Tribute Carved In Stone

July 19, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

MANTUA, Ohio

After his father died, Ron Fedor’s mother made a simple request.

Simple, yet difficult for a son to complete.

“Would you carve our headstone for us?” Roberta H. “Bootsy” Geiss-Fedor asked.

Richard J. “Red” Fedor died in October 2008 of lung cancer and the mother also was battling lung cancer.

Ron Fedor, 51, learned the craft and trade of stone carving and masonry from his father. He has operated the family’s business, Fedor Masonry, since his father retired 15 years ago.

The request left the son thinking about a fitting tribute.

Before his death, his dad also approached him about carving a headstone.

He began sketching his ideas on paper.

As his mother’s health deteriorated, Fedor said, it was difficult to share his ideas with her.

He showed her some sketches. One caught her eye.

She pointed to it, but she said, there was a problem with the drawing.

The idea Fedor had come up with was a stone wall to represent his father’s work, but the wall was to be left unfinished.

“Your father always finished his jobs,” his mother told him.

Then, Fedor recalled, his mother paused for a moment and a tear came to her eye.

She understood the meaning behind the headstone.

“She said, ‘I know what that means. He’s gone.’”

And so a few weeks after his mother died in October 2009 at age 73, the same age as her husband, Fedor began work on the memorial to his parents.

It started with several tons of Berea sandstone. The labor of love would last some 500 hours.

The painstaking work was done in his studio, inside a relocated 1820 log building from Alliance. It sits near a rebuilt 1820 barn originally located in Shalersville.

Through a window in his studio, Fedor could look out at his parents’ now-vacant home.

In November 2009, as he was in the early stages of making the headstone, he learned that he, too, had cancer. The diagnosis of prostate cancer came on the same date his parents had been married in 1956.

“I cried the first day, but that didn’t do any good,” he said.

His son, Brandon Fedor, offered encouragement and told him he knew he would beat the cancer.

“So I used the headstone as a focus, and not only was it easier to get over them dying, but to focus on this and get off of myself about being ill.”

Fedor is about halfway through radiation treatment for his cancer.

The headstone that he created is full of symbolism about his family. One column is tall, just like his dad. Another column is short, like his mother, who worked as bookkeeper for the family business.

On the monument are the tools of the family’s trade, including a mortar board and trowel, a brush, a hammer and a folding ruler.

There are five tulips carved into the stone, representing Ron and his four siblings.

There also are 24 tulip leaves representing his parents; his siblings and their spouses, including his wife, Sherry; his and Sherry’s two sons Brandon, 25, and Jordan, 18; and his siblings’ children.

There is an ivy vine with nine leaves representing the nine grandchildren in the family. There is also another vine with no leaves that represents that there are no great- grandchildren.

Asked whether he will someday carve his own headstone, Fedor said he has just started to think about it.

“I have my eyes on some stone,” he said.

The monument to his parents was installed at their grave site at Westlawn Cemetery on state Route 82 in Portage County’s Mantua Township just before Memorial Day.

The lessons learned from the effort are many, Fedor said.

“Never give up,” he said. “And appreciate your parents when they are alive. Respect them.”

The lasting legacy of the monument, he said, is “to leave this with other people and other generations, my kids and their kids and generations to come. This is what it’s all about.”