01:00 AM EST on Sunday, February 15, 2004

BY MEAGHAN WIMS
Journal Staff Writer

Abbie Hoisington has no name.

Her gravesite, all these months later, is distinguished not by a stately granite headstone, but by a hole, a small abyss about four inches deep where a proud stone marker should be.

Leaves and snow gather in the small ditch. Weeds sprout. Flower baskets tip over on windy days.

Her birthday has passed. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day have gone. And this week -- the one-year anniversary of her death, at age 28 -- will slip by, and Abbie Hoisington will still lie in an unmarked grave.

Her family is furious.

Losing Abbie, and in such a public, tragic way last Feb. 20, was hard enough. It makes it all the worse, her family says, that her resting place is bare.

Finding a stone for Abbie's grave has become a mission for the Hoisingtons, a focus for the energy of their grief, a mother's obsession for a daughter's final tribute.

"This is my way to protect her," says Bonnie Hoisington. "I couldn't protect her from dying, but I can be her advocate now."

On an afternoon last fall, Abbie's sister, Sarah, placed autumn flowers in the small void at the head of Abbie's grave.

Bonnie stared at the hole, littered with aging flowers and guarded by a small angel statue. She likened the gravesite to a dump.

"It makes you angry," Sarah said.

"I wanted Abbie to have a place to be," Bonnie added, looking away. "So much for 'rest in peace.' "

A QUIET GRIEF slips in and out of the Hoisingtons' lumbering home in the Edgewood neighborhood of Cranston.

The porch screen door slammed shut one morning last summer. Bonnie's breath caught. For a second, she thought Abbie was home for her weekly dinner visit, with a story to tell or a new outfit to show off.

It was only the wind.

That day, Bonnie went to her daughter's grave and cried. Wind chimes they'd hung from a nearby tree let out a sweet clanging.

She stopped crying and drove home.

It took Lee, Abbie's father, until December to go back to his teaching job. Abbie's younger brothers, Matt and Jon, still haven't returned to college. Sarah and Bonnie regularly see counselors.

"Certain things knock you over and make you sick to your stomach," Bonnie says. "I do the routine stuff, the house, the laundry. I cannot predict what will crush me. I wake up every morning with it."

The Hoisingtons' anguish has been compounded by an ongoing dispute with Pawtuxet Memorial Park, a private cemetery in Warwick where Abbie is buried.

The family says the park's owners, Stephen and Mary Douglas, have prevented them from getting a proper headstone for Abbie's grave. The owners are not talking.

Sitting in limbo in a Cranston workshop is a flat, black granite stone bearing an etched likeness of Abbie's smiling face.

SOON AFTER ABBIE'S death in The Station nightclub fire, her parents arranged for her burial at Pawtuxet, where they have a family plot going back to 1899.

The family wanted a simple, low headstone for Abbie. But, according to Bonnie Hoisington, the Douglases told them they couldn't have a headstone, giving no reason, but saying someone was buried next to Abbie. That perplexed the family. Who?

The cemetery owners also told them that two adjoining graves are necessary to erect a headstone, the Hoisingtons say. Again, the family was confused: single headstones dot the park's grounds, and the family's cemetery deed lists no restrictions on headstones.

But the family grudgingly, and in the fog of their sudden loss, agreed to start work on a footstone instead.

Bonnie says she never felt good about it. She worried that grass would grow to cover the stone and that it would slip and sink after heavy rains. The family paid for Pawtuxet to install a foundation four inches beneath the eventual footstone.

THAT'S WHEN Jason Loffredo comes in.

After the deadly Station blaze, Cranston's Loffredo's Monumental Decor, owned by Jason's father, Albert, offered to provide gravestones free for any of the victims. The families of two dozen victims have taken Loffredo's up on its offer.

Jason, who's been working with his dad since he was a kid, sought Abbie's family out. He remembers Abbie, especially her laugh, from when they were in the same homeroom at Cranston East High School.

On a bright morning last April, Bonnie, Sarah and Abbie's aunt, Janice Levenson, arrived at Loffredo's to finalize the design for the 2- by 1-foot footstone.

They were clear about what they wanted: Abbie believed in angels.

But the angel they chose for the corner of the shiny granite looked too young, silly. They wanted Jason to remove her bangs. He adjusted the computer image.

But the smiles didn't last long.

Bonnie had also chosen a quote for the gravestone, a wellknown passage from Hamlet: "Flights of angels sing thee to your rest." But she wasn't totally comfortable with it.

"Because it's so permanent, we've been going back and forth," she said.

Once they saw Jason's design on the computer, they relaxed.

"It looks right," Sarah said, tearing up, her arms crossed.

THE SLIM BLACK stone began its journey.

Up to a Vermont quarry town once, twice, to an artist specializing in diamond-etched engravings. The artist carved a snapshot of Abbie so realistic that visitors to Loffredo's recognized her face from the newspaper clippings.

By June, the etching was finished and ready to be viewed. Lee, Bonnie and their eldest son, Kevin, rushed inside Loffredo's dusty workshop to stare down at the stone.

"It looks just like her," Bonnie said, her eyes welling up. "It's beautiful, Jason."

They ran their hands over her picture, leaving disappearing finger marks on the glossy rock.

"It's eerie, it's so beautiful," Bonnie said of the engraving.

The Loffredos planned to take it from there, sandblasting and carving out Abbie's name, the Hamlet quote and the angel.

Jason Loffredo knows there's no room for error in the business of permanence. Gravestones are meant to last lifetimes.

"I'll make sure it looks good," he promised Abbie's family.

IN JULY, Bonnie went to Pawtuxet Memorial Park to make burial arrangements for her ailing mother, who would be buried next to Abbie. The cemetery owners, Bonnie says, maintained that someone was buried in that spot.

The site was probed, Bonnie says, and it was found to be empty.

And that's when the Hoisingtons say things got even more complicated. They said the owerns told them they could, after all, have a headstone for Abbie -- but that she and her grandmother would have to share it.

The Hoisingtons didn't want that.

The family contacted a close friend, Justin Shay, a Providence lawyer representing Abbie's estate.

Shay wrote to Pawtuxet Memorial in September, saying the owners had no right to deny the Hoisingtons a headstone for Abbie, and that flip-flopping on the decision tasked the family's emotions.

"[T]he behavior of Pawtuxet Memorial Park personnel toward Mrs. Hoisington and her family under these circumstances appears to be, at best, a callous indifference to a family that has been a loyal patron of the Pawtuxet Memorial Park for generations," Shay wrote.

Pawtuxet's actions are "an intentional, reckless infliction of emotional distress upon persons suffering under the most difficult of circumstances."

Stephen Douglas responded by phone and said the cemetery has a rule against headstones, Shay recalled.

Shay wrote to the cemetery once more, in November.

"Your admission that 'mistakes were made' in this case is an understatement," he wrote, arguing that Pawtuxet violated state law and property rights by denying the family a headstone and not keeping accurate burial records.

Pawtuxet, Shay says, has ignored that letter and subsequent phone calls. He said he's considering filing suit against the cemetery. The family wants to be reimbursed for the cost of having the footstone etched and won't start work on a headstone until the matter is settled.

"I guess it's a stalemate," Shay says.

The owners of Pawtuxet Memorial Park have rebuffed several overtures by phone, by mail, and in person to comment for this story.

"I think it's a private matter, and I don't think it should be discussed in the paper," Mary Douglas repeated this week.

ON A STIFLING May afternoon, the family gathered in the office of Rhode Island College President John Nazarian for a private ceremony to receive Abbie's graduate degree. They'd skipped graduation day because they thought it'd be too tough.

"All we can say is that I'm sure she's looking down upon you," Nazarian said, "and saying, I knew I'd make them all get together and honor what I've done."

Bonnie clutched the diploma to her chest, her bracelets dangling from her wrists, her eyes wet.

The family gathered around the small diploma, touching it, quiet.

Abbie was always the one who insisted on carrying on family holiday traditions: Easter baskets, Christmas stockings, decorating the tree, the works. The family went to Vegas to escape last December.

On Friday, the one-year anniversary of The Station fire, Bonnie and Lee will be in Florida for a short vacation. Yesterday, Bonnie brought a pink ceramic pig -- Abbie's favorite animal -- to place at her grave for Valentine's Day.

These days, it's getting harder to remember Abbie, Bonnie says. Memories are fading, lost in the expanse of passing time: a full year without her.

Sometimes, Abbie's absence doesn't seem possible.

"In your mind, you know it's real," Bonnie says. "In your heart, you'll never know."

If Abbie walked in the house today, she says, it wouldn't surprise her.