In many Asian cultures, it is very common to commemorate the anniversary of someone’s passing rather than their birthday. For our family, we do this by visiting my grandparents’ gravesite every so often.
My maternal grandparents are both buried at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills, and for as long as I can remember (and been alive), we have visited their gravesites there. We used to go much more frequently and with many of the aunts, uncles, and cousins on my mom’s side, but nowadays, it’s more like a few times a year–around December when my grandfather passed away, maybe in May for Mother’s Day or then in September around my grandmother’s anniversary, and sometimes in October when my uncle passed away.
I’m not sure when exactly we stopped going as much, but I think maybe it started happening after a lot of the younger cousins went to college and the older cousins began having kids. It kind of became more and more difficult to organize and coordinate everyone, and now, I can’t remember the last time we had a big cemetery gathering with everyone.
It’s sounds sort of morbid, but we’d have picnics by the gravestones, laugh at jokes, maybe do the occasional human pyramid, but really, just spend time together. It was never a sad event; it was a celebration of our family members that had passed and our own way to remember them.
For Mother’s Day this year, my mom wanted to visit the cemetery, so the siblings all went with my parents after church.
Tim’s parents came down to visit us for Mother’s Day since his grandparents live in nearby Palm Desert, and the plan was for a big gathering out there on Sunday, and Val, my MIL, had mentioned in conversation that Tim’s great-grandfather was actually buried at Forest Lawn, but she couldn’t remember which one.
So after everyone dispersed (Tim and I were going to see Les Miserábles at the Pantages that night and everyone else went home), we had some time and decided to find out where Tim’s great-grandparents were buried. We went to the front desk, and they kindly looked up Grandpa Hopping for us, told us he was at the Glendale location, and gave us his plot number.
It was about an 18-minute drive over to Forest Lawn Glendale. I had been here once before maybe 16 years prior, so it was practically a brand-new experience!
The front buildings were super cute and looked like a little medieval castle village in a bizarre way. It was also a beautiful spring day, so the sky looked especially blue with puffy white clouds.
At the front, we asked the receptionist to help us find the plot location, and she referred us to the Forest Lawn app, which was actually surprisingly accurate down to the GPS directions.
They also had a tour guide pamphlet with some of the artwork throughout the “memorial park.” We grabbed one of those and were off!
The drive was actually a really pleasant trip through meandering streets that wove through rolling hills of gravesites (that didn’t quite look like gravesites), surprisingly enough. It just seemed like a nice drive through a park.
I really wanted to tour the Great Mausoleum; however, it was around 5:45 PM, and apparently all the buildings close around 4:30 PM. Inside, it has tons of Michelangelo full-sized replicas, a stained glass window replica of The Last Supper, and another series of windows called The Poet’s Windows. We’ll have to revisit on another day when we can get there before 4:30 PM!
After driving past the Great Mausoleum, you drive under this archway that was kind of fun, which leads to more winding roads throughout the cemetery. You get sweeping views of Glendale as well as a good view of all the house that abut the park, which if you aren’t afraid of living next to a bunch of dead bodies, actually seems to be quite pleasant.
The next stop on the “tour” was the Temple of Santa Sabina, which was a little building that didn’t actually warrant me getting out of the car (it was getting chilly, hehe).
After that, we continued our drive to the northeastern corner of of the park to where Tim’s grandparents are laid to rest. We used the Forest Lawn app directions, and it led us right to the correct area!
After looking around for about 5 minutes, we found the site:
It seems like it’s been quite some time since anyone came to visit, but the gravesites were very nicely tended to. Something I wonder is how long they keep graves before they reuse them (if they do?).
Wikipedia said that Forest Lawn Glendale houses over 250,000+ graves, which I would believe based on all the sprawling grounds we drove through. Some of the graves we saw around were from the 1940s and older! Pretty old. I wonder how many of the people buried here have no living descendants or maybe their family members don’t even know they’re buried here, or if even where they’re buried. Or how long it’s been since some of these graves have been visited? Or if the people buried here would’ve even cared when they were alive that anyone visited them at all when they were dead? Hard to say.
Anyways, we continued our driving tour of the park. A lot of the buildings had very relaxing names like Court of Freedom or Garden of Memory. Again, I’d really like to come back when I can go in some of the buildings and see some of the artwork.
After we finished our driving tour, we ended up driving straight over to the Pantages, which was only about 5 miles or so from where we were. For dinner, we went to Shake Shack, which is about a 5-minute walk from the Pantages. Tim had never been to Shake Shack, and, boy, was he excited!!
What we ordered:
Tim was happy with his ShackMeister Ale!
I made Tim do a Q&A of his impression:
More than In-n-Out?!! If you know Tim at all, those are strong words. After dinner, we headed to the Pantages for a GREAT production of Les Mis, and then home. It was a looong day!