I’m a fan of Caitlin Doughty. She’s a mortician, based in L.A. and author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (about working in a crematorium) and From Here to Eternity (about how other nations and cultures deal with death). She’s a funny lady and good writer and an advocate for funeral industry reform. Here are a few things I’ve learned from her.
In America, death has been a big business since the turn of
the twentieth century. America’s funeral industry has become more expensive, more
corporate, and more bureaucratic than any other funeral industry on Earth.
(American funerals cost $8,000 to $10,000 not including the burial plot and
cemetery costs.) What’s more, our funeral system is notorious for passing laws
and regulations to interfere with diverse death practices and enforcing
assimilation toward Americanized norms. After Hurricane Katrina, a group of
Benedictine monks in southern Louisiana began selling low-cost, handmade
cypress caskets. The state’s Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors drummed
up a cease-and-desist order, claiming that only funeral homes licensed by their
board could sell “funeral merchandise.” (Eventually, a federal judge sided with
the monks.)
Many Muslims would like to be able to open funeral homes in
the U.S. Islamic custom is to wash and purify the body immediately after death
before burying it as quickly as possible, ideally before nightfall. They reject
embalming, recoiling at the idea of cutting into the body and injecting it with
chemicals and preservatives. Yet many states have draconian regulations
requiring funeral homes to offer embalming and for all funeral directors to be
trained as embalmers, even though the embalming process itself is never
required.
An executive of Service Corporation International, the
country’s largest funeral and cemetery company, admitted that “the industry was
really built around selling a casket.” As more of us are choosing cremations, the
industry must find a new way to survive financially by selling not a “funeral
service” but a gathering in a “multisensory experience room.”
The problem with cremation is that the process uses the same amount of energy required for a 500-mile car
trip; roughly the same amount of energy as a single person uses in an
entire month. What’s more, it releases 400 Kgs of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
plus a host of other pollutants and carcinogens, the worst of which is mercury
from dental fillings.
Alternatives to cremation are available in a few places (very few). Here are three I know
about:
Composting: The Urban Death Project, available in Seattle.
Burial directly into the
ground: Joshua Tree Memorial Park, California.
Open air pyre: Crestone End of Life Project, Colorado.
My husband and I are opting for composting,
but it’s not yet legal in California. Maybe if we live long enough….
For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.
In Prescott, AZ, where I live, there is an active little community devoted to these ideas: https://www.azcommunitydeathcare.org/ I have looked into this in considerable detail as part of my own death planning. That included contacting the local Vet Cemetery, which, I learned is full, but I got this, quoting from my own notes: <> Limited to vets, of course, but there are other ways to get that via the afore-mentioned azcommunitydeathcare.org. Painful regs in place that CAN be overcome, but they don't make it easy.
ReplyDeleteSorry, something deleted my quote from myself. Trying again: National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona in the Phoenix area. From Robert Jones of the VA cemetery in Prescott, AZ, where I live, I understand that a form of green burial is in fact available at the Phoenix cemetery. RJ said this is generally called a Muslim burial because the linen-body is placed on gravel in a grave and that covered with a vault on which the dirt is tossed.
ReplyDeletePrairie Creek Conservation Cemetery
ReplyDeletePrairie Creek Conservation Cemetery
https://www.prairiecreekconservationcemetery.org
PCCC is a conservation cemetery in Gainesville Florida that provides green burials while simultaneously protecting land for future generations.
Connie, Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery, here in Gainesville, Florida, may be a model for what you want for California. Each grave site has a small GPS marker. Several of us had quite an experience this June tromping through the woods getting our phones to match Libby's gravesite monitor. When we succeeded I recognized the native wild flowers I had planted five years ago. We sang together with a recording of Libby singing Kaddish, the mourners prayer, and several fun songs. Many of our friends want us to repeat the gathering next year. Gathering in the woods, is a very different experience than visiting a grave at a commercial cemetery.