DARIEN—Linda Lyons spends her mornings walking through the cemetery with her dog Peaches, looking at historic gravestones, visiting deceased family members, picking up discarded coffee cups and waiting for that still small voice of God to direct her to certain headstones, where she feels inspired to say a prayer.
A member of St. John Church in Darien and a lifelong Stamford resident, Linda has pursued her own personal ministry at Queen of Peace and St. John Cemeteries.
“I have always liked cemeteries,” she says. “And after my son Mark died on July 23, 2016, I started to really spend time exploring them and going there for walks with my dog Peaches on a daily basis.”
When she worked at Home Depot in Norwalk, she would go out and eat her lunch at St. John/St. Mary Cemetery, and during COVID-19 when certain places were restricted, she would walk through the cemetery and pick up flags that had fallen on the ground and pray for souls.
Her step-father Samuel Van Houten and her step-sister Margaret Van Houten are buried at St. John’s on Hoyt Street and Camp Avenue, where she spends most of her time. (Her mother Emma is buried in her hometown in Maine.)
Linda and Peaches, who is part Maltese and part terrier, set out early in the morning for their walk, stopping to say hello to the maintenance crews, pausing for a prayer to tidy up a neglected grave and examine historical details on a monument.
“As I walk around, I look at the graves and say, ‘I know them and I know them,’” she says. “We pass by the police officer section, and it’s like visiting old friends, and I’ll say hi and make the Sign of the Cross and say, ‘I hope you’re resting in peace.’ I feel close to them all.”
Linda recently bought a niche in the mausoleum at St. John’s.
“I decided that I didn’t have any plans, and I knew I had to do something, so I called them after I saw an insert in Fairfield County Catholic and told them what I wanted,” she recalled. Her cremains will be interred in a columbarium in the mausoleum. Now, she jokingly tells her friends, “I’ve found my niche…I tell them it’s my condo unit in Section F, Row B.”
She often takes it upon herself to help the maintenance crew and frequently picks up trash and soft drink containers whenever she comes upon them. She will also right a flag on a veteran’s grave and even trim around some of the footstones.
The American flag is very important to her. Over the years, she has bought quite a few of them and placed them on the graves of Stamford firefighters and veterans.
“It makes me feel good,” she says. “I am a helpful person, and I’ve cleaned a lot of stones. I do it anonymously, especially for some of the veterans who probably have no relatives.”
Two years ago, she volunteered to place flags on veterans’ graves in a cemetery in the South End of Stamford, and more recently she has replaced flags at St. John’s that have been frayed and damaged.
“I have a huge bag of flags that I will be taking to the VFW,” she says. “Sometimes I’ve found them in the garbage, where people put them, and I’ll take them out because the flag is important to me. A lot of people died for that flag.”
Linda is also intrigued by the history she encounters during her walks through St. John’s.
“I discovered this whole section of people who died during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic,” she said. “Some of their graves had crude markers made of pipe or wood with handwriting that noted only the day they died…and they’re still there more than a century later. You can find a lot of history in the cemetery.”
Linda takes special note of the veterans’ gravestones. She has found some from the Spanish-American War, another veteran from the Italian army and a woman who was in the nursing corps. And then, there are the graves of children whose lives ended too soon, such as a little girl born in 1980 who died in 1986 in addition to infants who succumbed during the pandemic. She prays for them all.
For Linda, the cemetery is a special place, a deeply spiritual place.
“I look around and realize that all those people had lives…maybe not all of them had children or siblings, but they all had a mother and a father, and they had lives,” she said. “It’s very humbling. We will all be there someday, so we should respect them.”
