Proposed Development Near Forest Lawn Cemetery

To the Editor:

A poem. Author unknown.

Lives are commemorated - deaths are recorded - families are reunited - memories are made tangible - and love is undisguised.

This is a cemetery.

Community's accord respect, families bestow reverence, historians seek information and our heritage is thereby enriched.

Testimonies of devotion, pride and remembrance are carved in stone to pay warm tribute to accomplishments and to life - not to death - of a loved one.

The cemetery is homeland for family memorials that are a sustaining source of comfort for the living.

A cemetery is a history of people - a perpetual record of yesterday and a sanctuary of peace and quiet today.

A cemetery exists because every life is worth loving and remembering - always.

Forest Lawn Cemetery is a historical treasure, but what many fail to realize is that it is an active cemetery for the living to honor life. A developer has proposed the insensitive and inappropriately named development Mill Creek Flats. Mill Creek Flats is a multi-story apartment building. It is treating the cemetery and the families of Forest Lawn as abandoned property. They could not have picked a worse name if they tried. The insulting and disrespectful name has me flat. It reveals the lack of respect and the insensitivity of the entire proposed project. Forest Lawn Cemetery is visited by the mourning daily. Such a large building with many windows built to observe mourners is insensitive, intrusive, undignified, and disturbing. This is an invasion of privacy that does not lend itself to comfort, peace, honor, and remembrance.

Mourners, friends, advocates and allies please educate yourself on this proposed development.

Amy Luczak