Neglected cemetery needs help from the community

Vietnam Veteran Cruz Abarca’s military creed of Leave No One Behind drives him to restore the neglected Memory Gardens cemetery where hundreds of headstones were sunken into the ground.

“Last week we completed raising the last 600 headstones,” Abarca said.

Abarca and volunteers have been working for over a year.

“So, now we’re onto the other phase, which is setting up the solar lights,” Abarca explained.

This week they put in 20, but, they need over 1,000 to cover headstones and the area properly. He said the lights give respect and beauty to the resting place.

“We’re trying to light the cemetery up at night, so it’ll look really nice when people pass by. We’re trying to bring this back up to make it look green, but it’s going to take a while. But, in the meantime, we’re doing whatever we can to give it some sort of beauty to it,” Abarca said.

He’s personally touched by the restoration work.

“My mother and my older brother and my paternal grandparents are buried out here. But, I’m also a Vietnam vet. And there’s also over 60 veterans buried out here. I thought it was a very terrible wrong that these people had been abandoned this way. And I just felt it was the right thing to do,” Abarca said.

He said to continue their work they need a bobcat to level areas of ground, and they also need trees. He’s hoping the community will respond to their need.

“When we initially started this project, to the north side of the cemetery, we took out, I want to say at least 12 dead trees. So, we want to make that we replace those for the families that initially planted those,” Abarca said.

Memory Gardens cemetery is at Highway 86, between City of Imperial and Brawley. People can find Abarca working there on Saturday mornings from 6 to 10. He can also be contacted through Facebook.

“This is part of the community. There’s a lot of families from this valley that are buried out here,” Abarca concluded.