MIDDLETOWN — Once a year for 17 years, area clergy and advocates for people with mental illnesses have read aloud the names of those buried in anonymous, numbered graves behind Connecticut Valley Hospital — 100 names at a time.
When the 86th and final name — Batista Fanese — was read aloud Wednesday afternoon, it marked the end of the effort to recognize the lives and deaths of each and every person buried in the CVH cemetery, 1,686 in all.
At each grave, clergy or volunteers read the marker number, then the name of the person buried there, their age and year of death, followed by a short prayer and the placing of a white carnation in front of the gravestone.
“We’ve learned something about some of the people buried there,” said the Rev. John Hall, the former pastor of First Church of Christ, who has been leading the annual service since 1999. “These people aren’t strangers anymore. We can see them now not as outcasts but as people with their own individuality.”
Hall said he first visited the cemetery in the late 1990s and was moved by the anonymity of the markers. He worked with CVH officials, who needed permission from then-Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to get a full list of the names of each person buried there.
“Its forsaken state was very powerful to me,” Hall said. “I thought speaking the names of the individuals and drawing attention to them as individuals with their own stories and values as human beings would be a very powerful thing to do and I wanted to do it.”
Hall said Wednesday that those buried in the CVH cemetery died of all types of causes, from illnesses to suicides to drownings to fires — as well as one who died from a bull attack. The cemetery has graves dating from 1878 to 1955.
Hall said he hopes the effort has helped people to better understand mental illness and to fight the stigma people with mental illnesses face.
For some, the service was the first time they learned the location of their loved ones’ graves.
Louise Worth Hakey was at Wednesday’s service, where her grandfather William Alexander Worth’s name was read — he was buried in grave No. 1669. She said news accounts in past years of the service helped her track down the location of his grave, which was unknown to her family.
Worth was a mason, and apparently suffered a traumatic brain injury while he was working and was subsequently committed to CVH. When she was a young child, she said, a CVH staff member showed up at her family’s home in Stamford to share the news of Worth’s death at the facility, which surprised her father, Worth’s son.
“From the time my father was a kid, he had been told [his father] was dead,” Hakey said. “We are a family that would have visited him. It goes back to the time when people just didn’t want to acknowledge [people with mental illnesses].”
Hakey said she read a story in the New York Times about the service and decided to check the list of names for her grandfather’s. She said she felt it was important for her to come from her home in northern Vermont to attend the service.
“To me it’s an ending,” Hakey said. “I wanted to know where he was before I died. I had no clue.”
Rev. Printice Roberts-Toler, the retired chaplain at CVH, said during his 23 years at the facility, he came across people of all types who were patients at the hospital. He said they each had their own traits, goals and dreams, but they were eclipsed by a diagnosis of mental illness.
“The important thing was to give these folks the respect and dignity they deserved,” Roberts-Toler said. “The fact they had a mental illness didn’t make them less human or less important. They’re just people that got stuck in anonymity. I’m so grateful to John Hall. Apart from him this [service] would never have happened.”
“We hope these efforts have restored some of the dignity and respect to some of these individuals who suffered so many indignities during their lives,” said Connecticut Valley Hospital CEO Helene Vartelas.
She said CVH will carry on the yearly service beginning next year, taking time out in May — Mental Health Awareness Month — to remember the people buried in the cemetery.
A full list of the people buried in the numbered graves is engraved on a monument at the CVH cemetery on Silvermine Road.
