“Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” the old joke goes. It’s taken more than one unwitting victim a moment to figure out the answer. Of course, the huge granite sepulcher on West 122nd Street and Riverside Drive in Manhattan contains the remains of Ulysses and Julia Grant. A copy of the original Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the site was once visited by up to 200,000 people a year, but these days at least one British writer calls it “famous for being the most boring and pompous monument in the city.” Perhaps in desperation, the city commissioned artist Pedro Silva to liven up the site with a strange, Gaudí-inspired serpent bench. But whatever the serpent adds in visual interest is lacking in meaning. Grant’s Tomb is, in a word, dead. It squats resolutely at the edge of Manhattan island, a familiar neighborhood curiosity, but its heavy echo of antiquity rings hollow and remote. Think of all the things this place could have communicated — the highly charged emotions the man and the war inspired in his contemporaries, the terrible human toll of the conflict he served. Attending his monument, we miss the plangent notes of a man who had to send friends to their deaths in horrific battles, who bore the burden of a nation’s future on uncertain shoulders.

But only steps away, just down the slope, stands another stone that captures, in one simple gesture, a world of beauty and grief. The small stone urn states, “Erected to the Memory of an Amiable Child,” to mark the grave of 5-year-old St. Claire Pollack, who fell to his death on the rocks there in 1797. When his uncle sold the land, he stipulated that the grave be left inviolate — and so it has, as one of the city’s quietest memorials. By its very modesty, this place evokes the enduring love of a family for a dear young boy, from a time when the banks of the Hudson were a perilous wild.

Most of us will not have the possibility of burial architecture as grand as Grant’s Tomb, or as poignant as the Grave of the Amiable Child. In fact, modern life may make our choices (or those of our survivors) more difficult and fraught than they’ve ever been. For most of our predecessors, decisions about burial and monument were pre-ordained by tradition, belief or geography. Some families clustered together in death as they did in life, until a plot was filled and another location was set aside for colonization. Many individuals planned the footprint of their monuments to reflect their sense of self-importance in life — a mausoleum mansion for the plutocrat, an exquisite angel for the connoisseur.

Burial practices also reflected the technological mores of the culture. The ancient Egyptians created the language of pyramids and mummification to connect their science, art and myth. By the same token, in early 20th-century America, embalming and fortress-like caskets were developed to demonstrate the capacity to overcome the forces of nature through preservation from corruption and defense against the elements.

Gravestones have trends, like any other fashion, and they are not only erected to remember an individual but also to reflect contemporary notions of God and Death. The late 16th and early 17th-century English favored the stark face and wings of the Angel of Death carved on the stone, stern and uncompromising. (There are striking examples of this style in Trinity Churchyard on Wall Street in Manhattan.) In some markers, the angel’s face is actually a skull, but other versions are more cherub-like. Over the 18th and 19th centuries, other motifs emerged, especially those depicting gentler notions of grief and faith in the afterlife. Roman symbols, such as the cypress for death, or a dove for the death of a child, flowed easily into more specifically Christian symbols like the palm branch and the Lamb of God. In the decades following the Civil War, America searched for an identity reflected in Imperial Rome. Copies of Roman architecture sprang up across the country, including references to Roman monuments. Death was indeed proud, even grandiose — as though the deceased could affirm status and power through the empty shell of a mausoleum.

We are now passing through a different phase of history, asking different questions. Our burial architecture for the great and the good may leave a modest footprint, like John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. There, a visitor finds a small, simple stone set into the earth attended by an eternal flame. Kennedy’s other memorial is a library in Massachusetts, a living home for research and scholarship.

But we have also begun to re-interpret our relationship to God in light of caring for the earth, not conquering it. Environmentalists question the practice of embalming, pointing out that formaldehyde and heavy steel coffins damage the earth and leave an unwelcome legacy of contamination to future generations. The new “green burial” movement advocates using wicker and cardboard caskets and planting endangered flower species on the burial grounds.

In the end, burial architecture and memorials exist to serve the living. As we consider them, we are also considering what statements we make about those who have died, and about the meaning of death itself. No culture can thrive without memory because collective memory is what embodies the stories and the lessons of those who have gone before. I haven’t settled on my own ideas for burial yet, but I feel lucky to know of three fine models to consider.

The first is the 19th-century graveyard of my father’s family in Nebraska — a windswept corner of a cornfield with a few dozen Swedish farmers and their families laid out under modest stone markers and a vast blue sky.

The second is at St. Ignatius of Antioch, where members of the parish have been allowed to store their ashes in small urns set behind stones in the walls of the church. The stones bear only their names and dates, but I have often walked over to touch the stones, as a greeting.

The third memorial is perhaps the most beautiful of all. When my father-in-law died, the family gave a donation for a grove of fruit trees, planted in the Guatemalan highlands to benefit widows who lost their husbands to political violence. The women sell the fruit to support their families. How many threads of the Gospel are woven through this story? My father-in-law was a quiet, self-effacing man, but I know that these “trees of life” would be pleasing to him — as they are to us, in honoring his memory.

For more information on 18th and 19th-century gravestone symbolism, see www.genevahistoricalsociety.com/PDFs/Symbol%20List.pdf.

For more information on green burial, see www.naturaldeath.org.uk.