Updated: Sun., Oct. 17, 2010, 12:42 PM
Bronx man buries longtime love on top of wife
By HEATHER HADDON
www.nypost.comLast Updated: 12:42 PM, October 17, 2010
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It's big love -- six feet under.
Santos Ellin, 67, has buried his love of 18 years, Maria Acevedo, in the same Bronx grave as his wife, Lucy Ellin. Now the packed plot has sparked a family feud, with two sets of children arguing over the gravestone, the inscription and whether the two should be buried together at all.
"This has caused much strife and bad blood between the families," Maria's daughter Maribel Miranda, 43, wrote in a court petition earlier this month. She asked the court for permission to have her mother's casket exhumed and buried elsewhere in the same Castle Hill graveyard.
The problems started two years ago, when 61-year-old Maria succumbed to cancer and diabetes. Ellin said he buried his longtime partner in the plot he owns at St. Raymond's Cemetery -- you can put up to three bodies in the same grave -- because her children didn't have money to bury her themselves.
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"I put [Maria] there because she was my partner, my wife, my friend, my everything," Ellin said in his Bronx apartment lined with guitars and memorabilia from Puerto Rico. "I didn't want to move her."
Maria's death sent her five Bronx children into a terrible state of grief, Ellin said. He offered $1,000 for funeral-home service and space in the $4,600 grave, letting them know that his first wife of 20 years was resting there, he said.
"I don't regret it," said Ellin, who met Maria at a Bronx salsa club, with the pair going on to win dance contests. "I did love her very much."
Maria's daughter Miranda said she was "emotionally distraught" when she agreed to have her mother buried there and had been on medication that confused her.
The move also didn't sit well with the two adult children of Santos and Lucy, who didn't want Maria immortalized on the same gravestone. Maria's children instead have had to pray to a laminated photograph posted in the ground and have tried to compensate by adding plastic flowers and an "I love you beloved mother" sticker.
"It's hard," said Julio Miranda, 35, Maria's youngest child. "We are still dealing with my mom's death."
Santos' wife, Lucy, died, also from cancer, in 1980, when she was only 37. She had told him on her deathbed that he should find someone else.
Ellin added that it breaks his heart to have Maria uprooted from her eternal sleep, but he won't oppose the court petition.
Maria's children have since raised thousands of dollars to move their mom to a new plot they have picked in the same 180-acre cemetery. A judge has yet to respond to the request, but the petition was stamped "urgent."
If Maria is moved, Ellin's plot will be a double-decker instead of a triple-decker. His father, Daniel, also occupies the grave.
