The Powerful Way Celebrity Gravesites Help Me Cope with My Grief

How my grave interest helped me process my grief over my father’s death

Photo by Mercedes Reilly on Unsplash

At night, when the house settles into its own quiet, I open YouTube and visit the dead. A man with a calm voice walks through a cemetery in Los Angeles, his camera steady as he points to the names carved in marble. The title reads Hollywood Graveyard: Legends of Old Hollywood. I know his rhythm by now: the slow pan to a headstone, the hum of birds, the trimmed grass that looks almost staged.

I started watching in 2020 during the pandemic, when the world blurred between headlines and hospital counts. I wasn’t looking for comfort so much as confirmation. Death was everywhere, yet still out of reach. My father had died in 2016, and I had no grave to visit. He was cremated, but his urn still rests in my mother’s closet, a quiet weight that feels both temporary and permanent. There’s no stone to mark him, no plot to visit, only the thought of his ashes waiting, still and unseen, in the house that once echoed with his voice.

So, I found other graves.

Scott Michaels, host of Dearly Departed Tours, became my unlikely guide. He has the kind of voice that makes even tragedy sound like memory.

I learned how Marilyn Monroe’s crypt at Westwood Village Cemetery sits between strangers who once paid to be buried near her. Hugh Hefner bought the space beside her for $75,000. Visitors leave lipstick kisses and white roses. Nearby rests Natalie Wood, whose headstone reads Beloved Daughter, Wife, Mother, and Friend. I pause the video and imagine how many people have traced those same words with their fingertips, searching for a pulse in stone.

Then there’s Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin at Hollywood Forever, a bronze figure of him rising from a dark stone base. His parents visit and tend the site every day. People see them in lawn chairs beside the statue, talking to him, brushing leaves from the marble, resetting flowers and photographs. The grave feels alive in a way that startles me. Love keeps a schedule. Grief does the chores.

Each grave carries both an ending and a strange kind of persistence. Someone remembers them. Someone stands there, camera in hand, to prove it.

I told myself it was research, but it was grief in disguise. I wanted to understand what makes a death meaningful or maybe what makes a life remain visible. My father never had a marker, no stone to outlast weather or time. Just a name on a certificate and the weight of memory that slips a little each year.

The YouTube algorithm caught on. Soon my feed filled with thumbnails of graves: Jim Morrison’s graffiti-covered slab in Paris, cluttered with flowers, bottles, and notes from pilgrims who never met him. Rodney Dangerfield’s epitaph reads There Goes the Neighborhood. I began keeping a list of epitaphs that made death sound less like a full stop and more like a wink, a comma, a continuation.

There’s something intimate about walking through cemeteries with strangers. The camera glides past flowers, flags, small stones balanced on marble. I pause to read each name. Some have faded into the granite, almost gone. I imagine who still visits, who once promised they would.

If my father had a grave, I would have filled it with small talk. I would have told him about the kids, the weather, the rent. I would have left a golf tee or a seashell or something that said, I remember you even when you are silent. Instead, I talk to a screen and trace the shapes of other names. I have memorized the cracks in James Dean’s marker in Fairmount, Indiana, the way fans chip away bits of stone as souvenirs. Maybe I’m one of them, pressed up against memory, hoping for reflection.

My father used to call cemeteries the quietest neighborhoods. He didn’t mean it as a joke. He liked to drive through old ones, the kind with crumbling angels and moss that overtook the names. Once, when I was a kid, we stopped at a graveyard on the way to the grocery store. He walked between the stones, reading dates and shaking his head. “Imagine all the stories that just end,” he said.

I think that’s why I started watching again after he died. I wanted those stories to keep moving, even in pixels and narration. Every video reminded me that someone once loved these people enough to write their names down, to make their deaths worth revisiting.

Sometimes I fall asleep before the video ends. The voice fades, and the screen glows with another thumbnail, another grave, another name I will never know. Other nights, I let the autoplay continue, a steady loop of endings and memorials.

There’s comfort in repetition. Every grave says the same thing: We mattered once. The details change, the cause of death, the fame, the flowers, but the message endures. Maybe that’s all I want from my father’s death—a sense that it mattered somewhere beyond the boundaries of memory.

When my daughters are asleep and the house is still, I picture him scattered beneath the Florida sky, mingled with the same sand that clings to orange roots and palmetto leaves. I imagine the wind carrying his dust across the family yard, where stories never end but settle.

On the screen, the host’s voice softens. “Here lies another soul who made their mark,” he says.

I close the laptop and repeat the line, but I replace the name.

My father made his mark too.

Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. Born in Hollywood and raised in Port St. Lucie, she holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in more than eighty literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and The Huffington Post. A Best of the Net nominee, she has won Inscape Journal’s 2025 Flash Contest and Blue Earth Review’s 2025 Dog Daze Contest for Flash Fiction. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com.