Best of the Best: Four Years Running!

Last week, the community offered an affirmation.

For the fourth consecutive year, Arlington has captured the title of Best Funeral Home and Crematory in the Cincinnati.com Community Choice Awards. The award was announced at the Community Choice Gala held on the evening of December 3^rd.

A Community’s Trust Reflected In How We Serve

Death is a constant in our lives. It visits all of us and is a disquieting reality. Grief jarringly stops families in their tracks while life rushes relentlessly all around them. At Arlington Memorial Gardens, we understand our role is to serve as a bulwark for the community in times of despair, a place of steadiness in a churning world. It’s a place where people can briefly lay aside their sorrow and find the strength to move through what feels impossible.

In 2024, Arlington earned multiple Best of the Best awards across several different categories. We were honored to be nominated in those four categories again this year, and the community selected us as the Best Funeral Home and Crematory. Sometimes a single distinction sharpens the focus on the part of our work most unique to our mission of service: the place where ritual, memory, and trust converge, underscoring the absolute centrality that guides everything we do.

People sometimes assume that a funeral home is the sum total of its enormous or polished physical facilities. We’re proud of our beautiful, contemporary spaces, but we believe that what truly shapes a family’s experience are countless behind-the-scenes actions. They happen when a director spends time with a family, listening and consoling. Or, when a crematory operator double-checks every small detail and cares for a loved one with human tenderness and technical precision. They happen when a Family Care Advisor guides a family grappling with decisions they were unprepared to make. It’s these quiet, unnoticed acts, repeated time after time, that are award-worthy.

Why This Recognition Reinforces Our Calling

Families return to Arlington year after year, not because of advertising, but because they remember how they were treated when they were at their lowest. Friends, neighbors, and relatives remind them that “Arlington cared for us.”

In receiving this award, it’s more to us than a vote count. It is a reaffirmation of our mission and the values we consistently practice. This fourth win does not signal the end of a journey. It reinforces the motivation to keep refining the work, deepening our service, and honoring the responsibility families place in our hands. Excellence in death care is never a finish line. It is a calling practiced one family at a time.

As we celebrate this recognition, we do so with an enormous sense of gratitude for the community that trusts us, to the families who allow us to serve them, and for every member of the Arlington team whose compassion makes this place more than a set of buildings. All of this is the inspiration that guides us into the year ahead.