Rosa Lillian Gardano was fourteen when she and her family traveled from their home in Olive Hill, Tennessee to Illinois.  What should have been a pleasant and uneventful trip turned deadly when the car in which she, her mother, and her older sister were riding was involved in an accident near the town of Livingston.  Her mother and sister, as well as the driver, survived and were hospitalized.  Lilly did not.  The date was July 27, 1972.

A local mortuary by the name of Lesicko Funeral Home was contacted.  Her body was prepared and casketed then Bob Shackelford flew to Illinois in his single engine Cessna to bring Lilly back home to Hardin County.  The following Sunday, July 30 ^th , friends and family gathered at the funeral home in Savannah to say their good-byes and Lilly was buried in the Memory Gardens, just a few miles outside the city limits.

Fast forward almost 46 years to March 19, 2018 when we received a call from Sierra Memorial Chapel in Riverside, California.  During the intervening years, Lilly’s mother, Rosalina, had made her way west.  Her life had drawn to a close and her sole remaining child, Lilly’s older sister, wanted her mother to be buried next to the daughter she’d lost so many years before.  We started a record on Ms. Gardano and waited for word of flight arrangements, but a few days later we received another call.  There had been a change of plans.  Ms. Gardano would not be making her way to Savannah to join her daughter.  Her daughter would be making her way to Riverside to rest beside her mother.

It only made sense.  The last member of the family was residing in California.  Why would you send your loved one three-quarters of the way across the country to be buried in a place where no other immediate family remained?  And so it was decided.

The proper documents were signed.  The necessary permits were acquired.  And then we waited.  We waited because a disinterment of this magnitude requires a lack of rain for more than a few hours, and blue skies and continuous sunshine were nothing more than distant memories at the moment.  But finally the week came when it looked like Mother Nature was going to smile favorably on the task at hand.  The airline was contacted and flight arrangements were made.  Sierra Memorial Chapel was contacted and advised of our schedule.  And then we started planning exactly how we were going to disinter a casket and vault that had been buried for over 45 years.

I’m not going to say it was easy.  All three members of the grave crew were exhausted when the day was over.  The funeral staff had to move Lilly from her original casket to the new one required by the airlines, something that’s hard to mentally prepare for when there are so many unknowns. But throughout the entire process, there was one goal everyone kept foremost in their minds.  This child would be with her family again.  There would be someone who loved her and who had mourned for her that would now be able to visit her grave regularly.  And she would rest beside her mother instead of alone.

The disinterment took place on a Wednesday; on Thursday she was taken to the airport and flown to Ontario, California where a representative of Sierra Memorial Chapel received her remains.  Lilly’s original casket was placed back in her original vault and reburied in her original grave.  With permission from Lilly’s sister, the monument chosen by her family so many years ago will continue to mark the grave that once cradled her mortal remains.  And the Lilies of the Valley that are cast in the bronze of her monument will serve as a reminder of the young girl who tragically lost her life at the age of fourteen—and of her family who never forgot her.

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