Everything Under The Sun: A Last Moment Of Dignity For Dead, Unidentified Children

Garden Of Innocence, Fresno

If ever you think about a funeral and burial, you would at least picture it with friends and family gathered around, a presentable casket or urn, and at the least, your name on the marker. But there are some children who have died here in this country, without any of that.

Elissa Davey, founder of GARDEN OF INNOCENCE, offers abandoned and unidentified children the solace of a dignified burial. She said, "I wanted to start a place for children to find the rest, love, and dignity they deserve. At Garden Of Innocence, we have the opportunity to come into their lives and be their family - to show them love even if we never knew them in life."

I doubt whether anyone has taken a census of how many children have died and been placed in unmarked or mass graves. Ms. Davey works with volunteers around the US to identify these children, age eight and under, who are unidentified and unclaimed. Working with cemeteries, she then provides these children with a dignified funeral and burial.

Throughout the past 18 years, Ms. Davey and her organization have provided funeral services to 307 children. There are 160 children in the first Garden. Each child receives a new name, along with a funeral service, and an original poem specifically for that child. Various groups make the casket or urn in which that child is buried, generally a boy scout working on becoming an eagle scout or a local woodworker. Each child is accompanied by a handmade blanket and a Beanie Baby. For burial, each child has an escort of members of the Knights Of Columbus, local law enforcement and Boy Scouts.

Since the organization was first founded, it has grown to a total of eleven Gardens in different parts of the country. Each of these has a group of at least 16 committed volunteers to provide the burials for children in a specific area. Each Garden has room for fifty burial plots. All of the Gardens come from space that is donated by the cemetery that contains it.

Garden Of Innocence general manager and owner of Reade & Son Funeral Home in Fresno, Enrique Reade, said, "With Elissa, everything is about those babies. She's like an army tank - nothing can get in her way or stop her. She's like an angel - one of God's disciples. She goes out of her way to talk to someone about the gardens because she feels that once she does, they're going to want to help. She travels at the drop of a hat to talk about the gardens, and she does so much of this work herself. No one stops her. That's why I give all my time to her."

Most of the Gardens are located in California, but that doesn't mean that other locations can't be started. There are plenty of ways to contact this organization, to donate money, and to volunteer. The volunteer section has information about starting a Garden in your own area.

Some of the urns and blankets that are used in laying a child to rest.

Not only are the Gardens a way of burying a child without a name, but they are also locations where family members, who have lost children, but have no idea where they are or what happened to them, to grieve and have some amount of closure. And these Gardens add dignity, compassion, and concern to the communities in which they are maintained.