Ed Martin III was 14 years old when he started working at his father's pet cemetery, and in the decades since then he has tended the graves of countless dogs, many cats, flocks of birds and countless other creatures.
In all that time, there was only one request, a few years ago, that baffled him.
That morning, January 29, 2020, Bruce Johnson, a New York lawyer, called him, who had the cremated remains of a woman named Patricia Chaarte. She had died at her home in Mexico, at age 92. In her will, he had requested that her ashes be buried in the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in upstate New York.
He had no family.
For Martín, the idea of burying a human being in a pet cemetery was not in itself something strange. Along with the approximately 80,000 animals buried in the cemetery, there are about 900 people who wanted to rest eternally with their pets.
But this case felt different. Chaarte seemed very alone.
Martin, 57, believes his work contains elements of therapy. He has heard many people confess that they struggled more with the death of his pets than with the death of his parents.
But there was no one to mourn Chaarte. Then, one day in March, Martin carried his ashes to a vacant lot. He watched as the foreman and supervisor dug a grave, about a meter deep.
Martin was moved when his urn was lowered into the ground. What if this was a member of my family? he thought. What if this was me?
The earth covered the hole again. A small gray headstone was installed. As a matter of business, Chaarte's file was closed.
And yet, his questions about her still hung in the air.
Among the things Martin didn't know was that, in Mexico, there was a group of friends who loved Chaarte and remembered her fondly. She was a voracious reader and a crossword puzzle expert. She smoked constantly and drank enthusiastically.
She was born Patricia Lou Bassett in Kansas City, Missouri, on January 11, 1928. Her parents divorced when she was a baby, and she was raised by her mother and, later, her stepfather. After high school, she moved to New York to pursue her career in illustration.
There he realized he was gay. A friend named Wendy Johnson became his girlfriend. The two also became business partners and opened an embroidery shop in Manhattan.
In the early 1990s, they retired and moved to San Miguel de Allende, about 200 miles northwest of Mexico City.
As Chaarte aged and his health declined, he reluctantly but diligently joined a gym.
“Why the hell am I not dead yet, Janis?” she said, in more profane terms, to her coach, Janis McDonald.
McDonald described Chaarte, affectionately, as a curmudgeon. But inside there was sadness.
About a year and a half after Chaarte's death, McDonald was looking at a photo of her friend in her home. For months, she had been working with Johnson to sort out Chaarte's will.
McDonald took a photo of the frame on his mantel and emailed it to her.
The image shows Chaarte holding a baby.
Soon, Johnson and McDonald were chatting on the phone. He told her that they needed to find Chaarte's son.
“He's dead,” she said.
She assumed he knew. Hadn't Chaarte and her son been buried together?
Dana Bassett was born in 1954, although Chaarte had not planned to become pregnant. She had no relationship with her father and she had decided to abort her. But she couldn't do it.
“She decided, 'Well, I'm just going to have this baby,'” said Melanie Nance, a friend.
Chaarte raised Dana alone in Manhattan, always concerned about keeping him out of trouble. That anxiety of hers, in part, led her to marry a friend of hers, Abner Chaarte, when Dana was young. She thought, her friends said, that her son needed a father figure in her life. The marriage did not last long. But the friendship endured.
Chaarte's fears came true: Dana was 14 when heroin entered her life. His mother tried to send him to rehab, but a few years later he died of an overdose.
“She never got over it,” Nance said.
At 60 years old, Chaarte was preparing to leave NY. But she didn't want her son to be alone. Then, on January 23, 1989, she buried her ashes at the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery. There she would rest with two beloved deceased pets as companions. Johnson, Chaarte's partner, later bought land there as well.
In Mexico, Chaarte found some peace. But near the end, he thought more about his son. “If I die, one of my dreams would be to be with my son,” she told Isaac Uribe, a friend in Mexico.
Johnson hung up the phone and wrote to Martin: “A close friend of Chaarte just told me that his son's ashes were also buried in his cemetery after he died as a teenager in the mid-1970s.”
Martin discovered that Dana Bassett had been buried 30 years ago.
A granite headstone displayed the names of a dog, Jackie Paper, and a cat, Puff the Magic Dragon. At the top was the child's name, Dana Brooks Bassett. And underneath the name Patricia was engraved. She was meant to be there.
On August 19, 2021, Martin and two workers removed Chaarte's remains from where they had been buried the previous year. They walked with the ashes about 50 meters to the grave where his son had been waiting for more than 30 years and placed them there.
I still didn't know who Chaarte and Bassett were. But she knew they should be together. And now they were.
By: ANDREW KEH
The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/07/nyregion/human-burial-pet-cemetery.html, IMPORTING DATE: 2024-01-18 20:22:04
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