Ex Urbem, In Sepulcrum:

Out of the City, Into the Sepulchre

a project of funeral culture exploration

Greetings, and welcome to my page! I am a humble funeral culture enthusiast who enjoys long, romantic walks through my local cemetary. When a close friend of mine passed away in 2019, I experienced the modern American funeral industry up close for the first time. As I spent time at the place where my friend was interred, I felt that cemetaries are often overlooked as potential gathering places, community centers, or just places to pass an afternoon. Unless someone needs a cemetary or knows someone there, they often will not visit them, missing out on learning something about their community or just on spending time in a manicured and free-to-access green space (so rare these days in many American cities!).

Spending more time in cemetaries confronting mortality and witnessing the final resting places of so many different kinds of people has improved my relationship with death and healed many past wounds left from losing people in my life. While burial grounds do demand a certain respect, it's not necessary to make a cemetary a gloomy place-- you are welcome to simply exist there and enjoy your surroundngs. In my opinion, a cemetary is just a park with a richer, more beautiful history to discover!

I made this page as a space for me to document the interesting cemetaries, graveyards, mausoleums, and other burial sites that I have visited and hope to visit. I want to share not only what I found at these sites, but also how they made me feel, and what I learned about the past by being there. Also, I hope to include other relevant writings about my experiences with death and human remains, and to provide resources for other people looking to cultuvate their relationship with local funerary culture and their own mortality. I hope you find this site enjoyable, useful, or just plain odd.

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Questions? Have a story to share? Contact me at exurbeminsepulcrum@gmail.com

Last Updated: Feb 13th, 2023