Incredible story of elderly woman who asked to be buried in NYC pet cemetery: Hard-drinking, chain-smoking lesbian, 92, was fired from Hallmark for creating pop-up JESUS card – and had heartbreaking secret reason for her chosen burial site

Nearly a thousand people are buried in New York City’s largest pet cemetery, along with their beloved dogs, birds and even Mariah Carey’s cat.

Sometimes more upset about the deaths of their furry friends than their own parents, they arrange to leave a plot inches away for when they join them.

But never had Hartsdale Pet Cemetery staff been sent the remains of a person to be buried alone until Patricia Chaarte’s ashes arrived in 2020.

The 92-year-old woman left instructions for the urn to be shipped from her home in San Miguel de Allende, a small city in Mexico popular with expats.

Ed Martin, who manages the cemetery his family built a century ago, was appalled: Why did she want to be buried all alone, without friends or family?

The following year, Chaarte’s tragic story unraveled – starting with an innocuous photo of a mother and child, the New York Times explained.

Born Patricia Lou Bassett on January 11, 1928, Chaarte grew up in Kansas City but moved to New York as soon as she graduated high school.

There she worked as an illustrator, including for Hallmark, until she was fired for creating an Easter card with a pop-up Jesus in it, with the caption “He is Risen.”

A friend later described this as a classic example of her particular brand of humor, and a product of “impatience with boredom and pointless repetition of banality.”

Later, after realizing she was a lesbian, she opened a craft store on the Upper East Side called 2 Needles with her longtime friend Wendy Johnson.

The couple retired in 1991 and moved to San Miguel de Allende, where Chaarte developed a close circle of friends to whom she left thousands of dollars each in her will, along with two housekeepers and a hairdresser.

Those friends described her as a lovable miser with a sharp wit and an even sharper tongue.

“I knew her balance was improving when I stopped hearing four-letter words coming out of her mouth,” said her personal trainer and close friend Janis McDonald.

Chaarte Chain smoked Camels and guzzled Dewars gin with just a single ice cube, while crushing ‘extreme’ crossword puzzles and beating everyone at Scrabble.

She was also such a fan of peanut butter that she often ate it straight from the jar with a spoon.

But beneath her tough New York exterior lay a deep, unyielding pain that bubbled to the surface on certain holidays or after enough drinks.

Her friends all knew, but Chaarte spent 569 days buried alone because she never told the lawyers handling her cases.

What it took was for McDonald to impulsively take a photo of an old photo of her friend with a baby in her arms, as part of a small shrine on her mantel, and send it to attorney Brian Johnson.

Not only did she assume that he too knew she had a son who died decades ago, but that Chaarte was buried next to him.

The little boy in her arms was Dana Bassett, whom she had in 1954 as the result of a one-night stand and who was minutes away from having an abortion until she changed her mind.

Desperate to prevent him from falling in with the wrong people, she married her boyfriend Abner Chaarte to give him a father figure.

The marriage was short-lived, but she kept his last name and so no one who interacts with her will make the connection.

But despite her best efforts as a single mother, Dana was addicted to heroin by the age of fourteen and died of an overdose just a few years later.

‘She never got over it. It was the tragedy of her life,” her longtime friend Melanie Nance told the NYT.

Another friend said she hated Christmas because it reminded her of Dana.

After moving to Mexico, Chaarte lived in a two-bedroom house that now rents for $1,500 a month. She devoted herself to an active social life and volunteered at a local animal shelter.

With a weak knee since she was 18 and a career spent sitting down, Chaarte started going to the gym after crouching near a dog cage and being unable to get up.

“Sitting behind a drawing board for years makes everything crumble,” she told McDonald when she came for help.

She lost 40 pounds and 10 percent of her body fat over the next ten years.

“Everyone now says I’m skinny, but that’s only because I used to be so fat,” she said.

McDonald tried to ‘educate her on the harms of smoking’ almost every week but gave up – but was surprised when she cut the habit in half after a year.

Just before she turned 80, she suffered a stroke that caused her to lose the right side of her vision in both eyes, affecting her balance and ability to read and do crossword puzzles.

She also developed severe anemia that caused fatigue, depression and loss of strength.

“I don’t want to be a sissy,” she told McDonald, doing her best to regain her strength and train her brain to read despite her failing eyesight.

But in the last years of her life she became increasingly vulnerable and was diagnosed with cancer, and even considered assisted suicide.

Chaarte was helped by her friends who brought her groceries and played cards at her nursing home, as his health deteriorated and the pain of Dana’s death outweighed him.

“When I die, one of my dreams would be to be with my son,” she told her friend Isaac Uribe, despite being an atheist.

Chaarte kept Dana’s ashes with her until she left and prepared to leave New York, and in January 1989 he buried him with his two beloved childhood pets.

As soon as McDonald told her the story, Johnson called Martin at the cemetery and located Dana’s grave, using Chaarte’s maiden name.

The small granite headstone bore not only Dana’s name and that of his dog Jackie Paper, and a cat, Puff the Magic Dragon, but at the very top, “Patricia.”

She should have been there the whole time.