When I trained at the cemetery to be a family service counselor, we were taught a variety of sales technique.  One of them was how to sell niches for cremation.  We were instructed to emphasize that having a place such as a niche was a better place to hold a memory than the mantle or scattering to the wind. Cremation is the final disposition of a body and you need not by law bury the cremains. Cremation affords a family a many different ways to create a place of memory. You can scatter on your own land, be placed in bullets, pressed into a favourite record album or made into a jewel, just to name a few.  Cremation attracts people who do not want a lot of falderal in their funeral planning. The industry, knowing this, would like very much to be part of your decision-making and sell you a niche or a place in the lawn for burial.

I treasure the time I spend visiting graves.  When I was in High School, I went to Chaucer’s grave in Westminster Abby.  I remember standing there filled with awe and admiration.  I carry that memory always.  Standing by a grave is a powerful feeling at times be it your grandparents or a great poet.  Far be it from me to tell folks not to have a place in a cemetery or burial ground for those they love.  The place of memory is not my issue.  I take issue with making people think that a place of memory belongs to the corporate death care industry.

We have options for making a place of memory.  Cremains can always be scattered or buried on your own property rural or otherwise without having to make a notation on the deed. You can dedicate a place on your own property for full body burial through following your state’s laws. Full body burial might be easier in a rural setting, but it can be done. Always make sure you know and follow the laws in your state.  In ancient times, Christian communities formed around burial societies.  Old churches still have burial ground attached for members of the church.  I do not see why we cannot have more church run cemeteries or cemeteries associated with other groups.  Why don’t environmental groups set aside places for their members who wish to have a green burial?  Why don’t urban groups create burial coops?  I know cemeteries are tough to run, but we have options if we only look. We have options if only we take to time to create them for those around us.  We never have options if we take the industry representatives at their word.  We need to know our rights.  Modest burial grounds need not be moneymakers.  The municipal cemetery down the street from where I live sells plots for $250 – a far cry from the $18000+ in corporate run cemeteries.   

Many of us do not want to end up in a corporate run cemetery.  We need to face the fact that none of us have yet gotten out of this life alive, and research and plan our own deaths.  The time to make decisions is not at the time of someone’s death where grief can make the process more difficult, but when we calmly and logically look at what we and our family wants for a funeral and burial plan.  If we want to have the kind of funeral and burial we want, we need to start now looking at local resources. We might have to create the place of memory for our body at the end of our time on earth.  I do not recommend ever purchasing a plot for burial long before the time that it will be needed.  Once you purchase a right of burial, the cemetery will not likely return your purchase once the time for cooling off has past.  I do recommend setting money aside for the purpose of your final acts and let your money work for you, and not the cemetery’s corporation. 

The true place of memory will always reside in our hearts.  How we live our lives matters the most and remains with those who love and know us. Sometimes if we are lucky, our lives will be remembered from generation to generation. Having a place to visit at a graveside is useful for many.  Any place that reminds us of someone who has died becomes a place of memory. We need not pay a corporation for a place of memory.

We face choices everyday of our lives.  Some choices appear to be small, while others we make form the rest of our lives.  I grew up in a family that spoke freely about death and choices we make at the time of death.  It was generally agreed upon that cremation was the most earth friendly method.  We all wanted to go back to the earth as easily as possible. Having said this, I have not always made the most earth friendly choice for those I loved at the time of their death, mostly because I did not know my rights and the impacts my choices would make on the earth.  I did not always educate my clients at the cemetery about the most ecological manner of burial, but it was through working in the conventional death care industry that lead me to the work I do now. I have and insider understanding of the industry as well as having been I been a client. Today, I advocate for people’s rights and wishes at the time of death and hope that people choose more earth friendly choices. I believe that everyone should have his or her last wishes met if possible, providing it is according to the law. I wish to educate, not make people feel uncomfortable about their choices.

The ideal and greenest of the green burials scenario would be a conservation burial adjacent to conservation land.  In this scenario, the person would be buried in a shroud, preferably a shroud made of a recycled natural material like an old quilt.  The body would be lowered in the grave by ropes or with a shroud board made of local wood, perhaps that even repurposed.  The grave would be dug and filled in by hand.  There would not be a marker, but GPS coordinates that would allow loved ones to find and visit the grave.

Ideals can be hard to reach.  Sometimes we must do what we can and aim in the general direction of our ideals.  We must never feel guilty because we could not accomplish the ideal.  In fact, some of us do not want the greenest of green burials.  Some of us want a marker of some kind. Several certified green cemeteries allow for stone markers, others do not. If you can get local stone, not import it from India or China, you are going down a better road.  Educate yourself and make wise choices.  If you need a few other hints, check out my Five Simple Green Burial Hacks.

Our choices make us who we are.  If we choose to go green, we need to look at our lives and make changes in that direction.  Not many of us are able to go off the grid and live on a homestead raising our own food and generating our own energy.  I, for one, would love to have solar panels on my house, but I cannot do that today.  When we make arrangements or prepare our own plans for burial, we have to take into consideration what we can realistically do.  If we do not have a certified green burial cemetery near by, we make do with what we have.  Like the rest of life, making burial choices is a balancing act.  It might not be possible for us to achieve the ideal state where we do not negatively impact the earth, so make choices with which you can live. Do not be angry with yourself for your past choices; move forward in the knowledge you have gained.  Know that not one of us is perfect.  We are trying to do the best we can.

I always enjoy a walk through a graveyard.  Monuments fascinate me.  Last summer I found this nearly abandoned cemetery.  I use mostly my own photographs on this blog, so many of the old monuments were interesting and I have used their images here.  In the back of the cemetery, I found these lonely markers.  Some were stones, but most of them were these little tag markers.  Today, I want to pay tribute to these short little lives that left behind them broken hearts.  I have known parents who grieve short lives, and I think most of us who have never known that grief often wonder when the grief will end and do not know what to say.  Today, let us remember that the lives the little ones left behind grieved sometimes in secret and carried these lives in their hearts the rest of their lives.

I was trained and worked in a cemetery run by one of the largest death care corporations.  We had a brief training on vaults.  Much of our training was brief because the purpose of a family service councilor is to sell.  We were told that vaults maintain the integrity of the grave, help keep the ground level for the cemetery and lined vaults kept out the elements (or nature) from reaching the casket. We sold all kinds of vaults from the simple to the high-end precious metal lined vaults.  To be quite fair, we were never trained to push the high-end vaults.  Our training also made it clear that vaults were not a legal requirement, but a requirement of the cemetery.

Let us look at this video demonstrating how tough the vault is.

My first comment about this video is about their scientific process.  We have no idea how long this vault remained buried before it was dug up again.  We have no idea if heavy equipment rode over this spot. Finally, the casket is empty.  We have no idea about the state of an occupied coffin buried for an unspecified amount of time.  I realize that they are selling vaults not coffins, but to be sure coffins and vaults are used together.   When I was a family service counselor, I became close to the grounds workers at the cemetery.  One member of the team who had been a grave digger for many, many years, told me that whenever he has been present at a disinterment, the vaults have always been cracked or otherwise breached.  Sometimes the breach was dramatic, other times, not so much.  Once interred, there is very little way of knowing the quality of the structure of a vault.  Some vaults are sturdier than others.  I do not mean to imply that vaults are designed to break or that all vaults do not stand up to the pressure.  What I am saying is no one really knows how tough any vault can be until you dig it up after use. 

Here is another video:

This one plays at the heartstrings.  As you know, I am all in favour of personalization of death rituals.  I find it odd that personalized vault that will spend most of its time underground, and that the only people who will be seeing it again will be those who would dig up the grave.  We are told in this video that a lined vault secures the casket and contents from water and insects.  It makes me wonder what it is we think we are doing when we bury our loved ones.  Do we really want to keep their bodies preserved for generations in hopes that one day an archeologist will dig them back up again? I think perhaps vaults are a hold over from the anti-theft devices developed for higher end burials in the 18th and 19th centuries when corpses were sometime dug up for scientists to study anatomy.  It’s not a pretty thought, but there you have it.  It’s not a huge leap from protecting bodies from body snatcher to protecting bodies from anything and everything. 

There are solutions for vaults in graves.  I suggest that vaults are not a necessity at all, providing steps are taken to prevent sunken graves. In green burial the grave is filled mounded with dirt on the graven so that once the settling of the grave takes place, the grave is not sunken.  A shrouded body creates less concern for grave settling than those using a biodegradable coffin because there is much less matter be broken down. In green certified burials, care is given to maintain the ground.  Green Burial does not mean haphazard burials without forethought.  To the contrary, certified green burial grounds undergo extensive planning and go through a strict process for certification.  Thought is given to preserving and restoring the land and in that maintaining the integrity of graves and the land in general.