An 11-year-old boy pushes a lawnmower through the yards of South Fargo, North Dakota, under the summer sun of 2016. Brandon Bakke is not earning pocket money for a hoverboard or video games. He is determined to put a name and lasting memory on the previously unmarked grave of the biological father he never met.
Adopted at birth and raised by his adoptive mother, Brandy Bakke, Brandon began asking questions about his origins. With her help, the family connected on Facebook with his biological sister, Tiffany. She shared that their father, Terrence, had died the previous year at age 56 after an asthma attack and was buried at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, without a headstone. The family could not afford one.
“When I found out my dad’s grave didn’t have a stone, I got really sad and thought if I did something for him, he’d be proud,”
Brandon later told TODAY. He added,
“I don’t think anybody should go unknown in life, even though their choices they made or anything.”
Brandon already had about $175 saved from earlier lawn work. Told a marker would cost more, he distributed flyers, mowed for neighbors and strangers, and took on odd jobs through the summer, ultimately raising roughly $400. His mother contacted Dakota Monument in Fargo. Moved by the boy’s determination, the company donated the headstone and invited Brandon to help design it. Drawing on Tiffany’s description of their father’s generosity and love of cooking including feeding people in need Brandon chose imagery of two hands holding a bowl of soup, along with a heart. The finished red granite marker was revealed to him in early October.
In mid-to-late October 2016, Brandon and his adoptive family traveled to Illinois. At a special service at Burr Oak Cemetery, which waived its usual fees, the sixth-grader helped place the headstone. He met more than a dozen members of his biological family for the first time. The day mixed joy at new connections with the quiet sadness of never having known his father in life.
Inspired by the experience, Brandon launched “Mowing and Blowing for a Purpose,” a lawn-care and snow-removal effort aimed at helping other families afford memorial stones so that “nobody goes unknown in life.” He told reporters he believed his father would have been proud to call him his son.
