- When I'm at a new gathering and people are always, "Oh, what do you do?"

I have a small stone carving shop with a small team of carvers and, "Oh, so you make sculptures, you make, you know, like Michelangelo?"

And I say, "Well, no," I almost never come right out with, "Oh, you know, we make gravestones.

(hammer clanging) And then I'll somehow weave in there, it's the art of remembering.

(gentle music) It is the art of remembering.

It is so that when that person has died, we have a place to go and we can read their name aloud.

Because the love doesn't end, the stories become even more precious because you don't have new stories.

(gentle music) The inspiration for each design comes from sitting with the family.

So I'll ask them, "Tell me about your daughter, tell me about your son, tell me about your wife."

Very often when I'm sitting with someone, they're telling me about their spouse, and they're telling me about how they met, and they're showing me photos of the travels they've done together, I am hearing the most beautiful love story.

(gentle music) And at some point in the meeting they'll pause and they'll say, I'll hear it again and again, I thought this was gonna be really hard and really difficult, and as much as it is hard and difficult, I'm really enjoying sitting with you and telling you about our daughter, and thank you for listening, and thank you for asking to see her picture.

(gentle music) When we've lost someone to death, all we really wanna do is talk about them or we wanna hear somebody else tell us a story about them, and so we must speak of the dead to the living.

(gentle music) The process for drawing and designing is really a solo act.

The family has gone home, I will light a candle again.

(gentle music) And I will just sit and wait.

(gentle music) I will look at the photograph of the person we're remembering, and I'll have a conversation with them.

What do you want?

Even if we're just gonna carve your mother's name and her birth year and death year, I'll try never to just do a dash, that gap in between is your life, so we'll create an icon of something.

(gentle music) The artwork is hand drawn, we're being inspired by photographs or going out into nature to find exactly what does that butternut leaf look like?

But then it's drawn by hand and then that's transferred onto the stone by hand, and then it's carved by hand with a mallet and a chisel.

And I like to say and remind each person that our most important tool is our heart.

(gentle music) So Block Island was a safe place for me as a child, and when I needed to return to someplace safe and try to figure it out, I felt that was the place.

And sure enough, it held me and really instructed the quiet self that I have today.

(gentle music) And it was there that in meeting my kid's dad, I fell in love with my father-in-law, who was just a quiet soul, a beautiful man.

And when he died in 1996, I had only been carving stone for a little while, had been carving wood for many years, I had a very clear leading to carve his gravestone.

And I asked my mother-in-law, I said, "I really want to carve this stone for Fran, I wanna do it in slate, I want it to look like something from the 18th century."

And she said, yes.

In memory of Major Francis Clyde Sprague, he departed this life, May 8th, 1996, aged 69 years, five months, 15 days, a quiet and gentle spirit.

(gentle music) The Providence Journal did an article about this woman that's hand carving this stone.

And from that article, I got four more commissions.

And when the phone rang, I'd say to them, "You do know that's the only stone I've ever carved aside from a pet stone that I had done for a friend."

(gentle music) The work that we have is a little bit different, it's quite creative, it looks like it's always been here.

(gentle music) This piece here, it's very different, it's an organic piece of granite where I took the family up to the quarry at the Granite Quarry in the Berkshires.

I said, you know, I can imagine having it cut all the way through.

You and I cannot fit through this passageway in our physical form, but upon losing this body, I'd like to think the spirit could move freely through here.

An arch is a symbol of strength, but it's also a metaphor for passageways.

There's the before and there's the after, there's the now, there's the journey, and then there's the other side.

What is the other side?

I don't know, I'll meet you there.

(gentle music) The families that call and trust us to do their final memorials is just very powerful for me.

(gentle music) I think to myself, how did I get to do this?

This is it, this is the work I've always, I didn't ever imagine it, just one day at a time, it evolved, it evolved, and I kept saying, yes, (gentle music) I haven't designed my own stone yet, no, I don't know what that's gonna be, but I've always thought the epitaph on there might be, she was a passionate woman.

(gentle music)