Green Acres Cemetery

The cemetery that I chose to visit was “Green Acres Mortuary and Cemetery in Scottsdale. Green Acres Mortuary and Cemetery was established and has been managed by the Hawkins family since 1957. It is a part of Dignity Memorial, which is America’s largest provider of funeral, cremation, and cemetery services. Upon driving into Green Acres’s grand stone walls, it doesn’t take long to notice the vast amount of graves that lie within it. There are small roads that wind within the cemetery to take you as close as possible to the grave you wish to visit. Green Acres’s grounds are very lush and green with lots of bushes and very large, shady trees. Everything appears to be very well kept up, with some areas even giving me a “golf-course” like vibe.

Scattered throughout the cemetery were small buildings that looked like living rooms within a home. They were decorated with bookcases, couches and chairs, and even fish tanks. Inside those rooms I saw people reading and sitting quietly on the couches. I found this especially interesting, as I have never seen that at a cemetery before. Green Acres seems to pride itself on being a sort-of “one-stop” funeral choice, with having a mortuary, chapel, and cemetery all within their land.
Green Acres Cemetery really surprised me with all of the different types of memorials they had there. While most of the grave markers were traditional-looking headstones, there were also several giant and elaborate memorials. There was one memorial in particular towards the back of the cemetery that had a concrete divider around the whole plot and it contained a whole family. There was a very large memorial in a tombstone shape at the head of the plot that had a picture of the husband, wife, and daughter-who was holding her puppy, and one single date of death for all three of them engraved into it. The memorial had steps coming down from it, and a bench attached as well and all appeared to be made out

Just walking around you can see large clusters of graves with Asian writing on them, a Jewish section, a Veteran’s section, amongst others. Upon walking around the cemetery, I kind of got the sense that most of these people came from at the very least middle to upper class families, just because of the extravagance of some of the memorials and headstones. Certain very extravagant memorials left my feeling curious, especially the large and eye-catching memorial of the family that all had the same date of death. I did some research and came to learn that this family died in a plane crash a couple of years ago and he was an extremely wealthy businessman. Located just a few feet from that plot was WWE star, Eddie Guerrero’s grave. One last memorial that I saw in the “Cremation Garden”, that stood out to me was a man named “Emil Kranzler” who’s plaque said “I’m Off to See the Wizard”. I researched Emil Kranzler and found that he played the role of a munchkin in the original Wizard of Oz movie (Find a Grave). Just by observing the grave markers and memorials located within this cemetery, I learned so much about so many of the people who are buried there. While I learned a lot about the people buried there, I also learned a bit about the living people who visit the cemetery. Almost all of the graves appeared as though they had been visited fairly recently, with some