the engraving?”

“Yeah,” he said, “that was the offer. “But, you know, they made the decision to do what they’re doing here.”

It was obvious to me he meant contacting the Free Press.

Young claimed he made an offer “in good faith.”

“And they decided not to take it.”

Later, in an email, Young made his now-conditional offer perfectly clear.

“The offer to do a new monument for the price of the inscription stands as long as this remains a private matter…”

Which reminded me of something else Mark Young said of the two women and their motive for contacting the Free Press.

“They wanted to crucify me.”

No, they only wanted to find the headstone their mother bought so her children wouldn’t have to worry about the cost when she died.

Instead, her daughters are still looking for something else that went missing when their mother’s marker vanished — the hope to be able to do what the other words on the black granite promised Nellie Yosyk.

To be able to “Rest in Peace.”

That was supposed to be carved in stone wasn’t it?

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca