Linda Sarette
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| | Hometown Hero: ‘All star’ volunteer Linda Sarette devotes herself to the gardens of the Veterans Cemetery
By JEREMY MARGOLIS
Monitor staff
When Linda Sarette laid her father to rest at the New Hampshire State Veterans Cemetery in Boscawen in 2019, the section where he was buried had no garden.
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| It was an omission that bothered the Sanbornton resident so much she asked the cemetery to create one.
“We’ll put one over there, but you got to maintain it,” Ted Merrow, the cemetery’s foreman, offered.
Sarette took the deal. And she hasn’t left since.
Several days per week for the last five years, Sarette, 66, has traversed the cemetery’s winding grounds to plant flowers, cut down trees, weed tree beds, and tend to gravestones and columbariums. At a cemetery that has no gardening staff on payroll, Sarette’s near-daily responsibilities – which are unpaid – have become a crucial component of the team’s operations.
The deal the cemetery offered five years ago “worked out very well for us,” Merrow quipped.
Sarette – skin tanned golden and fingernails cased in dirt – typically arrives at around 9 or 10 a.m. an average of three mornings per week during the spring, summer, and fall, and works through the afternoon. On a recent August afternoon when the temperature topped out at 95 degrees, she donned a long-sleeve baby blue shirt with a monarch butterfly and the words “Adopt a Garden” emblazened on its back.
While the “Adopt a Garden” program has other volunteers who assist with groundskeeping from time to time, Sarette is by far the most devoted.
“She’s here so much, she’s like part of the team,” Cemetery Director Shawn Buck said.
Sarette – who has the faint hint of a Boston accent – grew up in Cambridge, Mass., the daughter of a Korean War veteran. The family relocated to Seabrook, New Hampshire when Sarette was a teenager and she has been a Granite Stater since.
Prior to becoming acquainted with the Veterans Cemetery, she made quilts that were sent to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. When Sarette agreed to take responsibility for the garden at the cemetery following her father’s death, she had little clue of how centrally it would become part of her life.
“It just happened,” Sarette said. “That’s something I can’t explain. I just started coming here and the people were kind.”
Sarette sees her work as a way to pay respect to those who have sacrificed so much for her – and our – freedom.
“Keeping this place nice honors them,” Sarette said. “And their families that come to pay respect have a bench to sit on and flowers and they have nice places to reflect.”
Over the years, the relationships she has forged have extended not just to cemetery staff, but to those greiving family members too.
During the pandemic, Sarette recalled, one woman returned to her late husband’s grave site for the first time in eight months. She was sobbing and Sarette went over to console her. It’s a role, she said, that comes naturally.
“There’s just different people that you come to love, and it’s like part of your family,” Sarette said of the cemetery’s frequent visitors.
And then there are her actual family members. Sarette’s mother, Joan, passed away earlier this year, and joined her husband, Anthony, on a shared headstone at the cemetery.
Despite spending upward of 20 hours per week at the cemetery and continuing to maintain the flowerbed near where her parents are buried in Section 11, Sarette rarely walks over to their headstone itself.
But on a tour of the cemetery, she diverged from her normal routine.
“That’s my hero right there,” Sarette said, tapping her father’s headstone twice with her palm.
Jeremy Margolis can be reached at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.
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