Burying Your Mistakes

Today is a lesson in mistakes. Our lesson is very simple: when you make a mistake- and you will make mistakes in your life- it is in your best interest to catch it and correct it as quickly as possible. Mistakes can compound if not caught, and they can snowball and snowball into larger and larger mistakes.

I presume you know by now there is an example attached, and I shall not disappoint you. The initial mistake occurred in a cemetery and I can already see you burying your face in your hands going 'oh no' because the cemetery is not the optimal place to make a mistake in the first place. You are probably, though, expecting something like 'they buried the wrong person'. No, all the right people got buried. There wasn't a funeral that had to be stopped or anything.

What did happen was that, in 1968 at a funeral in Elkton, Kentucky, they buried someone in the wrong plot. For some, that isn't a big deal, but people do make requests to be buried in particular places in a cemetery, such as near other members of their family. Nobody caught this initial error, and over the years, 11 other people who died were in turn buried one row off. In 2010, they began using a computer to map out their plots- until then they'd been pacing it out by foot- and found the error. At either one end or the other- I can't figure out which- sits the plot of Sherrie Fischer, who isn't dead yet, but who would like to be buried near her parents. Sherrie's plot is occupied by someone else. Given that it is, after all, her plot, the result is that there's nothing to do except dig up the person in her plot and move them to the correct plot... which is occupied by another someone else, and on down the line for 11 plots.

The families of the people in those plots, according to the article, might be attempting to work something out amongst each other to where they don't all have to get moved, because I should not have to tell you that people become rather upset when their loved ones are dug up out of their graves.

It appears that in July, there was a town meeting about this. The site Topix has a local page for Elkton that discussed the meeting. As you will see, 'heated' is an understatement.