Displaced columbarium for ashes of Colorado Springs homeless community finds permanent resting spot

Dec. 13—Nomadic in life, homeless people who were displaced in death from a communal burial ground in Colorado Springs are reaching their last stop.

"It's been unfortunate, but it's good to know my brother will finally rest in peace in a friendly place and not have to move again," said longtime resident and psychologist Donna Johnson.

Her brother, Phil, always hated to move, Johnson said, on a lighter note.

Phil died in 2013, not without a home but as an ally who helped people living on the streets, and his ashes are among the cremains that were dug up in October from a nearly 30-year-old community columbarium for the disenfranchised and their supporters.

The Bijou Community, a group of social advocates for the destitute, dedicated the columbarium in 1993 on private residential property owned by the land trust they started in 1981.

Over objections of the organization's founders, new leaders of the land trust sold the property in 2020, and Bijou Community members realized they would need to relocate the ashes and decorative site.

They didn't know when that would happen, until Johnson drove by in October and saw that the land where the columbarium had stood for decades had been flattened.

The property had been sold again, and the columbarium's large stone wall and the candles, plastic flowers and personal mementoes that people had left around it over the years were taken down and put in storage, the group learned.

Bijou Community members located the spot where the ashes were buried, exhumed them and placed the soil in plastic barrels, until they could find a new location for the cremains, said Mary Lynn Sheetz, whose late husband, Steve Handen, was one of its creators.

City-owned Evergreen Cemetery offered an empty, crescent-shaped strip of land just inside the main gate at 1005 Hancock Expressway.

"That was an uncared and yet unused space, so it made perfect sense to use that for community good and taking care of our homeless population, when the need is there," said cemetery manager Cheryl Godbout.

"It's a final home for the homeless," she said.

The area has been cleared of brush and is becoming an ossuary, historically a place where human bones are comingled in the ground.

The site is not for public burial, Godbout said, but rather for ashes of the homeless that are connected to the work of the Bijou Community.

Once a human body is cremated, it is given final disposition, Godbout said, and families — or organizations that care for indigent people — can do whatever they wish with the ashes.

Volunteers are moving the stored items from the old columbarium to the cemetery.

The ashes will be reburied during the Bijou Community's annual Longest Night memorial service for all the homeless who have died in El Paso County this year. The number has been about 100 people for the past few years, and organizers expect a similar count this year.

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The public remembrance will begin at 5:30 p.m. on the winter solstice, Dec. 21, at the new ossuary at Evergreen Cemetery, with parking available in the lot just before the entrance gate.

Bijou Community member Esther Kisamore remembers Handen and homeless people building the columbarium in 1992.

The group gathered rocks to build the wall from near creek beds and other places homeless people lay their heads for the night, she said.

"It means a lot to me," Kisamore said. "It hurt knowing the property was sold and the columbarium was taken down. It's been a real community type of thing."

There is sadness in losing the original spot, said Bijou Community member Peter Sprunger-Froese.

"The respect and dignity that this columbarium gives to those who have died and our society deems as 'less than' is important," he said. "Everybody is important."

One of Kisamore's favorite memories is of a man who had AIDS helping with the wall construction until his physical abilities deteriorated.

"Then, he sat there in his wheelchair and joked and laughed with us while the wall was built," Kisamore said.

He and his mother's ashes are among those that were in the columbarium and that will be re-laid to rest next week.

Comingling ashes of the departed — with some of their real names and ages remaining unknown — means that although they may have left this life without apparent families or friends, in death they become part of a community that won't forget them, Kisamore said.

The purpose of the annual service isn't just about honoring deceased homeless, organizers of the Longest Night vigil say.

It's about the city's need to provide more housing for those who have lost their homes, Kisamore said.

It's also about nonviolence, said Sprunger-Froese, who has advocated for peace, justice and nonviolence as a way of life for his entire life.

"Hearing the names of those who have died and how they were given this honor of total respect, it's not a great step to why can't all life be sacred, why should there be war and violence," he said.

"The homeless are seen as expendable, but we remember those that are judged as the least in society," he said, "and in doing so, this innocent thing has the power to change a world view."

The ashes of people who will occupy the new ossuary will join the likes of the city's pioneers who have been laid to rest at Evergreen Cemetery, which was deeded to the city in 1875 by Colorado Springs founder William Jackson Palmer.

He is buried there, as are American prospector and philanthropist Winfield Scott Stratton and poet Helen Hunt Jackson.