LEWISTON — The Rev. Steve Crowson believes everyone — rich and poor, sane and sick — deserves to be remembered.

“We serve people that other people don’t see,” said Crowson, the priest at Trinity Episcopal Church in Lewiston.

Some are forgotten when they die.

“They don’t have anyplace to go,” Crowson said. Some alienated family. Some lived adrift.

In an alcove beside the 19th-century stone church, Crowson has led the creation of a community memorial garden.

Here, the church will bury people’s ashes at no cost.

“They can come here,” Crowson said.

It’s an idea the aging priest had instituted years ago at a Long Island, N.Y., church. He requested two plots in the church-owned cemetery and made it into a free burial site for cremated remains.

It filled a need.

“I was there 11 years and we had at least 40 people buried there by the time I left,” said Crowson, a white-bearded gentleman with a cane and an accent that points to his boyhood in Alabama.

He believes the need is here in Lewiston, too.

Crowson’s church sits at the corner of Bates and Spruce streets, on the edge of the poorest neighborhood in Maine.

For decades, Trinity Episcopal has fed people, eventually breaking off its soup kitchen as a separate nonprofit organization, the Trinity Jubilee Center.

In a small way, the garden will continue its service to the neighborhood, Crowson said.

He recently took a call from a woman who had lost her mother. The woman pleaded for money to pay her funeral expenses. Crowson refused. The church, which has only 32 members, doesn’t have the money.

But the priest volunteered to conduct the service.

He also volunteered to find a place to bury the ashes. Though they may not be buried in many public areas, there are few rules governing cremated remains.

The woman’s ashes could be the first buried beneath the garden’s surface of crushed stone.

“We’re not going to let people disappear,” Crowson said. “We’re going to honor their existence.”

Officially, the garden will open Sunday, following a 4 p.m. dedication service. Hymns will be sung and a proclamation will be read.

A sign marks the spot with the line: “We remember those we love but see no longer.”

The garden also features a baptismal font that was moved from the church, and a pair of homemade benches constructed from a piece of the church’s wrought-iron fence.

People can enter the garden and rest. But there will likely be little quiet, either from the street or the construction site on the other side.

“We have to bring our own silence,” Crowson said.

dhartill@sunjournal.com