Burial with dignity

A New York cemetery tour guide and former senior editor of the popular travel site Atlas Obscura, Allison Meier has written what feels like a guidebook to the American grave. Grave—an installment in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons, a series of compact, beautifully designed books about “the hidden life of ordinary things” such as shopping malls, motels, snakes, and blue jeans—is a digestible history and literary tour of American funerary practices, but it’s not just that. It’s also a case for the dignity of the human person beyond death and a call to keep the dead in community with the living.

Meier has researched graves for years, crawling through tunnels to the depths of the Paris catacombs, shining her flashlight into the chaos of skeletal remains that look to her like the mouth of hell. Yet her interest in graves and funerary traditions doesn’t come across as macabre. She visits—and works in—the graveyards of New York City because she wants to know about the people who lived there before her. While she finds cemeteries to be great repositories of cultural history, she also sees them as spaces deserving of reverence. The quality of her engagement and advocacy work conveys her deep respect for the dead.

Grave is also a pandemic book, written while the vulnerability of New York’s funerary systems was being exposed on international news with unforgettable images of parked refrigerated trucks accepting the overflow of bodies from the local hospitals. “This is not a place I want to die,” Meier found herself thinking. The question of what might happen to her own remains is the personal engine driving the narrative.