San Francisco is a city without graves. In 1900, the board of supervisors passed an ordinance prohibiting burials within the city limits. In 1912, the board announced its further intention to eliminate the city’s previously existing cemeteries, and in 1914 removal notices were sent to all burial sites, declaring them “a public nuisance and a menace and detriment to the health and welfare of city dwellers.”

...Still, even the most ardent modernist might feel some misgivings about a rejection of the dead as complete as San Francisco’s. And such misgivings reflect, however dimly, a deep political insight—for a city without cemeteries has failed at one of the first reasons for having cities at all. Somewhere in those banished graveyards was a metaphysical ground for politics, and buried in them was a truth that too much of modern political theory seems to have forgotten: The living give us crowds. The dead give us communities.

Interesting essay on death, community, and everything at First Things. There's some good stuff here, even if I don't quite agree with all of it. For instance, this:

Heidegger is surely right that death belongs at the center of philosophy, but he has always seemed to me fundamentally wrong that the death involved is the death of ourselves. We need a new phenomenological description of the human condition that asserts exactly the opposite: Anxiety about one’s own death is less fundamental than grief at the death of others—-just as every parent knows that fear for our own lives can be less compelling than fear for the lives of others.

is wrong only insofar as grief at the death of others and anxiety about one's own death are so inextricably bound that it's impossible to tell them apart. Parenting (especially in societies where infant mortality has been largely checked) can be seen as a kind of double denial of death, both your own ("Even if I die, a piece of me will live on in my child") and the child's (who, no matter what you do, will still die eventually anyway). Hence our horror (for instance) at Tony Soprano's mother, a nihilist with no such illusions—proclaiming "It's all one big nothing," she actively seeks to have her own child murdered because she is angry that she has grown old—or at a woman who admits she loves her spouse more than her children. Being a parent hasn't sublimated their sense of self-interest, as we've all agreed it should.