Staff
Camp Nelson National Cemetery is overseen by one cemetery director. The director and one administrative assistant work in the office, communicating with families and funeral homes to schedule funeral services and burials, coordinate with various agencies for the annual ceremonies, maintain records, and to answer questions or address concerns made by the general public. The staff includes six full-time cemetery caretakers, though the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hires temporary workers almost every summer to augment the staff by about fifty percent. These caretakers prepare graves with a backhoe or hand held tools (pick and shovel), take custody of and transport a casket to its grave, lower the casket into the grave, seal it within a burial vault, and fill in the grave. Caretakers also receive delivered headstones, set and align them at the head of the appropriate graves, and maintain the grounds; duties include cutting the grass, pruning trees, clearing the roads of leaves in the autumn and snow in the winter, preparing the funeral shelter for services, disposing of litter, and interacting with the public to answer questions or find graves.
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Famous quotes containing the word staff:
“In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“For the first fourteen years for a rod they do whine,
For the next as a pearl in the world they do shine,
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For the next doth crave a staff for a stay,
For the next a bier to fetch them away.”
—Thomas Tusser (c. 1520–1580)