By Tad Friend, The New YorkerHow much rest do the dead require? Late this spring, two experts were discussing burial theory over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Mill Valley, California. The elder man, Ron Hast, had just visited Fernwood, a new “green” cemetery on the edge of town owned by the younger man, his friend and protege Tyler Cassity. Hast is an avuncular fixture in the funeral industry. In his earlier days in Los Angeles, in the sixties and seventies, he invented the Casket Airtray, which enables corpses to fly home in style, and he ran a service that provided mortuaries with embalmers and pallbearers, men known for their navy-blue suits and perfect manners and prepossessing youth. When Marilyn Monroe and Gary Cooper and Clark Gable died, Hast’s men helped compose them for their final closeups. Now in semiretirement, at sixty-six, Hast edits and publishes the magazines Mortuary Management and Funeral Monitor.
August 29, 2005
California Dying
By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker Magazine
This week in the magazine, Tad Friend writes about the California cemeterian who is trying to redefine the idea of last rites. Here, with Amy Davidson, he talks about green burials, graveyard tourism, and the future of funerals.
August 24, 2005
How do you want to go?
By Finlo Rohrer, BBC News
Few go out with as big a bang as Hunter S Thompson, whose ashes were scattered by fireworks on Saturday, but cremations and “eco” options are superseding the traditional funeral.
August 14, 2005
Going Out Green Boosted by HBO
The nascent field of “green funerals” scored a publicity coup with last week’s episode of HBO’s “Six Feet Under.”
On the show, the main character Nate Fisher, is buried in the green style, which theorizes that upon death our bodies should be returned to earth in a way that benefits - rather than degrades - the ecosystem.
August 13, 2005
Eco-Friendly Burial Sites Give a Chance to Be Green Forever
By Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
MILL VALLEY, Calif. - Tommy Odom’s remains lie on a steep wind-swept hill at Forever Fernwood, beneath an oak sapling, a piece of petrified wood and a bundle of dried sage tied with a lavender ribbon.
When he died in a traffic accident last year, Mr. Odom, 41, became the first of 40 people at Fernwood cemetery to move on to greener pastures - literally. He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus.