Metairie Cemetery

This guide to Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans follows pharmaceutical merchant Lucien Brunswig through the spring of 1892, when he lost his young son just weeks before his tenth birthday and then, a month later, his wife Annie. It traces the unusual choice he made to answer that grief, building a full Egyptian tomb complete with a sphinx, coiled cobras, and a winged sun disk, rather than the obelisks and weeping angels his wealthy neighbors were racing to put up around him. Around it, New Orleans' wealthiest families were already competing to out-build one another on this old racetrack turned cemetery. Stand close to the pyramid and look up at the sphinx's cracked, unblinking stare.