Stafford Memorial Park

05/26/2025

07/30/2023

Sometimes it helps to hear from others who have been through the same thing you are going through:

Filmmaker Billy Bob Thornton says that he was forever changed when his younger brother Jimmy died suddenly of a heart condition. Watch Billy Bob describe the...

05/16/2023

Please do not put balloons out at the cemetery! If you wonder why, this may help you understand one important reason.

12/01/2022

https://www.elephantjournal.com/2017/12/surviving-the-holidays-while-grieving/?fbclid=IwAR2vpdiEACYo_vAX_PtVhtzcyZ2PSiUnI2cJDZ2cL2JRum_sD6KcmKybHD8

There’s so much pressure for the holidays to be the best time of the year. But it’s not like that for all of us, and that pressure can feel like salt in the wound if we’re already struggling.

10/06/2022

Just a reminder NO GLASS may be left on the grounds. It breaks and becomes a danger!!

05/30/2022

Your sacrifices will never be forgotten.

We wish to honor all our veterans this Memorial Day weekend with the image below. The American Legion poppy, symbolizing the blood you have shed and the scarifies you have made for our freedoms, let it never be forgotten!

11/28/2021

I had a few requests to repost this….

Living with a Broken Heart

Remember what the Tin Man said in the “Wizard of Oz” after he finally got a heart….

“Now I know I've got a heart because it’s breaking.”

If someone you love died, your heart is probably broken. So how do you live with a broken heart?

The answer isn’t how you fix it or move beyond it. The skill is learning to live with your grief as an ongoing way of being in the world. It’s the way you honor that which you love.

What I’m proposing is that, with enough healing, living with heartbreak can become natural, and very normal.

From my personal and professional experience, I can tell you that as you embark on your healing journey, you’ll start crying a whole lot more. Not just to clear pain, but for the simplest of everyday reasons, and out of nowhere. You’ll cry when you see a bird, a can of paint, an apple, or even the shape of a cloud.

Random things will make you cry.

The heart is designed to grieve, it wants to grieve…..it has to grieve!

Especially when it’s broken.

This is the price you pay for love. The loss of the life you thought you had, the life you once knew and held so dear. Loss of a dream you believed was true.

But you can also find and feel grief in opening your heart.

Opening it to love and to new possibilities. Opening it to what the future holds.

Isn’t that what life is all about? Endings and beginnings, closings and openings? The heart was designed to navigate you through this forever winding adventure called life. But you have to be willing to feel…..and to live with a broken heart.

Here’s the thing…..you can learn to live with your broken heart by befriending your grief.

You can discover the love that still exists around you…..and share that love with others who are also living with a broken heart.

Gary Sturgis - “Surviving Grief”

11/11/2021

Adding another 365 days of sacrifice by our service members and their families, we thank you for the freedoms you have and continue to protect!

We thank all of Veterans and their families for their sacrifice, we are free because of you!!