In search of an earth-friendly burial
By Linda Falkenstein, The Isthmus Daily
You’d expect any place called the Gardens of Eternal Peace Mausoleum to be peaceful. Maybe too peaceful. In the central area of the Y-shaped building, rows of chairs face a large modernist mural of angular praying people. A soft symphonic version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” wafts from invisible speakers. Lining the walls are white marble squares with discreet brass lettering. Behind the marble squares, of course, lie the bodies of the dead.
The mausoleum — at Roselawn Memorial Park in Monona — is tasteful, in a neutral yet fussy way. But it doesn’t look like a place where I’d want my earthly remains to reside. It’s like a strange mall, bland and impersonal.
Outside, the lawn is broken by an occasional marble bench. Plastic flowers and deflated balloons mark a few gravesites, and other spontaneous memorials have erupted in defiance of Roselawn’s decoration rules. A Packers windsock flies over one grave. A plastic pumpkin, American flag and miniature Christmas tree decorate another. It looks like a park, but a very sad one. That’s even before I see the sign that says “Babyland” in the section dedicated to infant burial. It is now a sad park that I want to leave.
My reaction to places like this may not be universal, but neither is it uncommon. The baby-boomer generation that is now old enough to be thinking about eternal rest is inheriting 20th-century funeral traditions it finds unappealing, esthetically and environmentally. There is growing concern about the sustainability of current cemetery practices and growing interest in a return to the simpler burial practices of the 19th century, the unadorned pine box and a simple rock for a headstone.
On the other end of the post-life- choice spectrum, elaborate personalized coffins, emblazoned with everything from Monet paintings to NASCAR’s checkered flag, are now on the market.
In both cases, people are giving more thought to how they want to be disposed of, and remembered. HBO’s recently deceased funeral home drama, “Six Feet Under,” made death acceptable to contemplate, if not downright cool. The show acknowledged the economic realities of the modern funeral industry: the rise of chains, the marketing of expensive caskets, the push for “the pre-need” agreements. But it also showed how baby boomers, approaching their own final years, are rewriting society’s death rituals much as they turned childbirth into something more organic. A main character in the show even opted for a green funeral — apostasy in the funeral home industry — lowered directly into the earth in just a simple shroud.
So far, though, going out green is more of an idea than a reality. Despite a recent spate of media attention on environmentally friendly burials, if you died tomorrow, your relatives would be hard pressed to give you a truly green funeral in Wisconsin.
The green scene
Why should anyone care about a green burial? One reason is that current practices are decidedly ungreen.
The average embalmed body contains two gallons of formaldehyde — a carcinogen. Natural-funeral advocates have calculated that 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid are buried in the U.S. each year. Plus many tons of reinforced concrete, steel, copper, bronze and hardwoods are going into the ground with burials. And no one knows for sure what impact putting all these chemicals and metals into the earth are having, or will have later, on the environment.
Ordinary people could take matters into their own hands — literally — but most shudder at the thought.
“It’s part of my job to educate the community about the end of life and bereavement,” says Karen Reppen, a spokeswoman for HospiceCare in Madison. “Nobody wants to hear about it.”
Reppen can’t think of anyone who’s done a home funeral, a practice she thinks would help relatives of the deceased “be present, part of the journey.” But “it’s not an area that people want to go to. They’d rather hand it off to someone who knows what to do.”
Home funerals hark back to the way Americans buried their dead in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The family would wash and dress the body and lay it out for viewing in the home. After a few days of friends and relatives paying their respects, the family would bury the body.
Last year, a PBS documentary called “A Family Undertaking” looked at modern mourners who’ve returned to old ways of conducting a funeral — keeping the body at home instead of giving it to a funeral home to embalm. Many people are surprised to learn that embalming — which, besides exposing the embalmer to deadly chemicals, involves great trauma to the body — isn’t required by law in most states.
Advocates of home funerals say decay isn’t a problem over three days, unless it’s very hot. The deceased needs to be washed and kept in a cool room, which can be accomplished with air-conditioning, freezer packs or dry ice. This contact with the deceased, without the intermediary of the funeral director, helps mourners come to terms with their loss.
This makes sense in the abstract. But the idea of washing and dressing the body of a dead friend or relative remains inconceivable to most people. We’ve been trained to find death unapproachable and untouchable. Most people have an easier time accepting “green burial.” Here a funeral home might take care of the body, but with no embalming, a simple biodegradable casket and direct burial, maybe even in a green cemetery.
The greenest of green cemeteries are conceived of as nature preserves, with unobtrusive markers made of natural stones or trees, or perhaps just a GPS coordinate. No embalming is allowed, and caskets are biodegradable, or not used at all.
But you can count the number of nature-preserve cemeteries in the U.S. on the fingers of one hand. Most burial still occurs in standard cemeteries, where it’s difficult to be buried with a casket only, much less without one. The reason has nothing to do with public health. It’s no big secret. It’s groundskeeping. Anything that decays and collapses in on itself will leave a depression at the gravesite. And that will make mowing difficult and cause tombstones to topple.
Most cemeteries require an outer container for the casket — the burial vault, made of cement, plastics and metal and weighing up to 2,300 pounds. Even if the casket already looks like a battleship, it must be encased in this bigger, heavier casket, like a set of Russian nesting dolls. Up against the suits Joe Sehee, director of the Center for Ethical Burial, wants to help ordinary citizens take end-of-life choices “back from the black suits” — his term for funeral directors.
Sehee, in Madison recently for a national land trust convention, thinks a good way to support conservation efforts is to devote a small part of a land trust to “conservation burial.” The price people would pay for their plots would fund not just that small percentage of conserved land, but also much larger parcels, large enough to act as significant wildlife habitats.
Conservation burial is still mostly theoretical, so it’s hard to know how much such sites might cost. But Glendale Nature Preserve in Florida charges $1,000; Ramsey Creek, in South Carolina, about $2,000.
Sehee says people pre-planning their natural burials often get excited about seeing their chosen plot. He thinks it’s because this makes death about “something bigger than themselves — conservation.”
If no green options currently exist in a given area, Sehee suggests it’s possible to “negotiate a green burial site” with conventional cemeteries. He pooh-poohs the landscaping concern that cemeteries cite for disallowing this option. “You know it’s going to decay,” he says, “so you mound up a bit.” And using flat stone markers means not having to worry about headstones falling over. The burial-vault rule, Sehee asserts, exists for one reason: so people can make money selling burial vaults.
As much as Sehee believes in conservation burial, he’s also cautious. “I fear green-washing,’” he says, warning that the funeral industry, which wields considerable clout, may co-opt and commodify green burial. He wants consumers to be assured that the cemeteries they choose will not “flip” — change strategies and start packing in as many bodies as possible, at the expense of conservation.
And so the Center for Ethical Burial is formulating a set of green standards and list of green providers to “take the guesswork” out of end-of-life choices. Sehee, whose background is in media relations, is “the advocate guy”; his wife, who’s steering their 2-year-old around Monona Terrace as we talk, does home funerals. “It’s an honor to be involved in end-of-life rituals,” says Sehee. “It is a ministry.”
A conference attendee from New Mexico comes over to listen. “I’m 83,” she announces, saying she intends her cremated remains to go into a niche at her church. “My honey’s right there too, where I go to church every Sunday.”Sehee nods sympathetically before he starts reeling off the environmental problems with cremation. It can take six hours of burning at high temperatures to turn a human body to ash; fuel consumption is a concern, along with airborne mercury pollution from dental fillings.
“A lot of people who want an environmentally sound burial have concluded that you’re not going to win, up against the black suits,” says Sehee, “so let’s just cremate.”
While cremation has risen in popularity, the drive for a memorial is still strong. Niches and vaults for cremains in conventional cemeteries can cost thousands of dollars. All for something that could be scattered to the wind for nothing. Sehee feels people are becoming more interested in end-of-life choices. “I think there is something innate about our need to befriend death,” he says. “We don’t want to cheat death. We want to get in touch with the cycle, make peace with the fact that we’re going to die.”A little greener
Dan Fose of Cress Funeral Homes in Madison says there are limits to how arthfriendly a burial can be, but tries to help people do what they can. Ten years ago, “I had never even heard of a green funeral.” Now he gets more inquiries about natural burials, although such services remain rare. Cress will forgo embalming if requested, and allow a private (family only) viewing. But Fose, citing “health concerns,” says embalming is still a must for public viewings.
Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, which advocates for expanded post-life choices, says there’s no evidence of health problems associated with viewing unembalmed bodies. If there were, he says, why would funeral homes allow private viewings: “Are families somehow immune to contagion?” There may be some odors, he says, but “that doesn’t cause disease.”
Cress does offer wood caskets. With regard to the burial vault, Fose suggests the nonsealing kind, also known as a grave liner, which allows the elements to reach the casket and create more of a “dust-to-dust” scenario. (The vault itself, though, would never biodegrade.)
Right now, Fose questions the business viability of a fully green cemetery: “You’d need to be in a pretty heavily populated area.” But he expects there will come a time when such ventures are feasible, even profitable.
Roman Ryan, president of Ryan Funeral Homes, says embalming is “an easy part to skip” but concurs with Fose that no public viewings can take place with an unembalmed body. (He stresses that this is a funeral home rule, not a state law.) Ryan’s cheapest casket is particleboard covered with fabric, which will biodegrade. But he says, “most people will step up and buy a metal casket.”
A newcomer on the local funeral scene, John Bucci, owner of the Wisconsin Chapels and Cremation Society in Verona, is willing to conduct green funerals.He sells biodegradable urns and caskets, and will skip the embalming and use a cooling board, or embalm for short-term presentation, with a less toxic embalming fluid. He also has contacts at a cemetery in Milwaukee that is willing to do green burials, he says, with no outer burial container.
Slocum, of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, fields lots of inquiries about green funerals and worries that “people think it’s an all-or-nothing proposition” — that either you get buried in a nature preserve, or are pumped full of formaldehyde and dumped into a steel casket in a concrete vault.
It’s quite possible, says Slocum, to go mostly green: “A, don’t embalm. B, there’s no state law anywhere that says you have to have a coffin. C, if the cemetery requires a vault, get a concrete grave liner that’s not fully sealed.” If more people insisted on such choices, he says, funeral homes and cemeteries would have to accommodate them.
A “biodegradable coffin” can be as simple as a cardboard box. While some are made to look fancy, the truly green-spirited might embrace the simple box used for cremation or airline transport of bodies (about $50; see www.cardboardcasket.com) and invite mourners to write messages and draw pictures on the surface.
If a cardboard box seems a little too FedEx, there’s the simplicity of the pine box, readily available on the Internet. You can even order plans to make your own (www.funerals.org/caskets.htm#own). One green cemetery in Florida sells wood caskets complete with hints on how to incorporate them into your home decorating scheme as a coffee table, bookshelves or stereo center. And you needed a new coffee table anyway! What luck.
Can it happen here?
Milwaukee attorney Mark Dahlby has his eye on Madison. He sees it as a prime candidate for a cemetery modeled on the nature-preserve concept. If so, it would be the first of its kind in the Midwest.
Dahlby is interested in using cemetery land to conserve “a whole bunch of land,” with burial confined to 5% to 10% of the whole. He’s hoping to work with a nonprofit land trust or even start a cemetery association and raise capital with which to buy the land, if partnering with a nonprofit proves too difficult. The former Madison resident sees Dane County as the probable location, because its population is more likely to be interested in natural burial, and because the metropolitan area is less developed than suburban Milwaukee. But Dahlby is only in the preliminary stages of pursuing his plan.
Joy Stewart, a state employee who lives in Madison, tried to drum up interest in a green cemetery in southern Wisconsin back in 2003. She centered her energies on the Madison Audubon Society, which she felt would be “the most likely to be interested” in devoting some of its land to creating a nature preserve that would also allow green burials.
But the Audubon board turned her down. “We’re a serious group. We want to do what we do correctly,” says Joanne Herfel, the group’s president. “A lot of us were in favor, but it wasn’t in our mission statement.” Conservation easements on the group’s current lands meant the society would have to buy a new chunk of land. “That was too much for us, with all the other land projects we have going.”
After that, Stewart backed off. “Death is a topic people don’t get excited about working on,” she says philosophically. Leave it to the pagans to be forward-looking in terms of natural passages. Circle Sanctuary, the worship group and preserve near Barneveld, has been the site of several green memorial services at a stone circle that’s reminiscent of the cairns people once used as natural headstones. Cremains are scattered on a wind-swept hilltop nearby.
Selena Fox, the sanctuary’s founder and senior minister, would like this spot someday to be a fully green cemetery. For Fox, the term “green” applies to more than just the physical aspects of burial. Just as important are the rites and ceremonies surrounding a death. She likes to break the funeral into several different stages.
“I’ll do a crossing-over at the bedside,” Fox says. She and the person approaching death connect with that person’s concept of divinity through the ancient cornerstones of earth, air, fire and water, with Fox bringing in symbols of all four. These rites help both the person and the family come to terms with the transition from life to death.
While an outdoor setting is ideal, Fox has performed services inside funeral homes and even in Catholic churches. But keeping nature in the event is crucial. She’ll bring a bowl of acorns into the funeral home and have everyone take one home; she’ll have mourners each take a flower from the church service. She has everyone form a circle to honor the interconnectedness of all life.
Fox also likes to hold a final rite on the one-year anniversary of a death. At that time, friends and family scatter or bury the cremains, perhaps plant a tree, and remember the individual. After a year, “people have evolved” in their grieving, says Fox, and the dispersal of the cremains “can be very therapeutic to those left behind.” It can bring closure in a way that a funeral immediately after the death does not.
Fox is taking steps toward making the cemetery a reality. She’s been in touch with town and other officials as part of planning. At the Sanctuary, “everyone’s enthused.”
Her recommendation, regardless of the availability of a green cemetery: “Take some time to think about what you want and set it down in writing.” It’s a way to “come to terms with death, and then go on with life.”
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