It’s late afternoon at Cedar Park Cemetery in Hudson, and I’m standing next to a small headstone with Caitie Hilverman. "So this grave in particular I selected because it's hard to read," she tells me. "I think that's part of what I want to do, is make this legible to people. It's covered in lichen. It has some dried grass on it. You can't easily make out the name that are on it."
Caitie is a gravetender. She comes to Cedar Park almost every day to clean headstones like this one. Time - and maybe neglect - have made it impossible to make out who’s buried here. Caitie pumps the handle on a jug of water with a hose attached to it, and starts washing the surface of the headstone. "The first thing that you do is wet it, before you do anything else, just to make sure that the tools that you use on it later move across it smoothly. From there, we'll use a plastic scraper. You always want to use plastic or silicone for this so it doesn't scratch the stone in any way."
She begins gently running the scraper back and forth across the stone. Clumps of lichen and grass fall away. She reaches into a basket and grabs a bottle of something called D2 - an industrial-grade cleaning solution designed to maintain stone structures. She says it’s the same stuff they use at Arlington National Cemetery. She sprays it onto the headstone, and scrubs with a soft-bristled brush. The D2 seeps into the lingering lichen and mildew stains, and they slowly vanish. Caitie follows up with a smaller brush, digging dirt and grass out of the letters on the headstone.
Five minutes later, the rich brown coloring of the headstone has started to shimmer in the late-afternoon sun. And for the first time in years, the name is clearly visible. Caitie reads it aloud: "Alberta, daughter of Albert and Theresa Toth, born 1927 died, 1928."
Caitie started gravetending at Cedar Park about nine years ago. She was doing a genealogy project about her family, and discovered that many of her ancestors were buried here. So she came to visit them. "What I found were many graves, especially from the late 1800s and early 1900s that were too overgrown with organic matter or too dirty to read. And so I researched the most ethical and careful ways to clean the stones just to get the information. But as soon as I started doing it, I really felt in love with the process of it. It felt like a somatic practice of sorts."
At first, she was just focused on the physical act of cleaning. "And then," she says, "I found myself reading the names and sort of saying them out loud and imagining what their lives were like."
The names are a big part of Caitie's process. Once she reveals the name on the stone, she’ll sort of murmur it to herself. "It's folks whose names probably haven't been said out loud in decades or centuries. And so I think bringing them back into the air, even for, you know, a moment, feels sort of beautiful."
As she speaks, I'm reminded of that old saying - that you die twice, once when your physical body expires, and then again the last time somebody says your name. When I mention this to Caitie, she nods vigorously. "Yes," she says. "I love that phrase."
Saying the names is particularly important to Caitie when the stones belong to babies like Alberta Toth. "So in this cemetery, and sort of everywhere, the death of a child will often be signified by a lamb on top of the stone. So I did many of those stones early on, because their lives were so short. I also have young children myself, and I felt like it was a way to honor and be in community with other parents from other times who didn't have enough time with their children. And it does sort of soften me to the experiences of people that I won't ever meet."
When Caitie started noticing other graves at Cedar Park that needed to be cleaned - headstones belonging to people she wasn't related to - she hesitated. She wondered what the ethics were. Was it OK to physically interact with the grave of someone you don’t have a connection to?
She came up with a set of rules for herself: if it’s a really old headstone, and she can tell from the materials it's made out of that her tools won’t harm it, she cleans it. "And if it's a more recent stone," she adds, "I won't touch it - unless the family has given me the green light."
Families do, in fact, seek her out to clean their ancestors' graves. Caitie grew up in Hudson. Around town, she’s developed a reputation. Last fall, someone was walking around Cedar Park asking people how to get their headstones cleaned. "And someone was like, 'Call Caitie Hilverman!" Caitie recalls, laughing. "And he came to my place of work and was like, 'Can you clean my stones?' And I did, and it was really, really cool."
Keeping names from the past alive in Hudson specifically is really important to Caitie. Her family has lived here since the 19th century. "You know, having grown up here, having experienced Hudson changing at warp speed over the last few decades, I feel a lot of longing for an earlier version of Hudson that simply won't be here any longer."
A few years ago, Caitie went for a walk on Warren Street, to visit her childhood home. She discovered it had been repurposed into a boutique hotel. Another house in the neighborhood that her family owned, which they sold in the 1960s for $14,000 dollars, is now worth over a million. With affordable housing developments like Bliss Towers being demolished, Caitie worries the newer, flashier version of Hudson won’t have room for people like her great-grandparents – immigrants who were looking for an affordable place to raise their families.
"But," she adds, "I also feel like it's important that we - that I, that people who have been here for a long time carry that forward, not necessarily as a demand that things go back to the way they were, but as a way to honor what has been. And bring forward the pieces of our history that are helpful to this community, and can be generative and, can help us build a future here that works for everybody."
Before we go, Caitie gives Alberta Toth’s headstone one final rinse. She says the cleaning process is designed not just to clean the stone, but preserve it. The lichen and dirt will continue to fade, and Alberta’s name will come into even better focus. "So this stone will look better tomorrow than it does today, and it will look better a week from now than it does tomorrow."
