Why you should visit cemeteries when you travel
- Aimee Boudreaux MacIver
- Oct 28
- 2 min read
New Orleans cemeteries are different. Some say iconic. There’s a whole industry of cemetery tours that escort groups past the graves of notorious voodoo queens, famous politicians, and historic generals.
But New Orleans cemeteries are also remarkably, unexpectedly beautiful because of their unique architecture. In this gumbo-bowl of a city with its swampy land, our graves are built above-ground. Cemeteries here look like little white cities of marble and granite. Ancient live oaks stand guard, their massive branches draped in dramatic Spanish moss.
I walk through our historic cemetery nearly every day. It’s peaceful, like a park, and makes me feel connected to something bigger than myself. Often I wonder about the people resting here, who they were, what they did with their lives. Some of the military graves give the teeniest bit of biographical info: Navy, World War I. Sometimes a prominent city member’s marker tells the longest story—as much as you can fit on a stone, anyway, which is still quite little.
But what I see more than anything else, sometimes even without a specific name or dates, is this: Mother. Father. Husband. Wife. Daughter. Son. Obviously these people did other things, worked various careers, held assorted roles in the community. All facts that we will never know, forgotten by history. In the end, the single most significant part of their life stories—the single thing we know about them, the single word chosen to represent a whole human life—are these relationships.
It’s the same all over the world. When you take a quiet hour to weave the cemetery rows in New Orleans, Paris, Rome, Ireland, anywhere—you gain a deep lesson in what matters first, most, and always.
“You well know that life is not long. You and I will soon be at the end, and we’ll be very grateful that we lived in a manner that doesn’t make our last hour too bitter.”
+St Zelie Martin
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