Growing up in Marion, she often worked with her parents in the yard, gardening, weeding and mulching.
Thompson says that this job feels like “coming full circle” for her. Since then, she has made the career change from a preschool teacher, someone who helps people at the beginning of their lives, to a gravesite cleaner, someone who helps people at the end. This experience caused Thompson to wonder if other people struggled with the same thing that she did, so she started posting about it on Facebook and quickly received phone calls. “It was like something was lifted off me,” she said.
She began researching how to clean the stone, and started planting flowers. Thompson said that her father was an avid gardener who always planted flowers in his yard and took great pride in them, and she knew it would be especially important to him to have them around his memorial.Ībout two years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, something shifted in Thompson. Wing passed away in 2015.Īfter Wing died, Thompson said that she couldn’t bring herself to visit his grave: “I tried to come by periodically, but then I felt terrible, because there were no flowers.” “I was devastated when he passed away,” Thompson said, getting choked up as she stood in front of the headstone of her father, Robert Wing. She said she was inspired to start the business by the experience of taking care of her late father’s headstone. Loving Touch Gravesite Care has been Thompson’s full-time job for the past year and a half. She also plants and tends to flowers around the stones. She scrubs down stones with D/2, a biodegradable cleaner that removes stains from mold, algae, mildew, lichens and air pollutants, and then she rinses them off.ĭepending how dirty the stones are, she says, it can take up to two hours to scrub them clean. She explained that when dust and pollen accumulate on stones, it provides a space for lichen and moss to be able to grow.
Thompson recommends that stones be cleaned at least once a year. She calls those her “perpetual care stones.” She can often be found in Evergreen Cemetery in Marion, where she has about 10 different headstones that she takes care of twice weekly. Thompson takes care of graves for people all along the South Coast, she said, sometimes traveling as far as Rhode Island to help people clean up their family plots. MARION – Debbie Thompson of Marion started Loving Touch Gravesite Care with a mission: To make cemeteries a better place - “plot by plot.”