He's engraved over 10,000 headstones — including his own

Hugh Tanchuck grew up going to cemeteries with his father. He remembers weaving in and out of rows of headstones, fixating on the ages of the deceased. “Oh, they were 50,” he would think to himself. “They were so old.”

“Now I'm 58 years old and I’m looking at all these stones going, ‘Hey, I'm older than that person,’ ” Tanchuck said. “When you’re young, life is forever. As you get older, you're seeing that it’s not forever.”

Tanchuck runs North Shore Monuments in Glen Head, which his grandfather started in the early 1900s and passed down through the generations.

Tanchuck’s great-grandfather, Alden, was a stone mason in Ukraine. Alden’s son Harry immigrated to the United States and started a masonry business in the Bronx. And Harry’s son — Tanchuck’s father, Martin — expanded the company to Long Island. North Shore Monuments engraves and restores headstones and also specializes in bronze and stone services.

Tanchuck didn’t think he would wind up in the monument business.

“[My dad] would always teach me this and I’d say, ‘I'm never gonna do this,’ ” Tanchuck recalled. “He’d say, ‘Well, it's something you could always fall back on.’ ”

“30-some-odd years later, I'm still here.”

‘The monument guy’

Tanchuck runs the operations at North Shore Monuments with his wife, Maggie. He taught his five employees how to engrave, carve and shape stone. Tanchuck calls himself a “community monument dealer." He often provides for friends, relatives and neighbors.

“It's always strange being the monument guy and going to someone you know’s funeral,” Tanchuck said. “I have actually been to a funeral of a friend and they'll be like, ‘Of course we were going to get the monument with you.’ And I'm like, well, I just came here to pay respects.”

Tanchuck says he’s personally crafted “probably over 10,000” headstones. His business has created monuments for various religions, and engraved stones in languages such as Farsi, Spanish and Korean.

“Every group has their own set of rules for what they like to see and what their image of a monument is,” Tanchuck said.

He’s currently working with a Greek family: “A lot of the monuments in Greece are like a box with see-through glass doors, and you can see in there and they'll have some mementos of their person.”

Tanchuck added that he’s working with a Chinese family and a “feng shui” expert on a monument now, as well, and certain aspects of this monument must be very precise, like the angle of the base and the color.

The final step

Tanchuck has seen the monument industry change through the years, particularly with cemeteries becoming more “regulated.” 

“I think you're going to see less and less family-run businesses like this because of the cost of regulation and the cost of insurance,” he said. “There's very few people running the industry, so that concerns me. Funeral homes are now selling monuments directly to the customer.” Plots of land are also getting smaller, he says, which means the size of the stones shrink, while costs of just about everything keep going up.

Tanchuck isn’t sure what the future holds for his business. His daughter is studying physics — “I don’t know if that’s gonna work with this.” And his son has an engineering degree. Tanchuck thinks he’ll “follow his own path” but he adds, just as his father told him, the family business is something he could always fall back on.

But it’s more than just a business — Tanchuck believes he plays an important role in the grieving process. He says he makes sure to follow “a bit of a script” when he meets someone who’s lost a loved one. He always asks questions about the size, color and finish of a stone, but also listens and works to understand what the family wants.

He also considers himself the “final step” in saying goodbye to a loved one, since people usually come to him after making funeral arrangements.

“They've come to some kind of grips with it, and then we make the monument, and that's the last thing they could do for the person," he said.

When Tanchuck’s father Martin died in 1998, neither he nor his stepmother wanted to take that final step of creating a monument. It took her “a year to the date” of his passing to come into Tanchuck’s shop and start making plans. It took him another year to begin working on the headstone.

“No one else was going to do my father's monument but me,” he said. “None of my workers, nobody. And it took me almost a year because I just didn't want to do it. It’s still hard to go see that.”

They picked a shady spot in Melville Cemetery at the base of a slender dogwood tree. A branch of flowers is engraved across the top of the stone.

“When I was making his monument, I was thinking of all the things that make my father unique. He was a simple man — he liked John Wayne, he was a bit of a tough guy, he was one of those guys who just wanted to see you succeed. So I was thinking of all these things I should put on the monument, and then when it got down to it, we just kept it simple. People get caught up and want to get all of their emotions out at that moment, but I think it’s better to keep it simple.”

Until death do us part

There’s another headstone Tanchuck wanted to do himself: his own. There are monuments displayed throughout his lobby of all shapes, sizes and finishes. Tucked under a large American flag is one with the name “Tanchuck” peeking out.

His wife’s ashes will go inside of the monument, enclosed by a bronze door. He will go in the ground adjacent to it. It’s handcarved, tall and made of granite.

“Everyone has a different view on why they get a monument,” he said. “I feel like it's out of respect; that someone has been on this planet. We all view it differently. I have people who will go to that gravesite every single day for years. 

“But some people are cemetery people, some people are not.”

By Rachel Weiss

rachel.weiss@newsday.com@RachMWeiss

Rachel Weiss joined Newsday in 2016. As a real estate/living multimedia reporter, Rachel writes feature stories and contributes to and appears in on-camera video packages. She was the lead reporter on Newsday’s LI Acts of Kindness series.