Photo Pest: Mount Auburn Cemetery

Friends know I'm a ghoul. That's why Magda suggested we go to Mount Auburn Cemetery less than a month after Christine took me to the Congressional Cemetery.

Mount Auburn, which straddles the border between Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts, is America's first garden cemetery. With a gently rolling pastoral landscape that changes with the season, it initially functioned as much as a park as a burial ground. The Bigelow Chapel, above, and the Washington Tower, as well as many of the most interesting tombstones and monuments were constructed in the mid-19th century by Boston's elite class. Graveyards were for poor people.

The well-signed cemetery--one of its distinctive features--reminded me f I had been born a girl, my parents would have named me Holly. Otherwise known as Jeff's non-binary path.

Family plots vary significantly in size. Nearly 100,000 people have been interred at Mount Auburn which remains open for new burials.

James B. Jacobs died at age nineteen. This ornate tombstone eternalizes his loving family's grief. "At morn, we know not what the eve may bring. And dearest treasures take the earliest wing." Peter Bent Brigham, his rich, single uncle paid for it; investments from his estate, provided seed money for Mass General Brigham, today the nation's largest research hospital. You have to wonder if his nephew's premature death motivated Brigham's charity.

Martin Millmore, an Irish immigrant who sculpted the American Sphinx, died young, too, at the age of 39. His work commemorates the Civil War in no uncertain terms.