Gardens of Stone --- A Cemetery Blog by Alexandra Kathryn Mosca

Yesterday, I saw this monument at Kensico Cemetery for the first time. It’s a beautiful example of funerary sculpture from the late 1800s or early 1900s. The statue shows a robed woman beside a pedestal and urn, her head bowed in thought. The folds of her clothing are carefully carved, flowing down to her bare feet, which stand for humility and mourning. The arrangement of the monument brings up traditional ideas of grief and remembrance. The urn symbolizes ashes and eternal rest, and the draped figure conveys both sadness and calm. The sculptor paid close attention to texture, making the stone fabric look soft against the solid base, which gives the piece a sense of life even in the quiet cemetery. It was a wonderful find, especially with the bright sky and green trees of Kensico all around.

Today’s post is a fun one—an unexpected mix of Hollywood lore, cemetery history, and the quiet, behind‑the‑scenes world of funeral service. It’s the kind of story I love sharing: a reminder that even in the most familiar places, there are always hidden corners, surprising connections, and lives whose legacies continue to ripple outward in ways we don’t always expect. Green‑Wood Cemetery is home to many notable figures—Elias Howe, Henry Bergh, and countless others whose monuments announce their place in history. Yet one grave that often escapes the notice of casual visitors belongs to Frank Morgan, born Francis Phillip Wuppermann, the actor whose warm, wavering voice and gentle comic confusion helped shape The Wizard of Oz . His grave, marked simply with the family name, rests on a small rise along Grape Avenue—an unassuming stone for the man who played the Wizard, Professor Marvel, the Gatekeeper, the Emerald City cabby, and the palace guard. Born in New York City in 1890, one of eleve...

I’ve read a lot about Nellie Bly over the years, but after finishing the historical novel The Mad Girls of New York , I felt inspired to return to Woodlawn Cemetery and visit her grave again. This time, I noticed the memorabilia left by other visitors — including pens. On my next visit, I’ll be sure to bring an extra pen to leave in memory of this groundbreaking journalist.

Each  time I visit Green‑Wood, I come across something new or rediscover an old favorite. That was the case yesterday when I found myself once again before Green‑Wood’s Angel of Grief. This monument is one of several replicas of William Wetmore Story’s dramatic sculpture which stands in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, where Story and his wife Emelyn are buried. Henry James once called the original “unsurpassed, in all his work, for intensity of expression,” and it’s easy to see why. Additional versions of the monument appear in New Orleans’ Metairie Cemetery, in Hingham, Massachusetts, and in scattered corners of Texas, California, New Jersey, and Canada. Formally titled The Angel of Grief Weeping Over the Dismantled Altar of Life, the sculpture was Story’s final major work—a raw, unguarded expression of his devotion to Emelyn. He described it as “the angel of grief, in utter abandonment, throwing herself with drooping wings and hidden face over a funeral altar.” Green‑Wood’s version m...

  Det. Joseph Petrosino was He was the NYPD’s first Italian‑American detective--and the only NYPD officer ever killed in the line of duty in a foreign country. Petrosino was murdered by Mafia members on March 12, 1909 while he was in Palermo investigating the Black Hand. It took almost a month for his remains to be returned to New York. After a funeral Mass at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Little Italy, over 200,000 New Yorkers lined the route to Calvary Cemetery— an unprecedented tribute for a police officer. The New York Times wrote that “if Petrosino had died a President or an Emperor no deeper or truer show of feeling could have been manifested.” His funeral remains one of the largest NYC has ever seen.

  This morning, I saw that my article, A December Gathering , is now the most‑read piece on the publishing company’s website. I was surprised at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Writing about the Eppig mausoleum at St. John Cemetery was one of those rare moments when my work as a funeral director and my work as a writer came together so naturally that they felt like the same calling. The story was never just about a mausoleum. It was about legacy, reunion, and the quiet strength of a place built to hold a family’s history. A year ago, on an unseasonably warm December morning, I met members of the Eppig family at the mausoleum—some of them cousins meeting for the very first time. There was something almost cinematic about it: the soft winter light, the stillness of the cemetery, the sense that time had briefly loosened its grip so the past and present could stand in the same room. When we stepped inside, the caskets were intact—an unexpected and deeply...