Dear Ancestor...where are you?!

My family is not great at memorialization. I can't point to a historically wonderful headstone marking our presence in this country, even though all branches that led to me arrived before the 20th century. We don't have a family cemetery plot. Anyone who died in the last thirty years was cremated and their ashes scattered. As Palmer's poem hints, graves are where ancestors mix and markers help the living find the dead.

When my father died last year we buried him at Steelmantown Cemetery in south Jersey because it's a natural burial ground and also because family members live nearby, which meant something as I'm 2 1/2 hours away. Like most such cemeteries Steelmantown limits individual grave markers to natural field stones, regulates engraving and oversees placement. For reasons having to do with the scattered nature of my family we haven't gotten around to finalizing a stone, though we did pick one out from the piles that Ed saves from digging in the cemetery. I thought the memorial would be important, but the shear emotional content of my father's burial looms so large that I don't miss the marker. 

I would however be very upset if the position of the grave were lost because Steelmantown is a forest and much as I want my father to become part of the landscape, I also want his death to be individually known. The fact that my recent relatives were all scattered to the winds at death leaves a hole--I have no place to visit them.

Doing away with polished headstones is a big part of green burial. It both adds an alternative to the impersonal grassy cemeteries of conventional burial and fits in with the concept of burial as part of a natural landscape. But we shouldn't lose sight of the importance humans place on memorialization. On being remembered. Bob Prout, funeral director and green burial advocate, once told me that beyond the first generation of mourners very few graves are visited, yet we need to heed the sensitivities of families. Like me.

As the green burial concept expands and more cemeteries come on line, the option becomes local. Now if you want green burial your choices will be limited by location. You should still be sure to think about and accept consciously a cemetery's grave marker policy. Burial grounds in sensitive ecological areas and ones that are creating a new landscape often opt to prohibit human traffic once the body is committed to the earth, and provide instead for group memorialization on a wall or scattered boulders. Others like Steelmantown allow engraved fieldstones that match the geology of the area. All define and record graves so their locations don't get lost as the landscape is restored.

The absence of grand grave memorials can be be shown in a positive light. Their lack should not be viewed as a negative.  

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.