Parents grieving the loss of their teenage daughter in a car crash 10 months ago are upset they’ve been asked to clear tributes from lawn next to her Maunu Cemetery grave.
Ella-Rose Donker was the only daughter of Robert and Kim Donker’s four children and died aged 18 on June 10, last year.
Her grave site and adjacent lawn in Whangārei has held an array of tributes from family and friends.
However, cemetery manager Stephen Jenkins recently asked the Donkers and 13 other families to confine those tributes to within a concrete headstone berm.
Jenkins has acknowledged the request is difficult for grieving families, and he is sorry the Donkers are so upset, but it is important that all families are treated equally, he says.
The Donkers and the family of 33-year-old Jovi Samson, who is buried two plots along from Ella, were also asked to remove small benches they’d put on the graves.
Both families said the request was “heartless”. The pain of losing their children - who died within a month of each other - was still too raw.
“Why can’t they just leave us alone - we’re still going through so much stuff.”
Robert Donker said he understood it might take cemetery staff longer to maintain areas where tributes had been placed on the grass and that it would make their task of mowing with a ride-on too hard.
However, he’d recognised that, and he’d been bringing a mower to keep the site between Jovi and Ella-Rose clear, along with sites either side of them.
“But then they said people couldn’t bring powered equipment either as it created liability issues for the cemetery... and similarly, they’d be liable if people sat on a (graveside) bench and it broke.
“It’s just regulation gone stupid... All common sense has gone out the window.
“I understand they have rules and it’s a lawn cemetery but we’re not doing any harm and they’ve said to me you have to be respectful of other people but we always are. If there’s a funeral on you don’t bring your lawnmower up and start mowing the lawn or anything like that.
“If there’s someone here, I always ask them if they mind - they always say they don’t - but if they did, I wouldn’t mow around Ella’s plot.