The Cemetery Guy

6/5/2024

Kelly Penman Jr. is a nurse by day and a cemetery repair guy by, well, also day. He grew up in Des Moines, but, like most in the U.S., has ancestral ties to countries overseas. Nine years ago, Penman was looking for a family member’s headstone in Scotland. 

“It had fallen down when I located it, so we put it back up. As I looked around that same cemetery, it looked terrible because they were all down,” Penman said.

Penman says finding time to balance this practice and his nursing job isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

“Nurses work long days, but we don’t work very many days. So it’s something to do on my day off, and I find a lot of peace in it. It’s my therapy,” Penman said. 

From there, Penman, who was in the Navy, began cleaning and restoring other graves when he had the chance. He says it felt natural for him to start working on other veterans’ graves. A lot of the work he does comes with the help of his friend, Brady Jackson.

“We started resetting some of them, and then we actually got to the point where we’re putting broken ones back together. We pretty much work with 1800s, early 1900s stones, traditionally. They are easier to work with. They’re just heavier,” Penman said.

Penman had no prior experience working with and repairing gravestones. The quantity of restorations he has worked on helped him develop his gravestone-repairing skills. Online videos helped, too.

“A lot of online research,” Penman said. “I’ve got some people who did this as a business practice. I would reach out to them, and they were kind of mentoring me via social media, and we had private conversations. I would say, ‘Listen, I found this stone that’s broken into nine pieces, what do I do?’ ” 

As for how Penman’s practice has grown, it’s mainly been through word of mouth since he doesn’t operate a business and works as a volunteer. That same word of mouth was how he got his name, “The Cemetery Guy.”

“I was in the Carlisle cemetery one day, which is where I had started, and I heard a couple of gentlemen on a cemetery tour,” he said. “One said to the other, ‘Have you heard about that guy, the cemetery guy, that’s doing work around here?’ ” 

Penman says since Carlisle is a small community, his work at the local cemetery quickly spread around the community. Since those early days, Penman has cleaned, fixed, adjusted, repaired and replaced cemetery stones across Iowa. He recently repaired a stone from Nebraska. 

“We will find graves that have headstones that are sunken, and we’ll dig them up and we’ll actually put them back together using the appropriate materials. Some of that is knowing what different compounds are for whatever era the stones are from,” Penman said.

Penman doesn’t know the exact number of stones he’s worked on over the years, but he says, “It’s certainly more than a few.” 

“Hundreds. Hundreds. Hundreds. We’ve reset and repaired hundreds, and we’ve cleaned probably hundreds more on top of that. The cleaning is the easy part, as long as we’re using the proper materials,” Penman said. 

This work comes with significant pressure, understandably.

“There are a lot of eyes on you,” he said. “If you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, people notice. We try to follow the National Cemetery preservation guidelines.” 

Providing this service involves the preservation of final resting places for friends’ and families’ loved ones, too. As such, it’s understandable that Penman has encountered heartwarming reactions over his nine seasons of work.

“It evokes a lot of emotions, tears. I’ve been hugged a lot,” he said. ♦