The wonders of soil.

Soil is a miraculous substance. It's made of inorganic material (tiny bits of weathered rock) and organic matter, what in the garden you would call humus. Soil sustains land life yet is an incredibly thin covering on the earth. To create a good garden you ideally mix compost, defined as decayed or decaying organic matter used as fertilizer, into the 8 to 12 inches of topsoil. Digging allows air to penetrate, the compost nutrients to spread more evenly and water to sink in. Then you plant seeds in the very top of this cultivated layer.

Plants grow tall so they can thrust their leaves into the air but they also need air in the environment around their roots. They depend on microbes in the soil to render the compost useful (like us cooking our food), help keep the soil loose, and protect them from harmful pathogens and microorganisms. These are oxygen-loving bacteria and fungi; without air they can't multiply and do their job. Digging the soil before and after planting maintains the top foot or so of the garden as a good microbe habitat. Below the topsoil the further you dig into the subsoil, the smaller the portion of organic material, the fewer microbes and the less active it is.

When we think of compost we think piles of autumn leaves, but it's not just plants that provide useful organic matter. Anything once living can be composted. When I was a child we carefully kept animal matter out of the food scrap bin. I always thought it would somehow make our compost pile impure, but animal bits compost just fine; in fact there's more nutrients in animal bits than in plant bits. The reason you keep them out is because "unfortunately their smell will act like a magnet for any rats, mice, foxes, raccoons, or cats in the neighborhood (or even coyotes and bears, depending on where you live), who will ransack the compost to eat them."*

When I wrote about Vermont Bill H.3 to change minimum depth of human graves from 5 to 3.5 feet I began by wondering what made grave depth important enough to be a requirement for green burial along with no embalming, no vaults, only biodegradable caskets or no containers at all. I learned that we should bury the body as high up as feasible in the ground because then it can decompose efficiently into the surrounding soil and become part of that wonderful landscape we wish to be under. Yet if the idea is to plant the body among the microbes, why don't we simply dig it into the topsoil, put a decent layer of soil on top and be done with it? 

I started off with the garden to fertilize your mind with images of lettuce or bean seeds swelling in the dark soil, putting out roots and sprouts. Now we get to the ick, because two primary roles of active soil in human burial are to provide a smell barrier and to get rid of pollutants and diseases. When you bury a human body in the topsoil, the oxygen-loving microbes want to make compost out of it so they get really active, and their work produces odors that lure in other workers to help complete the job. It's these others that are the reason for burying a body deeper in the soil--not the beetles but the animals--raccoons and other scavengers that would dig up the grave. Dogs--yes, even your beloved poodle would become a scavenger. Death at the surface employs all the critters to help dispose of remains as quickly as possible, but we prefer a more sedate schedule so we bury our dead. The microbes in the active soil also break down molecules of substances we consider pollution, and disease organisms which survive death. But these microbes are another story.

According to Michelle Acciavatti, Vermont H.3 co-author, it's generally agreed that 18 to 24 inches of soil above a grave is enough to provide a smell barrier. So an overall grave depth of 3.5 feet "is sufficient to protect bodies from detection from scavengers--there just isn't enough smell to attract them. There certainly is nothing the human nose can detect." It may not be in the most active topsoil but this, she says, represents "the fine line between what we can accept as natural vs. what we accept as respectful to the body and I think right now we are so cut off from nature that that is harder than it should be--think of the people who think the steak they buy shrink-wrapped in grocery stores doesn't come from cows!"

Soil is an ecosystem. The trick to green burial is to fit a human body into that ecosystem and not to isolate it.

* https://www.smallfootprintfamily.com/10-things-you-should-not-put-in-a-compost-pile

Why does grave depth matter for green burial?

Groups desiring to make green burial work in Vermont recently shepherded a bill through the state House of Representatives to raise minimum grave depth from 5 to 3.5 feet, considered a shallow depth that provides adequate cover for a burial. Michelle Acciavatti, an End-of-Life Specialist who founded Ending Well services in Montpelier, Vermont co-signed H.3. She says the bill accommodates people who wish to be buried in accordance with the environmental values by which they live without taking away the right of others to choose their own preferred burial.

My home state of New Jersey is also one of just a few states identified by the Green Burial Council as requiring deep burial. New Jersey Health and Vital Statistics law 26:6-36 says: "Every dead body interred in any burial ground or cemetery in this state shall be buried so that the top of the outside coffin or box shall be at least four feet below the natural surface of the ground, and shall be immediately covered with at least four feet of earth, soil or sand." Effectively this requires a burial depth of 5 feet, similar to Vermont law.

So what's the big deal about the right to a shallow burial? Alot of effort is going into this, plenty of mobilization of pro-green burial people in Vermont and across the country, yet it's an aspect that's not always included in green burial descriptions. In fact two years ago the Vermont Legislature confirmed the rights of cemeteries to dispense with burial practices that are generally recognized as inhibiting decomposition--metal caskets, concrete vaults and embalming. States don't have laws requiring caskets or vaults. They do, however, try to regulate burial depth because it relates to general public good, a fact reflected in the last words in the New Jersey law: "This section shall not apply where bodies are placed or buried in properly constructed private vaults so as to prevent the escape of noxious or unhealthy gases therefrom."

All bodies decompose, even those that have been embalmed. It's the time it takes that varies. As soon as someone dies their tissues start to break down as the cell walls no longer hold, and bacteria that normally live inside are released from their usual tasks and begin to feed on the body that contained them. If a dead body is left on the surface (where animals die) the flesh generally follows a standard schedule of decomposition, and the internal process is aided and then continued by organisms from outside--more bacteria, fungi, insects, scavengers. When a body is buried this assistance is inhibited, depending on the type of soil and the depth of burial. The top several feet of soil where oxygen reaches provides the most active decomposers. 

Key to a difference between deep and shallow grave depth is whether it allows the inevitable decomposition to benefit the earth. After all, green burials don't occur just anywhere, they are usually performed somewhere in hopes they will benefit the landscape. As Michelle says, "Green burial is defined in its simplest way as burying a body so that it has minimal negative impact on the environment and a positive beneficial impact on the environment. It is important to recognize that the definition is a two part statement." If your shrouded relative is buried too deeply, the nutrients in the body will get dispersed in the soil but not reach the trees or blueberry bushes planted on the grave. Your relative's chances of becoming part of the landscape are greatly diminished.

Lee Webster, a board member of the Green Burial Council which certifies green cemeteries and educates the public to the facts around green burial, testified before the Vermont House Committee that burial depth of 3.5 feet is shallow enough to be within the area where active bacteria and insects provide the best chance of rapid aerobic decay. "This is the primary goal of green burial—not to attempt to protect the body, but to aid in its natural biological surrender to the earth." The argument that there's a risk of infection from dead bodies as they decompose has been disputed by every major health organization; decomposition itself neutralizes most biological infections. A second argument, that the “furniture”—elaborate metal and exotic wood caskets, big and heavy concrete vaults—require deep graves is automatically eliminated in green burial where shroud burial is best or simple biodegradable caskets are used. As Lee testifies, studies of pollution near existing cemeteries show that the leachate from caskets and vaults is a bigger problem than from the bodies themselves. I can think of knee-jerk reactions to shallow graves--that animals could dig up a body and that a shallow grave can have a disrespectful connotation. But 3.5 feet is shown to be adequate protection against anything/one digging up a body and a compromise must be made between allowing active decomposition and the need to protect burial from scavengers.

New England, for all its progressiveness on other fronts, has only a handful of green burial cemeteries. While municipal cemeteries may permit people to be buried green on their grounds, the region needs more true hybrids and dedicated natural burial cemeteries. The success of Vermont bill H.3, which moves on now to the state Senate, could provide an incentive for more area startups.

Green-service funeral homes should post their prices online.

Recently NPR's Morning Edition investigated funeral pricing in a story called "Despite Decades-Old Law Funeral Prices are Still Unclear."* Listening to the story I wondered, is a funeral home that offers green services likely to list costs and services up front?

Funeral costs have been a consumer problem for a long time. When people prepared bodies in their homes there weren't alot of outside costs, but embalming techniques developed during the Civil War encouraged Americans who wanted embalming for their loved ones to move death care into professional places of business, and by the start of the 20th century the country had a national funeral directors' group (NFDA). 

When Jessica Mitford's examination of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, came out in 1963 it echoed the discomfort and distrust many people felt with after death care, and in the decades since funeral homes and directors have been corralled by attempts to get them to be up front with service options and prices. The FTC Funeral Rule spells out what funeral homes must do, including provide costs in person or on the phone. But the rule, enacted in 1984 and amended in 1994, is pre-internet and today, when many people depend on the web for information, funeral businesses are all over the place with what they divulge and how internet-savvy they are. Even if this is a result of poor business practices, it encourages an antagonistic/distrustful relationship between customer and business.

Natural burial obviously involves burial and cemeteries, but handling the body, getting it to the cemetery, and protocol at the cemetery is what funerals are about, whether natural or home or alternative funeral. I published The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide because it was time-consuming to gather useful information on green burial cemeteries and I decided to share my work to make the process easier for others. The guide also lists a selection of funeral homes that offer green services. Criteria for inclusion was a willingness to work with customers who want green burial and efficiency of communications--i.e., the business got back to me, generally by email. I did not go into details about service or price.

The Green Burial Council certifies providers and says in its standards for funeral homes "A GBC approved funeral home must define in their general price list, and make reference to on any published website, their 'green' offerings, which include the sanitation and temporary preservation of a decedent using approved GBC methods, including the option of a private visitation." Nowhere does the council specify where the general price list must be available or what it must contain.

The photo that accompanies this article is a screenshot of a green burial package online offering by a good, competent, certified green funeral provider. It lists services, and if you contact the business directly they readily provide the costs. But if you are truly comparison shopping (hard to do when someone is dying/has died so remember to do it AHEAD of time) you may want to do preliminary weeding out before actually contacting businesses.

The NPR interviewer spoke to Will Chang, whose startup Parting.com collects funeral home price lists and posts them on the web. I found 3 out of 5 New Jersey businesses that are listed in The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide also listed on Parting.com.

The subject of the NPR story, a consumer advocate who examined the funeral business when his father died, petitioned the California Legislature to require funeral homes to post general price lists online. A compromise bill that took effect in 2013 requires them to either post prices online or tell consumers that prices are available on request. In the wake of the bill most homes chose to post their prices.

Funeral homes seeking certification as green providers should be required to be up front about prices. Creating an atmosphere which encourages family participation is an important aspect of green/natural burial. Just as in relationships between human beings, it's tough to participate and cooperate without a clear channel of communication. 

* http://www.npr.org/2017/02/08/504031472/despite-decades-old-law-funeral-prices-are-still-unclear

Why are 12% of green burial cemeteries Catholic?

Memorial boulder with name and symbol of cross at Maryrest Cemetery  Photo: Tom Bailey   

We often emphasize the physical aspects of green burial and what it does not do to the environment, but people bury (or cremate) their dead because the body of someone we know and love represents something more to us than simply a physical husk like a pea pod or clam shell.

Last week Brant Huddleston interviewed me for his blog Dance2Death Afterlife. I had sent Brant a copy of The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide: State-by-state where, how and why to choose green burial. Being a good host, he read the book and sent me a list of questions we might address in a podcast. One was:

"It appears most of the religious sites in the guide are Catholic. Why do you think that is?"

Of course I had known there are a number of Catholic green burial grounds but I didn't twig to how large a percentage until I added up the entries in my book: 15 out of 125+ cemeteries, or roughly 12%. Jewish burial is often referred to as approximating green burial; embalming is not generally used, burial is in a plain wooden box that may have holes drilled to speed decomposition through contact with the earth. While a few Jewish cemeteries have opened dedicated natural burial sections, Catholic dioceses across the country are embracing the new movement toward green burial which not only eschews toxic embalming, burial vaults and painted steel caskets but considers the land and the landscape of the cemetery itself and the possibilities for human burial to add value them.

The embracing may be due to the Catholic Church having taken the trouble to square green burial with church doctrine. In an article titled "The Ecology of Burial: Choices reflect belief about life after death"1, Opus Dei Father Paul O'Callaghan, an expert on church teaching about end-of-life questions and a professor at Rome's Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, said burial methods often indicate underlying attitudes about the afterlife.

Christians recognize "in all humility, that the body has to go back to where it came from, it goes back to the earth," said Father O'Callaghan, noting that the words "human" and "humility" both come from the Latin word "humus," meaning earth.

"The authentic Christian practice" is burial "followed by natural decay." The eventual resurrection of the body promised in the Creed will be the "fruit of divine intervention."

After an October 2016 Vatican release of instructions placing severe limits on cremation for Catholics, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, noted that it was appropriate to allow the natural decay of the body while protecting the environment but not to see the body of the deceased primarily as fertilizer for plants and trees.2 

Because burial is important to Catholicism as a symbol of faith in the resurrection and also the dignity of the human body and the integral part it plays in a person's identity, the church considers a natural burial as meeting the Catholic concept of afterdeath care when the funeral rites are observed, including the Rite of Committal, and a memorial includes the deceased's name and the symbol of the cross. 

Andrew Schafer, Director of Catholic Cemeteries for the Archdiocese of Newark, NJ, my own diocese and owner of Maryrest, the first cemetery with green burial I ever visited, said, "For Catholics especially, (natural burial) can be an expression of profound reverence for the body and the sacredness of life, a deep respect for the integrity of creation and God’s good earth, and of course, it emulates the most famous burial of all,” that of Jesus wrapped in a shroud and buried in a rock tomb. 

Modern green burial is still in its infancy but just as the movement has become more concise at defining what it entails in physical terms, its embrace by more people should help define it in terms of spiritual and philosophical as well as environmental terms.

1 http://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2017/the-ecology-of-burial-choices-reflect-beliefs-about-life-after-death.cfm 

2 http://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2016/final-resting-place-vatican-releases-instruction-on-burial-cremation.cfmIn

Can more cemeteries offer green burial?

In a recent article in the Kokomo Perspective, two area funeral directors in Kokomo, Indiana who have worked with families on the green burial option say the paucity of local cemeteries that allow it dampens interest. 

“It’s one of those things where if there was a closer option, people would be more interested. Having to go an hour away where your loved one is buried is an obstacle,” said Matt Grecu. “With it being something that hasn’t really taken hold in central Indiana, cemeteries are pretty leery about dedicating and making a commitment to taking a piece of land and saying, ‘That’s what we’re going to do.’ Because once you put one person there and it doesn’t take off, then you’ve got an area of land that isn’t any more accessible to the cemetery.”

Four cemeteries in Indiana offer green/natural burial: Kessler Woods at Washington Park North Cemetery in Indianapolis; Spring Vale in Lafayette; Oak Hill Cemetery in Crawfordsville; and White Oak Cemetery in Bloomington. This is a relatively high density--some states (Wyoming, Rhode Island, Louisiana to name a few) have none--but it still means that few Indianans would consider them local.

I also heard recently from two people trying to get green burial off the ground in their communities who were reaching out for advice/information/advocacy. 

What can be done to make green burial local? It helps to show interest by asking for it when you approach a funeral director, but how many times in your lifetime are you likely to do that? Increasing the number of cemeteries would be more effective. It's really a push me-pull you situation: if you have the cemeteries people are likely to be exposed to the option, and if people are exposed to the option, they are likely to ask for it. And cemeteries, as Grecu says, are more likely to invest in green burial if they know people will use the option.

The Green Burial Council offers an educational sheet called 10 Things You Can Do or Say to Promote Green Burial. Number 5 under starting a green burial cemetery in your community is "Get your state Attorney General to write a letter confirming the legality of dispensing with concrete and plastic vaults." It would seem obvious that cemeteries would know this, but businesses can run on assumption and custom and it's easy to just assume that vaults are required. I would add embalming and burial containers into the equation. Customers need to ask and funeral professionals need to know what is required under law.

Another idea is to help an existing local cemetery cost out a hybrid green burial for their operation. This requires knowing what is involved yourself. The potentially higher cost to consumers of hand-dug graves and other non-mechanized operations is usually offset by eliminating embalming, fancy caskets and vaults. However, as these are areas where funeral directors and cemeteries make money it's important that cemeterians understand they can profit from increasing interest in green burial. It's the way of our country; you can't expect professionals to give away their services when they have lives to support.

If green burial is not to be just a flash in the pan, it needs to really take root. Educate yourself and be prepared to promote green burial when next someone asks what you know about cemeteries and funerals.

Embalming: The "yuck" factor.

Dr. Bunnell's embalming tent: "Free from odor or infection"

A soldier dies on a Civil War battlefield far from home.  Before the battle he bought a ticket to be embalmed. He's one of the lucky dead; he's found and identified and his family wants him back but the trains won't take unembalmed bodies. Using Dr. Thomas Holmes's new pump an embalmer injects fluid containing arsenic to kill microorganisms that cause decay long enough for his body to be transported home for burial and to provide closure to his family, who otherwise would never know for certain whether he died. 

Embalming existed before the Civil War to preserve bodies for medical study. The techniques developed during war were perfected for mass public use and by the mid-twentieth century, most everyone assumed that dead bodies needed to be embalmed to avoid spreading disease and polluting ground water. Formaldehyde-based solutions had replaced the incredibly toxic arsenic. Embalming also satisfied a human need to see and touch someone after they'd died. Although nobody set out to do it, embalming led the living to disconnect from the dead as afterdeath care that now required professionals and equipment moved out of family homes into funeral homes and Americans came to think of an unpreserved body as yucky.

As we try to walk back afterdeath care to achieve green or natural burial, is it necessary to entirely do away with embalming? If this were a newsreel, would we rewind to the point at which funeral homes didn't exist?

Probably not. People should and do have more input into afterdeath care. The afterdeath care field has expanded to include alternative professionals, just as cemeteries have, and many are willing to include families. I'm one of the customers who went green when my father died but chose to leave the personal care up to someone else. It wasn't important that he be viewed after his family saw him dead in the hospital, and the funeral director kept him in the refrigerator. We could still have arranged for him to be viewed. Refrigeration works just fine for preserving a body, as does dry ice, but part of making a body viewable is doing touchup to get rid of the "dead" look and I didn't want makeup. My father wasn't even dressed; he was decently wrapped in his shroud.

The definition of embalming doesn't include the word toxic; it includes words like chemicals and spices and sweetening and preserving. The Green Burial Council certified The Champion Company's Enigma line of "eco-balming" fluids as safe, effective, non-toxic, and non-hazardous both to the environment and, equally important, to the human who does the embalming (formaldehyde is harmful in the workplace). Eco-balming keeps a body preserved for about a week, or the time it generally takes to gather mourners and hold a funeral. (Myth: embalming preserves a human body forever.) Again, for a body to be viewable it also has to be made up and dressed.

My objections to embalming go beyond environmental to the social and emotional texture of death. Continuing to view a dead body as "human" well after death makes it harder to see our mortality as part of a cycle and to take comfort from simple burial directly in the earth in a shroud or biodegradable casket, in the grand idea of the human flesh being recycled into something usable by new life, whether it be blueberry bushes or earth worms, bacteria, beetles or evergreen trees.

When families took care of their dead the knowledge of what to do passed down from generation to generation. We've largely lost that knowledge; a couple years ago I wouldn't even have known what funeral home to call when my father died. The hospital people were incredibly kind but their responsibility ended at his death. I at least knew who to go to next. Because of my work in green burial I had chosen a funeral director who is a green burial advocate and who I could trust to make decisions. I'm glad of that because I was in a state of shock, but I regret not taking more of a hand in the individual steps.

Don't wait until someone dies to talk about what to do with them. There doesn't have to be any "yuck" in death.

NOW AVAILABLE! The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide 2017

It's official! The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide is out. The last months of 2016--checking facts and making corrections, agonizing over cover photos and design, made the book feel like the rock Sisyphus eternally tries to push up the hill. Now the rock is at the top and the guide is available in PDF for purchase and download at greenburialnaturally.org. The complete guide lists over 125 cemeteries across the US in 303 pages. You can also purchase it in one of four regions, Northeast, South, Midwest or West. Each edition contains introductory material on green burial and photo illustrations, and the cemetery listings are color coded with maps to help you find the nearest place; you may have to look across regions for something that suits your needs. More cemeteries are coming on line and once enough are available, they will be added in to a new edition. Canada will be available later this year.

Four years ago I stumbled upon the term "green burial" on the internet. I'd never heard of dead bodies being disposed of without formaldehyde-based embalming or environmentally unfriendly concrete burial vaults, in a shroud or biodegradable casket, using the burial to protect or reclaim forest or meadow, in a cemetery which doesn't use pesticides and heavy equipment for landscape. Where graves may be hidden unmarked in the landscape or marked with just engraved fieldstone memorials. Bodies that are not sealed away recycle their nutrients into the soil and help build new life.

Actually I knew nothing then about burial, green or otherwise. I'd rarely set foot in a cemetery and my first forays were timid and full of unknowns. Gradually a general book formed out of my research that wasn't this guide. It took so much time and effort to track down, contact, and visit a handful of cemeteries in the Northeast where I live that I decided to make it easier for people to get themselves and their loved ones buried green. The guide includes lists of funeral homes that work with green burial customers to make it easier to get help with preparing the body.

I buried my father naturally in Steelmantown Cemetery in New Jersey last summer. I would like to be buried naturally myself.  I hope the guide encourages more and more people to choose the option and more and more cemeteries to go natural so together we can green up the future of burial.

Maryrest, my first green burial cemetery.

Ann at the Saint Francis of Assisi green burial section at Maryrest Cemetery, Mahwah NJ  Photo Credit: Tom Bailey  

Green Burial Naturally did not spring full-blown from my mind. The idea was an afterthought; I'd spent ten years with my husband Tom Bailey traveling on a sailboat, writing and taking photographs for sailing magazines, until in 2010 we returned to the US to try to get my aging parents out of the big house they raised me in and into different housing. As the time home expanded I looked for topics to write about and an internet search on recycling came up with the term "green burial." It was unfamiliar. With nothing else exciting on the horizon I began research.

I'd spent virtually no time in cemeteries of any kind and to get a feel for them we toured a half-dozen conventional cemeteries within easy reach in northern New Jersey then headed for the only nearby green burial cemetery in Mahwah. Maryrest is a Catholic cemetery with a dedicated green burial section. It's a hybrid cemetery because it incorporates both green and conventional burial.

The day was cold and clear. Maryrest's small hillside site is stuffed into a semi-rural community near the Ramapo Mountains. Like many odd-sounding New Jersey town names, Mahwah is a derivation of a Lenape word and means “place where paths meet.” We approached the gate diffidently but when no one challenged us sailed on in. 

Tom and I have now visited a hundred cemeteries but back then I was intimidated. What etiquette should I follow? Walk on graves or not walk on graves? Speak softly? Would people know we didn't belong there?  

My information packet for Maryrest didn’t include a map and as it was Sunday no one was around to answer questions. We followed the cemetery road through manicured lawns filled with orderly rows of polished granite headstones, looking for something that might be green burial. As a Catholic convert I can be buried in a Catholic cemetery. The rows of anonymous stones, curiously uniform in size and close together, called to my anti-class sense but were blah aesthetically. This made the contrast even greater when we stumbled upon the green burial section in a cut-off vale of ground beside a busy highway. On the flat above a quarter-acre of raggedy but pleasing woods was a wooden gazebo with wind chimes playing in the gusty winter wind. We parked on the cemetery road, climbed out into the freezing air and crossed a brown grass strip (natural burial discourages fertilizer or pesticide use by groundskeepers) to look down where falling trees had been left to lie, crisscrossed in a wild tangle.

I felt a breath of magic rush over me. It was a misbegotten place in some ways yet the idea that someone had been recently buried per their instructions in a tangle of anonymous trees rather than under trimmed grass was so antithetical to the rows of grey headstones behind me that I shivered. The wind chimes tinkled. Bird feeders hung empty of seed, the birds gone. A huge truck blatted up Route 287. But people lay below me unmarked and returning to nature. Along the berm we found a few boulders with names inscribed on them that appeared to be markers for the natural burials below. The hair rose on the back of my neck and it wasn’t from the cold. Something different than anything I’d contemplated lay below me.

I found out later that the graves were not in the woods but on the berm but that didn't cut into the sense that we'd stumbled upon something revolutionary; something I wanted for myself. On subsequent visits to Maryrest more names had been carved into the boulders. 

Maryrest began the quest that ended in compiling The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide. Like my introduction to green burial the name Green Burial Naturally is pure happenstance; when I needed to set up a website green burial was already taken. So I added what came Naturally.

Let’s get beyond the idea of perpetual care.

Perpetual grave in a corner churchyard at a busy intersection in Orange, New Jersey  Photo Credit: Tom Bailey

Let’s get beyond the idea of perpetual care.

Someday someone's going to be left with your body. What do you think should be done with it?

Each year 2.7 million people die in the US. That's a lot of bodies to take care of. A cremation rate of around 50 percent still leaves well over a million. Conventional cemeteries bury on average 1250 bodies per acre. Natural burial cemeteries generally bury in the hundreds per acre. Taking an average figure combined we would need around 4000 acres. This could be accommodated on a single square of land roughly two miles by three miles. That seems ridiculously small and doable in a country as vast as ours.

 But hang on, those figures are per year because grave rights are purchased in perpetuity. In just 10 years we would need 62.5 square miles, in 100 years we would be need 625 square miles, and on and on. Because people like to be buried either near where they live or someplace else meaningful, this would mean setting aside more and more land in prime locations just to bury our dead.

So why then do I advocate for green burial? Because I believe it's important for humans to see ourselves as part of the cycle of life rather than outside it, to seek "material immortality" in the words of Rachel Carson by allowing our bodies to go simply into the earth and the nutrients in our flesh recycled into new life.

So how could we do this and not sink under cities of the dead?

By foregoing perpetual care. Most European cemeteries lease burial plots for a set number of years with the option of paying a high price to get a perpetual lease. But in the US grave rights are eternal.

Most bodies buried naturally (i.e. in a shroud or biodegradable coffin) decompose to the skeleton in a dozen years or less. If cemeteries as they do in Europe were to institute a method for respectfully handling the skeletons, we could manage natural burial grounds to recycle the dead through the generations. The British Parliament is considering a rule change to allow cemeteries to remove bones and rebury them in a smaller box several feet below the original burial site, permitting a new body to be buried in the same grave. For natural burial cemeteries, markers if used could be reset in a wall for preservation. 

Another way to truly follow up on the idea of using natural burial to restore or preserve open land could mimic crop rotation; if a natural burial ground is filled sequentially, i.e. plots assigned at death next to the last ones filled, when a section is full it could lie fallow for a period of time while another section is opened. You could let bodies lie for a longer period and get the advantage of undisturbed meadow or forest instead of digging the land frequently.

We could make green burial not only an environmentally friendly option but also a sustainable way to use the earth.

In my father's neighborhood.

Ann setting temporary marker stone on her father's grave. photo: Tom Bailey.

It's been three months since I buried my father at Steelmantown Cemetery and the woods have changed with the season. When I visited this weekend most of the forest vegetation that masked the sound of nearby traffic was leafless, and oak leaves steadily spinning through hazy afternoon light softened the forest floor as they piled up in red-gold heaps. 

With my mother still alive I haven't had much time to grieve. It's not like I felt a wrenching hole in my psyche when my father died. Now sadness is creeping in on the accumulation of small moments when he would have been here, would have said something. And the holidays are coming up.

I need to address his absence, so Tom and I took a road trip to south Jersey. We stopped for lunch at Burger King at the exit from the Garden State Parkway, and I picked a table while Tom ordered food.

"This is probably where Ed comes for lunch," Tod smirked. "They're showing soccer on the tv."

At first I had no idea what he was talking about then I thought, oh yeah, he's just down the road. The idea of seeing my father sitting in the restaurant--the young Ed? Old and bent over? A ghoul? startled me into a laugh.

I'd been worried how I'd respond to seeing his grave; would I cry? No, I didn't. As we walked into the forest any morbid thoughts left me. My brother-in-law had wondered how we would find the grave and we did wander a bit; the moss-covered path converges and diverges and has deadends; until we recognized the recent grave of a Native American brought here from North Dakota. Luckily his is marked with colorful flags because my nearby father's grave was almost unrecognizable. He was a skinny guy, and we buried him in a shroud so there's not much to cave in. The mound of forest soil was settling under its blanket of oak leaves, and already a few shoots of wild blueberry and brambles poked through. 

When I knelt beside the grave I thought I caught a faint whiff of death but he's too far down for that. Too far down, I realized, to be in contact with the roots of the forest plants as I'd hoped. The late sun shown almost horizontally into the space and lit up silken webs being spun by tiny green spiders with red heads that I would never have noticed if I hadn't been so close.

This is my father's neighborhood. And he's active. His death is a process. I made a mental note to determine what stage he would be at based on passage of time. He's not stewing away. All those bodies in there, and Ed Bixby has sure been burying plenty, are busily working their way toward dissolution and not passively decomposing. My father couldn't stand to sit still; he shopped for food every day for an excuse to get out. His mound looked oddly like a body lying in wait under the leaves until we'd gone. Tom tried to get a photograph but there's too little relief to show his mound. 

We chose two new chunks from Ed's piles of fieldstone markers and pounded them into place, one for my mother's reserved grave and one for my father. It's humanly contrarian to want to mark a grave that's supposed to go back to the earth, but so be it. When the gravediggers filled in the grave they added conglomerate stone. I thought it looked artificial, or maybe I just needed to do something. Restless, like my father. 

The trail back was lined with stones where people had purchased plots pre-need. Ed has been selling as well as burying; the secret of green burial is out.