Author: Charles

Absence from whom we love is worse than death

17 November 2008
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: ashes
Ask a hardline atheist if they want to be buried or cremated. Their response ought to be a predictable “I don’t care, my dead body won’t be me any more, I’ll have gone from being a me to an it.” But I’ve never met an atheist who didn’t express a preference, an insistence, even, and talk about their dead body as a me, as in “I don’t want to lie in a hole rotting away full of maggots,” etc.It’s illogical but it’s the sort of thing you tend to notice only once it’s pointed out. Illogic pervades everything to do with death and funerals, we accept this easily, unthinkingly, particularly in the matter of letting go of the body. Religious people are no less illogical.

Once you’ve let go of the body, what’s left? Plenty. Feelings. Memories. Admiration. Gratitude. Example. Values. You don’t have to let go of any of them. You can still see the dead person in your mind’s eye; you can still hear them in your mind’s ear. You could argue that most of the most important things are left, together either with the joyful reassurance of the dead person’s present non-existence or their blissful afterlife on the Other Side.

It’s not the dead person’s body we miss but everything their body embodied. It’s the black hole of absence we grieve for, the loss of continuing presence of all those things we don’t have to let go of, that we haven’t lost. Nothing can compensate for that.

So we cling to their bodies in ways which are, to paraphrase Tom Lynch, sacred and silly. Claire Seeber, writing in the Guardian, keeps her grandmother’s ashes in the glove compartment of her car; Keith Richard famously snorted his dad’s; Patsy Kensit slept beside her mother’s for years. One man, Stanley, brought his wife’s ashes home. “There was no plan,” he says, “so I put her in the wardrobe … Now I find it comforting to know she is there safe and, most important to me, warm. It might sound irrational — as a scientist I know there’s no logic in it, and I’m not religious or superstitious — but … I’m just reassured to know that she’s not out there in the cold … she’s still with me when I’m sleeping.” Read the whole article here.

Ashes in the wardrobe, a little shrine on the mantelpiece — sacred and silly; silly but sacred.

Where do you draw the line?

The recent picture at the top shows Lenin having a restorative bath. Sacred? Silly?

Your call.

You couldn’t make it up

12 November 2008
Charles
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Categories: funeral cost

You couldn’t make it up. The Express could, perhaps, given its record for libelling people. Here is the essence of their story in today’s paper.

 

First, the headline: Three Orphans Sell Pets To Pay For Mum’s Funeral.

 

Got yer pulse racing? It’s right up there on a par with Headless Waiter Found In Topless Bar (New York Post).

 

Troy, 17, Rory, 15, and Alice, 14, are flogging all they’ve got to raise £2,500 for the funeral of their mum. “The youngsters have so far raised £525 by selling their beloved spaniels Peggy, Minnie and Sammy – for which they got a total of £250 – and some furniture from their council house in Whittlesey, Cambs.” Next to go is the Xbox. Troy says “We can’t face mum having a pauper’s funeral. We’re not asking for a lavish affair but she deserves a few flowers and a nice send-off.”

 

The funeral directors insist on having the money upfront. They offered to knock 200 quid off by squeezing the body into a smaller coffin, but the kids refused.

 

Enough!

 

What a shame it is that the people who feel duty-bound to spend more than they can afford on a funeral are so often those who can least afford it. No one calls those middle-class, cardboard coffin funerals paupers’ funerals.

 

Read the whole sorry story here — if you can bear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

People like people like us

10 November 2008
Charles
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Categories: family funeral directors, funeral directors

Saturday was National Bereavement Awareness Day. Miss it? Whoops. Let me fill you in.

A brainchild of the independent funeral directors’ trade body, SAIF, the day was a marketing tool designed to raise the profile of independents. My local funeral directors, James Giles and Sons of Bromsgrove, held an open day. They’ve recently refurbished, so they had a service of dedication, too, and roped in the local MP. They asked me to come along and talk about what I do. I work with families who don’t want a full-on religious funeral ceremony.

My work ethic doesn’t normally extend to Saturdays and, as I knotted a reluctant tie, I wondered in how many households anyone darkly muttering, “Hey, we can go to the open day at undertakers” was being met by an enthusiastic answering chorus of “Yes, lets!”

I got there deliberately too late for the holy part of the proceedings. Rain was falling unkindly on the horse-drawn hearse in the yard. But inside, the scene was unexpectedly one of warmth and cheeriness. People had come. Lots of them. My spirits woke up. The refurb is great — light and bright and airy. There were even people who wanted to talk to me, so we talked and we considered what the purpose of a funeral is and looked at the options and I wished the Good Funeral Guide was already out there to guide them. They’d been up to the mortuary, seen the fridges, found out what really goes on. It was a true open day — an eye-opener.

There was wine and fruit juice, tea and coffee, sandwiches and sausage rolls. But there was no hush or awkwardness. There was more of a party atmosphere and lots of laughter. It set me thinking.

These guys at Giles and Sons don’t big themselves up in shuddermaking clothes and set themselves self-importantly apart. They’re not trend-setters, either, but they’ll ungrudgingly do anything they’re asked (“so long as it’s legal”). They are friends, neighbours, members of the local community — everyone knows them — and they do what they do with a kindness and a naturalness which makes the business of arranging a funeral normal, natural, so much easier than people dread. This makes an enormous difference to their relationship with, and experience of, death. That’s why people came to their open day: because the Gileses are people like us, and people like us are the people we like. Almost every one who works there is a member of the family. They are the very best sort of family funeral directors.

When people talk about how funerals can be improved, undertakers can come in for plenty of criticism for their resistance to change.  Many of them deserve some. But if funerals are too often bleak and meaningless affairs it is a mistake to point the finger exclusively at the undertakers. There are other more influential factors at work. It takes too long to arrange a cremation. Twenty minutes is not enough for a proper send-off. A religious ceremony is an absurd choice for unbelievers. Above all, the bereaved are too content to play a passive role in the process.

Funerals will only improve when informed consumers start calling the shots. When they do, we can be sure about this: James Giles and Sons, and countless other family funeral directors throughout the land, will be only too happy to do as they are asked — so long as it’s legal.

Ghastly good taste

7 November 2008
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: ceremony, something for the weekend
One mistake this blog will never make: it will never engage in debates about taste. Each to their own, I say, all the while keeping my personal views encased in concrete behind a suave and serene demeanour. “We’re one but we’re not the same”, as my good friend Bono so sagely sings. So right, Bono.

Over in India there’s a growing fad for inviting a celeb to the funeral to offer condolences to the mourners. It costs, of course, but it doesn’t half add prestige both to the event and to the dead person’s family.

Could it catch on in the UK? What do you think? If you’re going to drape the coffin in a Liverpool flag and tell everyone to dress in Liverpool shirts (or at least something red), why not pay Steven Gerrard a few bob to come along and wring a few hands?

I don’t think I’ll be looking for a themed funeral, so I won’t be looking for a themed celeb. But I’m definitely into the overall notion. And yes, now that I think of it, I want that lovely Ric Griffin from Holby at mine. His empathic presence will surely blunt death’s sting.

You?

Forward backwards!

4 November 2008
Charles
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Categories: funeral pyres, funeral trends, open-air cremation, viking funeral

My good friend the embalmer is not noted for halfway utterance, nor for half-tones in her vocabulary. She calls a spade a spade and hits you with it if she thinks you’re wrong, thwang thwang. She’s never less than invigorating.

One of the themes she warms to hotliest is that of the present reinventing the past. “What do they think is so new about that?!” she’ll expostulate in response to some new funerary trend. “It’s all been done before!!”

Quite right. So it has. Personalisation, for example. Everyone’s talking about that — unique funerals for unique people. Turns out the Vikings were doing it more than a thousand years ago.

They were more like us than you might think, the Vikings — and I’m not inviting comparison here with Friday night revellers in our city centres.

For starters, they had no defined religion. Instead, according to Professor Neil Price, Chair of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, they “made up a set of spiritual beliefs, which were then acted out at the graveside … They were aggressively pagan and strongly anti-Christian.”

Just like so many of us.

Possibly more emotionally sophisticated. Professor Price observes “how slim they perceived the boundaries to be between life and death”. We haven’t got there, yet.

He talks about burial rituals which became a form of theatre lasting up to ten days, during which order cialis online australia mourners told stories about men and gods — stories “intended to provide the deceased with a poetic passage into the next life,” stories which predate the sagas and may even be the progenitors of Norse mythology.

We haven’t got there, yet, either, but the trend towards more participative funerals is, er, a move in the right direction.

As for personalisation, they benchmark it. “No two graves were the same,” says Professor Price, who has studied thousands. “Some bore evidence of a military career, with whole ships containing the corpse left open. Other graves were found to have had animal remains – one had no fewer than 20 decapitated horses – and occasionally there were human remains as well. Some Vikings were buried with their wives and families; others were laid to rest in more simple single graves.”

Way to go.

It turns out that the Vikings’ reputation for raping and pillaging is unmerited. They were actually far more interested in poetry and spirituality. A medieval English chronicler, John of Wallingford, observed that they combed their hair every day, washed every Saturday and changed their clothes regularly. He meant it disparagingly.

We’ve a long way to go to catch up with our forefathers. Indeed, you could say that Viking funerals illustrate how the forward march of our civilisation has in fact been a retreat into fear and impotence.

I must go down to the seas again…

24 October 2008
Charles
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Categories: Uncategorised

This blog is going to the seaside for a week in the firm conviction that there is more to life than death. It will spend some time hanging out with its embalmer friend, but its small talk is unlikely to be corpsecentric. No, it will be walking the windswept clifftops, eating crab sandwiches at Portland Bill and enjoying bitter beer at The George, a pub which is still a pub. It is unlikely to give expression to thanatological utterance.

Before I go, three things:

First: Note to all florists: ‘Granddad’ has three ‘d’s, a double followed by a single. You’re all missing out a ‘d’ at the moment and losing good revenue as a result.

Second: I apologise for getting under the skin of so many people with my last post about Funeralcare. Everyone professionally involved with funerals lives in beyond-mortal terror of screwing up. We know that if it can happen it will and, therefore, at some time, we will. This is a matter of deep neurosis. I touched a raw nerve. Only this morning it only took me just half a mile to convince myself that I was driving to the wrong crematorium. I wasn’t — but you know how it goes.

What am I doing, tweaking Funeralcare’s tail like this? It all started with my first post about them, and their subsequent non-response. Read what the latest TUC Congress said about them here. I have to confess that I hate a good fight, it’s not what I do. But you may forgive me for feeling narked. The GMB union has promised me a response, and I’ll post that when it comes in.

Third: The rejection of a mainstream religious funeral by those who are not religious, or have their own, personal spiritual beliefs, has made it necessary for them to re-invent the funeral. And the central problem facing those who want to re-invent funerals is this: if the funeral cannot look forwards and contemplate the person who has died enjoying a blissfest in eternity, then what on earth can it do? People who have not adopted or evolved a belief system which explains death have to make sense of it their own way, sometimes from scratch.

I’ve just read a very well-written and thoughtful blog post on the state of the modern funeral. It will strike a chord with many of you. Here’s an extract:

We stopped talking about death, judgment, heaven, and hell. We have become Egyptian in our attitude towards death and the afterlife, thinking our deceased’s coffin needs to be filled with the things they enjoyed in this life: their favorite cigarettes, romance novels, transistor radio, etc. We allow the white funeral pall, which recalls baptismal dignity, to be replaced by things like a sport jersey or some other keepsake.

He is a priest. He has no doubt what a funeral is for. He believes that the doctrine and decorum of a religious funeral breathe a still, small voice of calm and certainty upon disorderly feelings of grief and loss. Here’s how he defines some modern attitudes:

[Mourners] don’t see any need (much less the necessity) to pray for the soul of a deceased person. Nor do they see their need (or the deceased’s need) for the Church’s funeral rites. This gets replaced by their own personal version of the same. In short, the funeral is about THEM, and their grief at the loss of the deceased.

Read the entire post here. It will nourish your thinking. I’m not telling you what I think.

For now, “all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying / And the flung spray and the blown spume and the sea gulls crying.”

Back with you all soon.

How different from US

23 October 2008
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: funeral cost

The effects of the crash have yet fully to register. Brits have always had a puritanical, penitential streak, a disposition to pare cheese, save string, make do and mend. Those who will be wiped out are to be pitied. The rest of us, I think, are strangely relieved that it’s all over, happy to get back to self-reliance and common sense. We remind ourselves that the best things in life are recession-proof. The beauties of nature outshine the thrill of the mall.

 

Bad news is good news for the press; our papers are making merry feeding our schadenfreude and our fear. They’ve picked up on it in the US and it’s generated this headline in Time: Corpses Pile Up Amid Britain’s Financial Crisis.

 

You hadn’t noticed? It goes like this. Families on benefits are encountering delays in getting Social Fund payments for their funerals. Some funeral directors, unwilling to carry debt, are refusing to go ahead with funeral arrangements until they have been paid. It has taken nine weeks to hold a funeral for a Shrewsbury man. Questions have been asked in the House. The spectre of the Winter of Discontent stalks our streets.

 

In point of boring fact, this situation predates the crash. It affects only 27,000 funerals a year. So the chances of a corpse pile-up in your neighbourhood are bathetically less than nil.

 

The hullabaloo raises interesting questions about funeral costs, though, at a time when everyone will be interested in cheaper funerals. The Social Fund will cough up around £700 towards the funeral director’s bill and around £1,000 for disbursements. In all, that’s a few hundred pounds short of the cost of a typical funeral. Need a funeral cost this much? Two factors, in particular, make funerals arguably more expensive then they ought to be.

 

The first is the d-word, that peculiar word we apply only to the very old and the dead: dignity. If a funeral does not feature a hearse, bearers, shop flowers atop the coffin and a be-toppered undertaker walking in front of the cortege, most people would reckon that to be shabby rather than simple. Funeral directors could offer a service that costs less than £700, but there’d be little uptake. What’s more, their pricing structures are such that they’d struggle to make a decent profit if they did.

 

It is interesting to see how, in the US, the huge cost of a ‘traditional’ funeral — cosmetised, casketed body, visitation, service, whole body burial in a vault — has spawned its polar opposite, direct cremation, whereby the body is cremated as soon after death as statutorily possible (usually 24 hours) and the ashes returned to the family. Thus Florida Direct Cremation can offer to transport the body, coffin it, do all the paperwork and cremate it for an all-in price of $395. In sinking, shrinking British pounds that works out at just £225.76. Most charge around $900 — £500.

 

Direct cremation does not preclude a funeral, but it is likely to be a funeral not for a body but for its ashes. The family chooses its venue. In the UK we are culturally conditioned to believe that a funeral for a body is indispensable. Could that change?

 

How much does cremating a body actually cost in terms of fuel and capital costs?  I ought to find out; perhaps a helpful person will tell me. It’s bound to be more in the UK than it is in the US because we cremate so inefficiently. And this brings me to my second factor: because a UK crematorium is both a ceremonial space in which to hold funerary rites and also a place where the dead are burned, it gets all that heat up to burn far fewer bodies than it could — a very un-green way of doing things. A US crematory will burn bodies round the clock if necessary.

 

The UK model doesn’t work. More time is given to dead bodies than they need, too little to mourners. The outcome looks and feels like a production line. Not for the business of cremation it isn’t.  

 

It would make more sense for bodies to be burned in a dedicated plant serving several ceremonial spaces. Given the lack of interest most people show in what happens after the curtains close, it would seem to be immaterial if a body is burned a few feet away from the ceremonial space or a few miles. Those few who do wish to see everything through and done properly could still go and do so — as they do in the US. Sure, they would find themselves in an industrial environment, but scarcely more so than behind the scenes at a crem.

 

Should local authorities feel obliged to provide a ceremonial spaces? Or crematories? I can’t see why. But they’d hate to give up their crematoria because they yield good profits, which subsidise the costs of cemetery maintenance — and, therefore, of burial. In this way, local authorities are able to compete unfairly with natural burial grounds run by the private sector. They further penalise cremation clients in order to fund unrelated projects. It’s a pity many of them don’t spend a little of that money on refurbishing their crem toilets.

 

Vested interests oppose change. Funerals cost more than they ought.

 

And the funeral directors? Are they making more than they ought? No. They must comply, both, with things as they are and with the wishes of their clients. If funerals cost more than they need, that’s not their fault. Having in mind what they do, they are entitled to a decent living.

 

As I go to press I can’t help thinking my argument is flawed. It is reassuring to know that my loyal readers will not hesitate to pounce. 

Fobbed off and let down

17 October 2008
Charles
No comments
Categories: Co-op, Co-operative Funeralcare

There’s no rule of thumb that will help us find a good funeral director.

The soulless efficiency of the firm that sells us car insurance suits us very well so long as it’s the cheapest. But when someone has died, what we look for is an intensely personal service, and it naturally seems most likely that we’ll get that from a little independent family business rather than from a branch of one of the conglomerates (Dignity and the Co-ops) or a chain of funeral directors. The big boys know this, they know that the perception is that big equals impersonal and soulless, and that is why, when they acquire a family business, they like to go on trading misleadingly under the old family name.

If they believed that they were doing the best possible job they’d have the confidence to proclaim UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT! The fact that they don’t tells us something, doesn’t it?

And yet, as a great sage of the industry observed to me recently, there are good big ‘uns and bad little ‘uns — and the other way about. Yes, there are some nasty little tykes out there, and some really top-notch branches of the big ‘uns.

We get very few scandals in the UK funeral industry but we do get muddles and screw-ups. It is famous in the industry that these are normally committed by the Co-ops. Here’s an example:

On 1 September this year the funeral for a Leeds woman, a stickler, in life, for punctuality, was arranged by Co-op Funeralcare for 2.20 at Lawnswood crematorium. The hearse and 2 limousines didn’t get to her daughter Kathleen Gamble’s house until 2.40. Fortunately, the crem was able to accommodate the delay. On a busy day, it wouldn’t. Mrs Gamble was furious: “Somebody should be held accountable for making a really sad day for us even more traumatic, emotional and stressful. My mother was never late for anything and then she turned up late to her own funeral.”

There’s Greenwich Mean Time and there’s Funeral Directors’ Time. FDT makes GMT look sloppy and inexact. Funeral directors, you’ll be interested to know, obsess about time. When, on a recent Holby, the cortege for a 12 o’clock funeral pulled up at a quarter to, all the watching undertakers dived behind their sofas, heads in hands. A well run cortege arrives bang on the dot, no earlier, no later. The Co-op’s crime in Leeds was, in funeralworld, well, horrible.

Funeralcare has a multitude of administrative systems designed to make its operation (literally) idiot-proof. In this case, they blamed their howler on a “communication breakdown”. We can only speculate on what really happened. It looks as if the idiots won.

Could the little independent family firm for whose clients I lead funerals have committed such a howler? Absolutely not. How do I know? Because, simply, I know how much they care. Every funeral is, for them, an event, not just another job.

Even a moron-proof admin system will not be proof against an employee who doesn’t care enough or is too busy.

When Funeralcare finally got around to explaining their cock up to Mrs Gamble more than three weeks later, this was her response: “Apparently plans are in place to prevent it from happening again but I just don’t believe them. We feel completely fobbed off and let down.”

We know how she feels. This blog has invited Funeralcare on three occasions to write and tell us about its ethos and, despite promising to do so, it has failed. It is incredible that, given a free opportunity to target consumers, talk about itself and get us all to love it, Funeralcare goes on passing up the chance, falling into contempt and letting down its best employees into the bargain.

To what do we ascribe this? Arrogance? Complacency? Stupidity?

Let’s be kind. Let’s put it down to a “communications breakdown” and hope that “plans are in place to prevent it from happening again”. The only reason why this blog presents a one-sided view of Funeralcare is because they won’t rise to their defence. I believe that there are two sides to this story. Readers will form their own judgement.

For the fourth time I shall now write to Funeralcare, asking them to respond, refute — and advertise for free.

Blazing row

15 October 2008
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral pyres, open-air cremation

“The Hindus of Britain have never asked for anything,” says Mr Gai of the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society “but we’re not asking for much, just to cremate our loved ones in the way our religion says it must be done.”

The issue of open-air cremation is hotting up as Newcastle-based Mr Gai prepares to go the High Court next month to demand the right to have his body disposed of in accordance with his religious beliefs.

He’s got precedents on his side. In 1884 the colourful Dr William Price cremated his five month-old son Jesus Christ on an open-air pyre. He was prosecuted, and acquitted on the grounds that cremation is not illegal if it creates no nuisance. When he died, Dr Price himself went up in smoke on top of two tons of coal. His successful test of the law was the green flag the Cremation Society was waiting for. Britain’s first-ever crematorium, at Woking, was in business at last, its first customer the pioneering (if inert) Mrs Pickersgill.

There are other precedents. You can read about them here.

Mr Gai’s challenge will, doubtless, come down to an evaluation of both the aesthetic and environmental effects of outdoor cremation. It is not long since measures to control foot and mouth disease in the UK blackened the sun and cloaked the countryside with the smoke and stench of burning cattle carcases, so no problem there. But those innocent beasts did not have teeth filled with mercury amalgam, and vaporised mercury is particularly nasty emission.

Invocation of a Supreme Being is often an effective way of bypassing standard procedures, leaving those who defer either to no deity, or to one with no political clout, in second-class-citizen position. There was a row last month over a man whose body couldn’t be buried on a Saturday because he wasn’t a Muslim. Read about it here.

Let us hope that Mr Gai will be successful and that the judgement will permit open-air cremation for anyone who opts for it. Does that mean that the derelict shipyards of the Tyne will be replaced by burning ghats?

No — regrettably or otherwise. Open-air cremation is perceived to be a religious requirement only by some Hindus. And for a very few non-Hindus it is an elemental desire which cannot be reduced to a mere reason. It’s a tiny niche market, but one which nevertheless deserves to go the way of its choosing.

Let’s not forget that our ‘bonfire’ derives from the Middle English ‘bone fire’.

Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade

13 October 2008
Charles
No comments
Categories: green funeral, natural burial

I had to go to Wales to see the burial ground at Usk Castle Chase because it’s just been garlanded with the title of Green Burial Ground of the Year 2008.

Wales doesn’t know it’s Wales, of course: that’s simply the name its present tenants have given it. But it is a ‘country’ with a strong sense of national identity, something which makes me feel, as I drive towards the border, defensively prickly. Patriotism is too often a symptom of a bi-polar inferiority complex; its manifestations can be ill-natured. I anticipate being categorised as English. I am not. I am a republic of one.

My misgivings are groundless. The satnav goes on speaking to me in the easy way it always used. The road signs are intelligible, for all that they leave me coming up gasping for vowels. I am charmed by the Welsh way of slowing you down as you approach a sharp corner. Araf, say the signs, and I fancy they sound like the warning bark of a Welsh corgi: Araf-araf! Arrrrr…!

The burial ground is a large sloping meadow flanked on three sides by woods. Beside it is a simple wooden shelter. It is a blissful spot and the most complete contrast to any other burial ground I have ever seen, whether conventional or green. It is the fulfilment of the idea of a natural burial ground, utterly uncompromising.

There is no memorialisation allowed whatsoever, so there’s none of the possessiveness and territoriality that go with a conventional cemetery – no jealous demarcation and personalisation of plots, no visual jabber of talkative, decorated headstones, sunwashed artificial blooms, dead roses in cellophane, blue chippings, solar powered angels. There is no tingle-wingle from a single windchime. Nothing. Nothing at all but birdsong.

Most other natural burial grounds compromise – because grieving people can’t help feeling proprietorial about the grave site — and permit grave markers (albeit biodegradable and non-renewable), gardening of the plot and a certain amount of what green burial pioneer and guru Ken West elegantly terms ‘grieving waste’ – flowers, plastic pots, stuff. The result tends to be tawdry, half-hearted – in the worst cases, a sort of shanty town of the dead.

Usk Castle Chase probably scores as close to full marks as makes no difference according to Ken’s ultra-puritanical criteria of greenness. I was particularly pleased to learn that they bury at 1.3 metres, allowing bodies to rot aerobically and, therefore, environmentally usefully. Too many green grounds bury bodies at six feet; no one’ll never push up daisies from down there.

On the day I was at Usk I saw no freshly turned earth, no evidence at all that anyone has ever been buried there and no visitors. The words of Psalm 103 express it perfectly: As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

Anyone thinking about natural burial — and 64 per cent of the population say they favour it — needs to consider all this both from their own point of view and also from that of those they will leave behind. It’s not emotionally easy to embrace the idea that it is the whole place which stands as a memorial to each dead resident, but that’s what green burial logically means.

Green burial ought to be about sustainability in terms of the re-use of graves, too, after, say, 40 years. But I suppose no one would buy a plot on those terms. Not yet, anyway.

(The title of this piece quotes from Andrew Marvell’s The Garden.)