My trip through the cemetery yesterday got me wondering about burial laws. I’d heard (somewhere) that it was illegal for you to, say, bury your mom when she dies in your backyard. That sort of shit. You know, the type of thing that people did more traditionally who owned land, where they’d have a little family plot on it someplace. This seems pretty cool to me, especially if you owned a lot of land. And anyway, cemeteries are weird as shit. I mean, they are sort of cool on the one hand, just because they’re so bizarre. But they’re also super unnatural. I don’t relish the idea of being pumped full of chemicals, sealed in a titanium box, lowered into the ground and cemented into place. No sir. That shit ain’t gonna happen if I can help it. Besides being cremated or something, I actually really dig the idea of being put just straight into the ground, and whatever nutrients I have going back into the ecosystem. In other words - THE WAY IT SHOULD OBVIOUSLY BE.
Turns out I’m not alone in that sentiment. There is a non-profit organization in the UK called the Natural Death Centre (There are some links there to places in the US & Canada, also). Anyway, the goal of the organization is to support people who actually want to die the real way that people have always passed - at home, surrounded by their loved ones. And from there, helping people to organize family-run, inexpensive funerals and burials which are actually environmentally-sound.
This movement actually seems to be especially strong in the UK. I’m not sure why, but a preponderance of the resources available on the subject are from there. Here are a few resources I’ve found:
- BBC has a thing about DIY (do-it-yourself) funerals
- A British page about so-called garden burial laws, and DIY funerals
- Another UK site called “If I Should Die” has a section on green, alternative and DIY burials
- A page with some good thoughts on natural death
Aside from that, I found a halfway decent article on MSN about the topic (I know, I was shocked too) of green and woodland burials. Actually the article is specifically about one such alternative cemetery in South Carolina called Memorial Ecosystems. Their idea is pretty cool. They set up a nature preserve first and foremost, and within that, you can buy spaces to have ecologically friendly DIY burials. This is what they mean when they say “woodland burials,” is that it’s actually in the woods. It’s in nature, it’s wild, there are animals around. It’s not some manicured lawn with little fucking US flags waving in the breeze. Gravesites have natural flat stones laying down as markers; it’s actually kind of beautiful. I personally feel like it would be much more meaningful to visit the grave of a loved one while on a walk through a secluded forest, than driving through a weird village of the damned.
I know what half the people who are reading this are thinking though. EWWWW! Dead bodies? Do-it-yourself funerals? YECHHH!! Get over it. Dying is part of living, and while I’m not interested in becoming a mortician or anything, I think it’s really weird that people are so separated from the natural processes of life as they are. It’s just another example of our roots being cut out from under us as real honest-to-god human beings. Admittedly, this kind of shit is going to be more than most people (myself included) could handle on their own. But it would be really cool to see this kind of thing really catch on in the funerary industry, to give people a more natural and more human option.
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