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“It's just something that I just keep walking the grounds and just knowing somebody's there and there's no marker for them,” Lorena resident Jon Goddi said.
Jon Goddi has lived in Lorena for more than 25 years. For the past five years, he’s worked the grounds at the Lorena Cemetery.
“Make sure everything's up to par, clean, beautiful. Make sure they are mowed. Made sure the limbs and sticks and everything are down,” Goddi said. “We buried my grandmother here, my uncle, we have plots here. And just over time, I just felt that you know, the cemetery needed a little more upkeep and more hands-on."
Now, he’s raising money to buy headstones for those who don't have one.
“Grave stakes break, and they become missing, and then it just becomes the ground. There's no true record,” Goddi said. “And that's what I’m afraid of—that person being lost in history,”
He told 25 News that maintaining the grounds is a major struggle for cemeteries across Central Texas— an issue we’re seeing with Cox Cemetery in Bruceville-Eddy.
“It's been abandoned, it's been overgrown, and it's just, it's horrible, you know,” Goddi said.
25 News’ Kadence MaKenna went to the cemetery to see exactly what Goddi was talking about. MaKenna found names covered with brush, displaced gravestones and fallen tree limbs.
“It's nothing now, and that's what I’m terrified of. With the cemeteries around here, people are losing interest, and they're just letting them overgrown and be forgotten. And I refuse, I refuse for to have that to happen while I’m around,” Goddi said.
Goddi told 25 News he is accepting donations to help fund the benefit. He is always looking for volunteers to help out, too.
“It's important to me that these cemeteries last for generations, generations to come,” Goddi said.
