MARION – Debbie Thompson of Marion started Loving Touch Gravesite Care with a mission: To make cemeteries a better place — “plot by plot.”

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.

She can often be found in Evergreen Cemetery in Marion, where she has about 10 different headstones that she takes care of twice weekly. She calls those her “perpetual care stones.”

Thompson recommends that stones be cleaned at least once a year.

She explained that when dust and pollen accumulate on stones, it provides a space for lichen and moss to be able to grow. 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.

Depending how dirty the stones are, she says, it can take up to two hours to scrub them clean.

She also plants and tends to flowers around the stones.

Loving Touch Gravesite Care has been Thompson’s full-time job for the past year and a half. She said she was inspired to start the business by the experience of taking care of her late father’s headstone.

“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. Wing passed away in 2015.

After 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.”

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.

About two years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, something shifted in Thompson. She began researching how to clean the stone, and started planting flowers.

“It was like something was lifted off me,” she said.

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.

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.

Thompson says that this job feels like “coming full circle” for her. Growing up in Marion, she often worked with her parents in the yard, gardening, weeding and mulching.

Some of the tools she uses regularly to garden at gravesites belonged to her father.

“I feel really connected to him when I do this,” she said.

Thompson knows Evergreen Cemetery inside and out. One thing that strikes a chord with her when she regularly walks the grounds is the number of dirty, forgotten headstones of people whose families are no longer alive or have moved away.

“I’m actually speaking to the Cemetery Commission about it,” she said. “I want to figure out a way to at least honor the veterans and get their stones cleaned.”

She is hopeful that they will be able to use historical preservation funds and “get something going.”

Thompson has put her own money into the cemeteries, too. She’s donated more than 50 watering cans to cemeteries around the South Coast so that people will have an easy way to water the flowers around headstones.

“I just really am hoping to make a difference for towns and families,” she said.

Loving Touch Gravesite Care can be found online at www.lovingtouchgravesitecare.com or by calling Thompson at 508-728-6326.