The task, at first, seemed impossible. Kiersten MacNabb and her two young sons, Kayden and Colton, pushed into a stretch of unbroken snow Saturday at the Onondaga County Veterans Memorial Cemetery, hoping to find one flat gravestone among thousands — a task that can take a little searching even on a warm and pleasant day.
This was the absolute opposite. In this old-school December in Central New York, a relentless morning snow was falling on Onondaga Hill, covering every grave with five inches or so of a thick, white clay-like blanket. All around MacNabb and her sons, hundreds of family members and volunteers — many with snow shovels, many on hands and knees as they searched — were making similar longshot guesses about the exact spot of tombstones honoring people they love.
Finally, MacNabb — standing in the rising snow — made a strategic move: She pulled out her phone and called her father. He gave her his best estimate at where the stone she was seeking might be, and MacNabb offered those directions to her sons, both Cub Scouts, who were there on personal and official business:
Their Cub den had volunteered to help out with Wreaths Across America Day in greater Syracuse, a vast effort Saturday in which 3,600 wreaths were set above graves at the veterans’ cemetery on Howlett Hill Road.
On MacNabb’s advice, MacNabb’s son Kayden, 9, abruptly dropped into the snow and began some fierce burrowing. He pushed away snow until MacNabb knew her guess was golden: They had found the gravestone of Gary and Patricia Gonyea, MacNabb’s grandparents, a Kirkville couple who both died within the last six years.
“They were wonderful,” said MacNabb, now of Camillus. One of her most powerful childhood memories involves going to a family camp near Pulaski, where she’d sit at the campfire with her grandparents as the sun fell in the sky — enjoying that childhood sense of absolute peace when you’re with people “who’d do anything for you.”
They were buried at the veterans cemetery, MacNabb said, because Gary served in Vietnam.
Kayden is 9. Colton is 8. The boys were so little when their great-grandparents died that MacNabb fears they’ll have no living memory of who they were.
Yet she has faith they’ll recall, forever, the morning when they set down these wreaths, in heavy snow.
It was an astounding, mysterious and beautiful Yuletide scene, with so many people — seen from faraway as gray silhouettes — hard at work with shovels in a kind of pewter cloud. Ellen McCauley, volunteer coordinator of the event, figures around 1,000 fellow volunteers or family members showed up at the cemetery. Those who signed on to honor veterans donated $17 for every wreath they wanted to set down, while volunteers stepped in to do the job on behalf of relatives who couldn’t make there it themselves.
The total number of wreaths, McCauley said, was 3,600 — four times more, she said, than had ever been set down before as part of the program in Syracuse. Access was complicated by the snow: Shuttles ferried hundreds to the cemetery from Onondaga Community College, while hundreds more who drove to the event ended up parking in a nearby subdivision.
The result, in the end – if you just stood there and admired the whole landscape – was a memorable pattern made by thousands of wreaths in the snow. A year from now — hopefully in easier weather — McCauley’s dream is that a wreath can be set down at every grave on the site, a number exceeding 6,000.
The effort is worth it, she said, because of the thousands of Central New Yorkers lying beneath those stones, veterans whose sacrifice as teenagers or young adults — when they went far from home to serve in a myriad of ways — still affects so many lives in intimate ways, generations later.
That was personified by three sisters who traveled together to the graveyard, despite the snow. Cathy Madigan is 80, Patty Coon 79 and Sandy Kochevar 72. Their existence itself is a cause-and-effect based on their parents’ military service: Their dad and mom, the late Harold and Ruth Burke, began their courtship when they both served with the Marine Corps.
The couple met at Camp Lejeune, after Harold, a wounded veteran, survived his years in the Pacific theater in World War II — including grim combat at Guadalcanal. He and Ruth settled after the war in Marietta, where their dad built a career in railroad work while the couple raised six children.
“It meant so much to us to honor them,” said Kochevar, who remembers her parents as extraordinarily giving, as people who held real wisdom about the things to really worry about in life – a broad perspective of humility and decency that the three daughters have no doubt was influenced by what their folks endured in wartime.
To find the grave, Kochevar dropped to her knees and pushed away the snow. Once the sisters set down the wreaths, they paused to quietly contemplate this tribute to their parents – then were ready, mission accomplished, to find someplace “to thaw out.”
Minutes later, the wailing and distant melody of “Amazing Grace” drifted through the wall of snowfall, with the hymn performed by bagpiper Jack Heins. That concluded some brief ceremonies, near the entranceway, in which hundreds took part in a moment of silence. As Heins sounded his last note, entire families with snow shovels were still at it — digging, brushing and sifting for gravestones.
Linda Bolds had no trouble with that quest. Even in deep snow, she said, she knows every step of the way to the grave of her son, Markice Scott, an infantry sergeant deployed in the 2000s who was wounded while riding on a vehicle that Bolds said struck an IED — an improvised explosive device.
He died of related medical problems six years ago at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Syracuse, Bolds said. She had four children — three girls and a boy — and she said that while it always means a lot to put a wreath on the grave, the real tribute to her son is reflected each day in the bright future of his daughter, who graduated from Penn State.
Still, Bolds makes sure to show up each year during the Wreaths over America remembrance, for a bedrock reason felt by everyone hunting for family graves:
“I love him,” said Bolds, who used that radar to quickly find her son, even in deep snow.
Jim Hathaway, a Vietnam veteran, was there purely as a volunteer. He has no close relatives in the cemetery, but he said he operates on a fundamental ethic represented by Wreaths over America: Honor and gratitude endure only if they are passed along with quiet diligence, generation by generation.
“Maybe someday,” he said, leaning on the handle of his shovel, “someone will brush some snow aside for me.”
Not far away, retired math teacher Roy Carr, 73, cut a long path that revealed not only the tombstones of his in-laws — World War II veteran Phillip Gebhardt and his wife Jean — but the graves of many other veterans. It was a quiet statement of community that Carr hoped would make it easier for many families to find those stones.
“These people gave their hearts and souls to this country,” Carr said of the sea of graves around him. “We owe them this.”
The snow, as the morning went on, did not let up. Pat Edmonds — a widow seeking the grave of her husband Mark — said he was a devoted member of the Valley Desperados Motorcycle Club, an organization that sends volunteers every year to the Yuletide wreath-laying, where the members always place a wreath at the grave of club co-founder Alan Wrightsman, an Army veteran.
Among those helping Pat: Eddie Swiderski and Bennie Crisafulli of the Desperados MC. As the trio searched, Pat told me how she met Mark, a Navy veteran, when she worked in the oncology department at the SUNY Upstate Medical Center and Mark was a nurse at the Syracuse VA.
“He had the greatest smile and the bluest eyes,” she said. Her husband cared deeply for his patients, she said, and she remembers years ago how he was riding his motorcycle one day when he came upon an elderly couple — hurt badly in accident — and rushed to help.
In 2017, Mark died of injuries suffered on the road. He was killed when he experienced a medical problem while riding his bike, leading to a crash. Even now, Pat is still coming to terms with that great loss, though she takes some comfort in knowing her husband died doing exactly what he loved.
We broke off the conversation when Swiderski abruptly reached down and furiously brushed away some snow, revealing a marker and letters spelling out “Mark Edmonds.” Before he stepped back and Pat set up the wreath, Swiderski reached down to tap his knuckles on the metal, a sign of gratitude that also meant:
No one here forgets.
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