Big Battle Over a Little Grave in Vermont

To Tom and Tami DeBlois, their baby was much more than a name and an all-too-brief life span. So they added a family photograph, laminated against the weather, to the headstone.

Jonica Deanna was just 11 months old, and they loved her so much.

But the picture was not enough, so they had a knee-high china statue custom-made in Jonica’s memory, with black hair like hers. On what would have been her birthday, her niece set a pink lamb at the grave.

Her father, a carpenter, built two square flower boxes to flank the stone, and the family planted a small tree for ornaments at Christmastime. Family members brought a crouching lion, a painted raccoon and a ceramic bunny; a wooden carving of a girl on a swing hung from a tree branch overhead.

But when Tom DeBlois built a thin trellis over the headstone last summer, cemetery officials decided they had had enough.

“They’ve been mourning for five years,” said David Dally, one of the five Readsboro cemetery commissioners. “That’s a lot of mourning.”

In a letter, the commissioners said the decorations “have exceeded what is allowed by the rules and regulations of municipal cemeteries under which the commission functions.” They had 30 days to remove them.

The letter set off a dispute that continues to this day. It outraged the DeBloises and their family, not only in its content but in its tone, and they have refused to comply.

“They’re just cruel,” said Marcy Gordon, Tom DeBlois’ sister. “Once they looked at my brother and his wife and said, ‘We’ve given you four years, now get over it.’ ”

Jonica was just a few weeks short of her first birthday when she was killed, nearly five years ago. Her mother was seriously injured; a car crossed the center line and crashed head-on into theirs.

Jonica was buried high on a hilltop in the family plot, not far from home. Tami DeBlois was hospitalized and couldn’t go to the funeral.

“She’s still a part of our lives,” said the mother, and the family still includes her in its celebrations. Every Christmas, the couple and their two children, ages 2 and 4, bring a Santa Claus to the grave on a sled.

The cemetery’s rules allow only “conventional memorials”--terminology that both sides agree is open to interpretation. The family says it has followed all of the rules. They remove everything from the grave on Nov. 1, as required, for the winter. Their ornaments do impede landscaping at the grave, but the couple weeds and mows in a manner that should satisfy cemetery officials, Tami DeBlois said.

“We clean up every little speck,” she said.

That’s not the point, Dally said.

“It’s excessive,” Dally said. “It’s entirely different than the normal response of families to death.”

To critics in this mountain town of 700 residents, among them more than 100 people who have signed a petition in support of the DeBlois family’s position, Dally denies charges that the commissioners lack compassion.

“I think I am [compassionate], but within my own reasoning,” Dally said. “Death is inevitable.”

But Tami DeBlois, who runs a day-care center from her home and serves as cheerleading coach at Whitingham High School, thinks the commissioners have overstepped their bounds.

“They should have had it in the rule book to begin with,” she said. “Now they’re trying to make it a rule, because they don’t like it.”

The family has written to the Vermont secretary of state’s office for help, and this spring Tom DeBlois ran for election as sexton of the cemetery, but lost to incumbent Arthur Dassarti, an opponent of the decorations.

Two of the five commissioners support the couple; the other three do not, said Carl Moon, Tom DeBlois’ stepfather and a member of the board.

“It upsets me some,” Moon said of the controversy. But “the majority has a say, so there’s not much I can do.” Some board members, he said, think Jonica’s grave “looks like a circus.”

There doesn’t seem to be any imminent resolution of the dispute; the commission’s next step may be to hire a lawyer, Dally said.

The DeBloises, meanwhile, have returned to Jonica’s resting place.

Usually, the family decorates the grave at Easter; this year, cold and snow stopped them. But in May, when winter loosened its grip, the animals, the flower boxes, the statue--everything but the trellis, in a gesture of compromise--returned to its usual place.