Wayne Smith admits he did not know what a cemetery sexton was when he officially took on the role for Batavia Union Cemetery at the beginning of 2008.
“Not a clue,” Smith said. “Not a clue.”
But because he has always been “willing to help out, especially for the Village of Batavia,” Smith agreed to fill the position temporarily until the cemetery board could find someone else.
More than 18 years later, he is only just now stepping down.
So, what is a cemetery sexton? Though he was still learning up until his last day, Smith said he finally built up a pretty good definition of the job: “Everything has to come through the sexton. He is 100% in charge and responsible.”
For nearly two decades, Smith was somewhere on Batavia Union Cemetery’s 15 acres pretty much every day.
He made sure the grass was mowed, weeded graves and cleared rocks from the road — taking special care of the cemetery’s 700 veterans and those with no family left alive, buried in older sections dating as far back as the 1830s.
Smith also spent time with families during moments of profound grief.
Often, he helped search for the grave of somebody’s loved one. Other times, he helped plan burials and probed vacant spots to make sure no one was already buried there, because record-keeping wasn’t great back in the day.
“Maybe in every cemetery in the United States — or at least that's always been a joke — there's been a fire of records at some point,” Smith said. “And apparently that happened here.”
If things didn’t go according to plan, Smith said people sometimes took out their grief on him. But he never took it personally.
“You got to know that when you're in the cemetery, you're here for them because they've just lost somebody,” Smith said, adding his favorite part of the job was working with families.
Smith wasn’t required to attend every burial, but he made it to most of them, even on weekends and in bad weather.
“You want the family to be A-1 perfect,” Smith said. “You want everything to be perfect on that day of rest for them.”
Some months, that meant Smith attended many burials. In July alone, there were 14.
No burial was easy, but Smith said the hardest days were when he laid someone to rest that he knew, like his father-in-law. And he still remembers vividly the first time he buried a child.
“She was a 7-year-old little girl. That was the toughest,” Smith said. “I'd only been here a couple years, and that one hit hard because I'm a grandfather, and I had a granddaughter not far from that age.”
Working in a cemetery sometimes meant dealing with unnerving details about its history — especially at the red-brick vault house, built in 1881.
The building is now used for storage, but it had a very different purpose when graves were still dug by hand.
“That's where the body was kept, especially in the winter months — if the ground was frozen, or [there was] too much snow — until things thawed out,” Smith said.
Legend also has it that two previous sextons hung themselves in the vault house, and another one in a different section of the cemetery.
“That's kind of a little strange when you go into the vault house, but it's no big deal,” Smith said. “Doesn't make me feel too bad. So, I'm not going to be one.”
Over the years, Smith remained pretty detached about spending so much time with the dead, and he still isn’t sure whether he believes in ghosts.
“If I say I don't, they'll probably get me tonight,” Smith laughed. “I don't know. Are there spirits? I'm sure there's spirits for sure.”
Mostly, Smith is proud of the work he’s done to improve Batavia Union Cemetery, such as replacing the vault house’s original roof, repaving the roads and improving record-keeping.
His advice for the next sexton is pretty simple: keep the families top of mind.
“Hopefully they feel the same way that I do, and they take their job as serious as I did, because they are there for the families, to make sure everything on that final day is perfect,” Smith said.
What’s next for Batavia Union Cemetery?
The cemetery is governed by a board with representatives from both Batavia village and township.
Members Rex Parsons, of the township, and Jim Owens, of the village, both say they’ll be hard-pressed to find a replacement for Smith.
“With Wayne, it's whatever it takes. He doesn't put a label on it. It's just, ‘If they need me, I'm here. Period,’” Owens said.
Owens said they’ve found someone to fill in temporarily, until the end of the year. Then, the board will start looking for a permanent sexton.
“It might be that interim person,” Owens joked, referring to Smith’s accidental 18 years on the job.
But advertising for the role of cemetery sexton is no easy feat, Parsons said.
“There's not a manual that we can just pass on to the new person,” Parsons said, adding Smith’s value came from his heart. “I believe there's people out there, but we don't know them yet. We got to find them, or they got to find us.”
Picking someone to be a responsible steward of the cemetery — and the cemetery’s money — is a really important task, Parsons said, because it’s a sacred place for the people of Batavia.
“We know a lot of these people that are buried here, and that has an extra special meaning to it,” Parsons said. “My grandparents are here, my dad's here, and I will be here someday, too.”
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