Sharing the Sorrow : Five small graves on a knoll at Calvary Cemetery have brought a group of strangers together as a family of friends. ‘These children are our little angels,’ a mother says.

Kneeling on her little girl’s grave, Monica Fagoaga pours water over the marble slate and wipes it clean with her palm.

A few steps away, Guadalupe Rios picks up paper scraps near her daughter’s marker. And, as she has done every Saturday for two years, Isabel Almada sweeps the curb in front of the five little graves on a knoll in Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles.

“I feel in my heart a lot of joy, sweeping and cleaning,” Almada says, “because this is like my son’s house now. This is where our children are sleeping.”

She looks pensively at the other women.

“We all have experienced the greatest loss a mother will ever have: the death of a child.”

That bond has turned a group of strangers into a family of friends.

Together, they cry.

Together, they celebrate.

Most often, they reminisce about their “little angels”: girls who walked around in their mothers’ high heels. Boys who tumbled in piles of leaves. Kids who loved to eat Happy Meals at McDonald’s.

The families join together to decorate the graves every holiday.

This Christmas, snow-flocked firs are adorned with toys the kids will never play with and gingerbread cookies they will never eat.

They do all this, the families say, to make sure their children do not feel abandoned. And because these communal remembrances help ease the pain and loneliness of losing a child.

Three years ago, Monica and Jose Fagoaga were the first to bury their daughter, Cynthia Vanessa, on the knoll.

Then came the Almadas and their son, Antonio. The Zendejases and their son, Eder. The Rioses and their daughter, Lizette.

A 6-year-old boy who died the same year as Antonio is buried on the other side of Cynthia Vanessa.

Monica Fagoaga met the boy’s mother two years ago.

“I felt sad because the lady told me that she doesn’t have money for flowers and that’s why she doesn’t come,” Fagoaga says. So she and the others decorate his grave, too.

“These children are our little angels,” Almada explains. “They are all living in the same house now.”

Cynthia Vanessa Fagoaga, 3

Monica Fagoaga gently pats her stomach. In less than three weeks, she will deliver a new life into this world. His name will be Christian Roberto Fagoaga.

He’s certain to hear a lot about his sister, Cynthia Vanessa, who died three years ago in a car crash. Her soccer games with their father. Her tippy-toe prancing because she wanted to be a ballerina. The way she could fire off the names of the Seven Dwarfs in a single breath.

“We’re going to tell him all about Vanessa,” says Monica, 32. “But I’m not going to make plans like I did for Vanessa. We’re going to take it a day at a time.”

Her husband, Jose, agrees. “I always imagined her in a pleated skirt and white shoes going to private school,” he says. “We wanted her to learn piano.”

And his wife had begun saving for Cynthia Vanessa’s 15th birthday. “My dream for her was to have a quinceanera ,” says Monica, a short, shy woman who speaks of her daughter as if she were sitting next to her. But “after she died, I thought to myself, ‘It’s not good to make a lot of plans.’

“With my new baby, I don’t feel like planning again.”

“We are happy that we are having another baby,” says Jose. “But we still feel down because Vanessa is gone.”

The Fagoagas live in East L.A., where Jose worked as a parking supervisor and Monica as a Sears saleswoman. On Oct. 16, 1989, Monica and a friend picked up Cynthia Vanessa from the baby-sitter. On the way home, their car was struck by another.

“I woke up two hours later in the hospital,” Monica recalls. “I asked for my friend, and they told me she had died. I said ‘What!’ Then I said, ‘And my baby!’ They said, ‘She’s in the intensive care unit.’ ”

Cynthia Vanessa died the next day, Jose’s 33rd birthday.

The Fagoagas selected Calvary because it was near their home and would make visiting easy. The children’s section was full, so they buried their daughter in a little patch of land the right size for a child’s four-foot-long casket.

For two years, they had lunch at her grave every day. They said they went so often because they felt guilty--because Cynthia Vanessa had not been strapped in a car seat and because they had to leave her with a baby-sitter.

At their lunches, the Fagoagas talked about work, their families and the house they dreamed about buying. But mostly they chatted about their daughter. They also talked about having other children. (After the accident, Monica had two miscarriages.)

About the time she became pregnant with Christian Roberto, Monica was laid off and began attending a trade school; Jose was transferred to Culver City. They stopped their daily visits, but went to the cemetery some mornings and evenings and, always, on weekends.

Every holiday, they decorate their daughter’s grave, bringing such gifts as flowers and happy-face stickers and, for her birthday, leaving slices of cake on all the children’s markers.

“I love to go to the cemetery,” Monica says. “I feel very peaceful over there. Sometimes you are sitting there and you don’t feel the time passing by. We think about Cynthia Vanessa. We talk about her. Sometimes we speak to her.

“When I’m having a difficult time, I speak to Vanessa,” she says. “I say, ‘Vanessa, I need help,’ and I know she is listening because I feel better.”

The Fagoagas’ home still looks as if their daughter lives there. The living room is filled with photos of her. Her favorite Disney video is on the coffee table and two Barbie dolls sit in the corner. In a bedroom closet hang her clothes, including a pink bunny costume she would have worn the Halloween she died.

Jose loves to show visitors Cynthia Vanessa’s photo albums and favorite toys, especially a doll she named Fiffin that has scraggly red hair and wears one of her T-shirts.

“The Christmas before she died, we were going to get her a swing set,” he says, sighing. Then, breaking their own rule, he adds: “Maybe one day we can get it for her brother.”

Antonio Almada, 20, Eder Zendejas, 3

For 17 years before her son Antonio’s death, Isabel Almada cared for him--a man trapped in a child’s body--at her Compton home.

She changed his diapers, massaged his legs, mashed carrots for him to eat and sang him to sleep.

“He was my child who never grew up,” says Isabel, 60, a feisty, friendly woman with short red hair and squiggly, penciled-in eyebrows.

“Tonito,” the youngest of her five sons, was 3 when he suffered brain damage after being hit by a car. He died of complications in November, 1990, at age 20.

“In all those years he never had one bed sore,” says Isabel proudly. This even though she also cared for her ailing mother for four years until her death in 1989 and helped her husband, Jose, a metal grinder, overcome a drinking problem.

That Tonito lived so long--although blind and in a semi-coma--is a testament to his mother’s devotion. Often, relatives and even a social worker encouraged her to institutionalize him. But Isabel wouldn’t do it.

“I think God put me on trial. Maybe another mother would have done different, but God gave me Tony to see if I would take care of him or neglect him. Had I placed Tony in a nursing home, I would have felt like I had abandoned him. Today, my conscience is clear.”

One afternoon nearly 20 years ago, Isabel and her son were visiting a relative in Compton. Tony and four other children were playing outside when, suddenly, the others ran in, crying, “Something’s wrong with Tonito!”

Isabel ran out to find that her 3-year-old son had chased a ball into the street and had been hit by a car. He suffered brain damage that left him with a child’s mind and body. He was hospitalized for 1 1/2 years. Isabel took him home as soon as she could. A neighbor helped with his care, while Almada worked for a few years as a part-time assembler.

After Tony died, the Almadas buried him at Calvary. They picked the spot next to Cynthia Vanessa because they wanted him to be with other children.

Monica Fagoaga and Isabel Almada met two years ago, shortly after Tony’s burial. “We started to talk about flowers and how expensive they are,” Isabel says. “My husband and I used to buy them across the street. Monica told me, ‘Oh no, you should go to the downtown flower market.’ ”

Ironically, Isabel says, coming to the cemetery helps heal her pain, because this is where her memories of her son are most vivid.

“Before the accident, Tony was a normal boy, he was talking and walking,” she says. “He called us ‘mama’ and ‘papa.’ When my husband raked leaves, Tony helped with a little rake. When we went to my mother’s house, he would get on top of the table and sit there eating sweet bread. I remember all that.”

After he was injured, he “would sit outside in a wheelchair and take in the sun, or in the living room on the couch, where he would sit most of the time. Whenever he heard my or my husband’s voice, he would laugh, but he could never talk after the accident. He knew who we were. The sound and smell of us would get him all excited.

“It’s very sad,” she says, wiping tears away. “I know my Tony is gone. But I am thankful to God for giving me a little bit of strength, courage and faith to keep on going.”

Elizabeth Zendejas, 36, says that without her faith in God, she too would be lost.

Last March, her 19-month-old son, Eder Giovanni, named after a Brazilian soccer player, died after choking on a piece of steak. Eder was jumping with his brother, Cesar, 14, when he suddenly turned blue and collapsed after regurgitating, then inhaling the meat.

Like the other families, Elizabeth and her husband, Javier, 34, a restaurant worker, gather each weekend at the palm tree-lined knoll and try to make sense of their son’s death.

“We try to come during the week and always on the weekends,” Elizabeth says, cradling her youngest child, who was born seven months ago and is named after his brother.

“Sometimes we come alone without our other children. But we are really never alone because always Isabel and her husband are here early on Saturday.”

Says Isabel: “People say to me, ‘Why do you go every Saturday? Doesn’t it make you feel sick?’ ‘No,’ I tell them. Why should I feel bad when it makes my heart feel good?”

Most of the time she is happy to be at the cemetery, but sometimes she feels like crying. She fights back the tears by reading a poem she carries in her wallet:

There once was a procession of children marching in heaven.

Each child held a lighted candle and as they marched they sang. Their faces shone with happiness, but one little girl stood alone.

‘Why don’t you join us, little girl?’ one happy child asked.

‘I can’t,’ she replied. ‘Every time I light my candle, my mother puts it out with her tears.’

“I read this poem a lot,” Isabel says. “I keep it close to me because I want Tony to rest in peace, especially during the holidays.”

Lizette Rios, 8

“I wonder how her looks might have changed, how she would be in the fourth grade, how she never got to see her little brother, Angel,” says Guadalupe Rios. She turns away, tears filling her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” says Guadalupe, 36, as she sits on the floor turning the pages of her photo albums. A picture of a little girl holding a bunny brings a smile through her tears. “This is our second holiday without Lizette, and it feels like the first.”

“Sometimes I let my mind just get lost,” she says, the album now turned to a page showing Lizette with birthday cake smeared on her face.

Lizette, nicknamed “Gordita” (chubby) by her father, Roberto, died June 29, 1991, during a family vacation in Mexico. A truck crossed over the dividing line and slammed into the Rios car. Lizette, 8 at the time, died instantly. Guadalupe, Roberto, 42, and three other children suffered minor injuries. Another son had stayed home in Los Angeles.

“It is difficult for us during this season,” says Guadalupe. “Last year we didn’t put up a tree in the house and this year, well, we put up that little one because my 7-year-old, Patricia, she doesn’t really understand what we feel. I put the tree up for her.”

Lizette’s oldest sister, Maria, 19, likes to remember happier times. Whenever someone was sad, Maria says, Lizette would paint a silly face on herself with markers and dance. And everyone still remembers Lizette’s menagerie: a duck, a rabbit, birds and her dog, Bon-Bon.

At the cemetery on this particular morning, the topic is Monica’s pregnancy.

“I’m due Jan. 6, but the doctor told me it will probably be sooner,” Monica announces. The women gather around her, excited by the news.

“Do you know yet if it’s going to be a boy or a girl? Do you think you’ll have a New Year’s baby?” come the questions.

Isabel leans on her broom. “Imagine a New Year’s Day baby. That’s real fireworks!”

The women laugh, but almost suddenly silence falls as they remember where they are.

“You can never replace a child with another,” Guadalupe says later, holding her baby close. “But I do feel that God gives us strength to have other children.”

“Yes,” says Isabel, nodding to her friend. “We all have to move ahead with our lives.”