When I first arrived at the cemetery my first initial reaction to the area was it was loud. Being right next to a major highway with a lot of traffic, the cemetery is not entirely an ideal location for peace and quiet. We started out just walking around and looking at the different graves. Other than the noise level, the cemetery is extremely beautiful and is very well kept up. The cemetery is very large as well. Throughout the cemetery are roads you can actually drive through to help you get through the cemetery faster, as well as several covered seating areas. The cemetery itself is divided in half by a rather dirty looking river, really no more than a large ditch. This kind of took away from the appeal of the cemetery and made it harder to navigate as there was only one crossing which required an extensive amount of walking.
Now the primary reason I chose this cemetery was because of family, however this was not the only reason I chose it. When researching the cemetery before I visited I discovered that this was the burial place for the Yates children, the children who were murdered by their mother back in 2001. I remember hearing about this tragic story from my parents. The reason it moved me the way it did was because my father had actually gone to school with the mother that committed the murder. So all in all, I really wanted to find this grave. It was pretty easy to find as it was a very large headstone with a picture of each of the 5 children engraved onto it. Three of the kids are buried in front of the headstone, while two more are behind the headstone. It is sad to see the grave markers and realize that the oldest child was only seven years old and the youngest was only six months old.
After visiting the Yates' grave, we carried on with exploring the rest of the cemetery. Some of the interesting things we noticed were that there was a lot of graves that were only partially filled out, with spots reserved for future family members. I thought this was a neat aspect that all family members would eventually be buried all right next to each other, and at the same time I felt sad for the one person already buried there knowing they are alone until someone ultimately joins them.
I found several headstones that had images relating to what that person liked or what they were interested in, and one even of what that person did for a living. We found quite a few foreign graves, many of which were in different languages. Some of the graves were really because some of them have the epitaph in their native language as was as translated in english next to them. Not all of the foreign graves that we saw did this though.
In conclusion I found the Forest Park East Cemetery to be culturally enlightening. I discovered that even though these people are dead, we can still learn a great deal from them. We learn their stories, such as the Yates kids. We learn who they were and what they did. We learn if they were a war veteran or a war casualty. We can learn a lot about our history from the graves of our dead. In addition to what we can learn, the simple fact about how we treat our dead is a statement of its own. While some third world countries would simply throw you in the ground, our society has grown to not just burring our dead, but instead we are honoring our fallen and lost.
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| Father and Mother grave with deer and doe imagery. |
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| This grave was interesting to me because of the amount of detail that was put into the fish statue. |
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| This one I actually found a little humorous. I'm guessing that the person buried here was a crane operator. |
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| This Husband, Father and Grandfather must really have loved his dogs. |
