In the summer of 1975, my little brother and I drove across the United States to Washington D.C.  And back.

We returned to Southern California via a less-direct route, one that took us to Gettysburg, Niagara Falls and Canada and across the I-70, rather than the I-40, which we had taken heading east.

We arrived in Gettysburg early one night and checked into a motel in the dim light south of the town center.

The following morning, I opened the curtain covering a sliding door and just behind the room — like, a matter of a couple yards — were acres and acres of head stones belonging to the Gettysburg National Cemetery.

And I was creeped out. I had slept all night yards away from thousands of dead people.

Had I known what was out the back door, I would not have stayed at that motel.

Which I recalled as I watched tonight, on Chasseurs d’Appart (the French version of House Hunters), as a young French couple choose to purchase a new house in the northwestern city of Rennes …

With the town cemetery inches behind their back fence.

While looking at the house, the couple seemed surprised and less than pleased when they realized that most of their windows overlooked the cemetery. Not freaked, but not pleased. “A bit of a cold shower” was how one of them described it.

So, I was a bit surprised when they not only designated the house as their favorite, they followed up by purchasing the place.

Living with nothing but a window or thin fence between me and thousands of cadavers in boxes … well, call me squeamish, but I would not be up for that.

I know some people like living next to cemeteries — because they are so quiet, or leafy or green. A close relative lives across a street from a large cemetery, and has no problems with it.

Those may be the correct sort of reactions, the sensible sort.

I would never suggest my thoughts on this make any real sense, that they might place me among the ranks of superstitious primitives. (Zombies; not a real thing.)

It may also reflect the often unnatural attitudes toward death among “modern” Americans — it is something to be put out of mind as often as possible and as long as possible. And it is to be followed by cremation, rather than burial.

But I have always had issues with this. I didn’t like riding past Long Beach’s old graveyard, when I was a kid. I am never going to volunteer to walk through a cemetery at night.

Perhaps my imagination is too vivid. What is in those boxes, six feet under?

Choosing to live with dead people as my closest neighbors … I would not willingly do it.

I would buy a much less impressive place on the other side of town.

The whole world may be the “sepulcher of great men”, as Pericles put it in his famous funeral oration, and people have been living and dying in this part of France for thousands of years.

I would just prefer to be some distance away from existing repositories of the dearly departed. Measured in miles, not feet.