Category: Burial

Categories
Burial Death + the Law

Things Left Behind

“That’s probably the hardest part — to see how some of these people have nobody in their lives,” Hendrickson said.

Saw an interesting article in the LA Times about what happens to the belongings of those who die and have no heirs or fail to leave a will. Possession are packed up in a warehouse and later auctioned off, with proceeds going back into the estate or used for burial expenses, with the remainder going to the state.

I imagine this happens in hundreds of cities throughout the United States. But with Los Angeles County being so dense—and being home to a high percentage of famous and infamous decedants—these auctions must present quite the collection of oddities and fascinations. The thrift store freak/junkhound/garage sailor in me salivates at the possibilities. The introspective me thinks about the sadness of so much left behind. Obviously, you can’t take it with you whether you will it to someone or not. But, in most of these cases, the stuff left behind tells a story about someone very alone—save for the company of their last earthly possessions.

Categories
Burial Eco-Death

Burial Goes Vertical

Aussie Undertakers Turn Funeral Business on Its Head… by Offering to Bury People Upright
Foreign News Service, Daily Mail Online (December 7, 2009)

Just when you thought there were enough options for final disposition, a company in Melbourne, Australia, invents a trolley that will cart around a corpse then deposit it vertically with minimal blunder into a narrow hole. The new six feet under is ten feet deep and two feet wide; bodies are sheathed in biodegradable sacks. Not only does this make it “eco-friendly,” such Upright Burials (the name of the company) would take up less real estate in space-sore cemeteries. As it is, the burials will be performed in a designated field outside of Melbourne that, once full, will be converted back into pasture.

Absent a coffin and the all fuss of a headstone (names are instead inscribed in a memorial wall), burial packages are about 60 percent cheaper than the average traditional burial. According to the Daily Mail Online article,

But Mr Dupleix [the company director] believes principle rather than price is the main reason for interest in vertical plots.

He said: “Most people are attracted by the simplicity of the project and the concept of being far more in touch with nature.”

You know… targeting poor people doesn’t automatically make you a jerk. And if that isn’t true, then it’s definitely true that greenwashing poverty (not to mention death) is a one-way ticket to more than 10 feet deep.

Categories
Burial Death + Popular Culture Defying Death

Dead Man Walking….Into His Own Funeral

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Dead wrong: Man attends own funeral after mix-up over body’s ID

On the holiday known as the Day of the Dead, a Brazilian bricklayer walked into his own funeral.

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: So a guy walks into his own funeral… but apparently it wasn’t so funny for the friends and relatives of Ademir Jorge Goncalves. You see, Mr. Goncalves had been presumed and identified as dead. As it turns out, it was all just a case of mistaken identity. Ha ha!

This isn’t the first time the deceased will attend his or her own funeral—nor will it probably be the last. Take the case of the late Leonard Shlain. After Mr. Shlain’s green burial in northern California earlier this year, a film was shown, featuring himself in a white suit saying that he’d always wanted to attend his own funeral. Filmed a few months before his death, it gave him a platform to set the tone for the affair—surprising and humorous, but also deeply touching as he reassured his loved ones that he was happy, that he missed them, and felt blessed.

This all got me to thinking—just how many ways are there to attend your own funeral? I found these two flakey chicks doing a video tutorial of sorts on attending your own funeral. The message here seems to be about taking stock of your life and thinking about how you want to be remembered before you die. I really didn’t find this very helpful or uplifting, but perhaps Sarah and Suzi will convince you otherwise.

And then there are tales like this one that involve a massive lie in order to “spare everyone’s feelings.” It seems there are easier ways to ditch your friends, no?
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Finally, what about the poor folks who have been interred and buried alive? Also known as premature burial, tales of being buried alive have been found across cultures and time. Some of my favorite stories growing up were Poe’s The Telltale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado. O.K., technically, you are not actually attending your own funeral—just your own burial. But this seems like the worst of all possible ways to go. If anyone has any other ideas about how one can attend his or her own funeral (or burial) let us know via our comments feature. We’d love to hear from you—dead or alive.

Categories
Burial Death Ethics

London: Charming City of Double-decker Busses… and Now Graves

UK Cemetery: Share a Grave with a Stranger?
Jill Lawless, Associated Press (October 28, 2009)

Britain Grave Crisis (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

In efforts to conserve and open up more grave space, the City of London Cemetery, the largest graveyard in the city, has begun reclaiming graves — digging up corpses at least 75 years dead, reburying them deeper, and putting new bodies on top for “double-decker” graves.

While legally sound (well… there’s a loophole involved), it has been causing some turned stomachs… and turned up noses:

Many other European countries regularly reuse old graves after a couple of decades. Britain does not, as a result of Victorian hygiene obsession, piecemeal regulation and national tradition. For many, an Englishman’s tomb, like his home, is his castle.

Categories
Burial Funeral Industry

Death Objects on Video from the MN Historical Society

Minnesota Historical Society Funerary Objects
Matt Anderson, MNHS Curator (October 19, 2009)

Just in time for Halloween. The Minnesota Historical Society presents the following video on Funerary Objects from its own collection. Many state historical societies have these kinds of objects in storage. It’s always interesting to see how they present them and when. Halloween, of course, is a logical (if not too easy) mark.

Categories
Burial Monuments + Memorials

Poe’s Funeral Draws Hundreds

Edgar Allan Poe Finally Getting Proper Funeral
Ben Nuckols, Associated Press (October 6, 2009)

The late Edgar Allan Poe had a memorial service Sunday, October 11, in Baltimore, Maryland. Yes, that late Edgar Allan Poe—the beloved American writer of the macabre who has been dead for 160 years.

Hundreds of mourners in period dress, including Alfred Hitchcock and H.P. Lovecraft impersonators, paid their respects to the man whose first funeral, following his mysterious death in 1849, fetched only a handful of attendees. The memorial service Sunday — there were two, actually, to accommodate all the mourners — was one of many events celebrating his 200th birthday.

To see some footage of the Poe replica and procession, including some retro morphing effects in the ABC video, check out the links below (it seems to be popular lately to disable embedded video… jerks).

160 Years After Mysterious Death, Edgar Allan Poe Gets Proper Funeral (ABC)

Second Send-off for US Writer Poe (BBC)

Edgar Allan Poe’s Final Send Off (Reuters)

At the beginning of the ABC video, I twice saw an ad for a mouse trap — count yourself lucky if you watch it, too: “Nothing to see, nothing to touch, you just throw it away.” …Because that’s just how we like our death: disposable.

Categories
Burial Death + Biology Eco-Death

How Dead Bodies Become Beetle Juice

To Casket Or Not To Casket? One Of America’s Great Field Biologists Thinks About Burial
Robert Krulwich, NPR (October 9, 2009)

NPR science reporter Robert Krulwich (also of RadioLab fame) did this short piece (it’s a little over five minutes long) on the decomposition of dead animal bodies and their consumption by beetles. He interviews Professor Bernd Heinrich, an expert on all things animal, insect and decomposition. Check it out!
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I am all for being left to rot in the woods after I am dead. Based on my current body size, I bet I could feed thousands of beetle families. It would be my way of giving back to the natural world.

Categories
Burial Eco-Death

Promession: Lose Your Life, Leave a Tree

Kim posted a couple weeks ago about promession, the process by which a body is embrittled in a bath of liquid nitrogen, crumpled using vibrations then sterilized by freeze drying, rendering a corpse into compost. Promession avoids the harsh chemicals and environmental pollutants of traditional burial and cremation, making it a green alternative while providing the requisite sanitization of death and emotional distance from simply dumping fresh bodies into the earth (the original “organic compost” method).

Today I discovered an animation depicting the process. I fear the multiple angle re-enactments of a tree growing out of a corpse’s pulverized chest may shift the intended “gee whiz!” effect closer to “oh dear god,” but it’s still an interesting infoplug, provided you’re not eating a delicious, ruby apple, or plan to, ever.

Categories
Burial Funeral Industry

Funeral Procession, er, I mean Promession

Container by Erik Geschke

“Natural burial is what we have been doing for millennia. People may be leery of this new fandangled technology.”

– Janet McCausland, Executive Director of the Toronto-based Natural Burial Association

Eco-this, eco-that. Seems everybody wants to “go green” these days—even in death. I say, why not? It’s the last good deed you can do for the planet after you shuffle off that mortal coil.

Eco-friendly burial practices are not necessarily a new phenomenon, but they are receiving more attention and interest these days as environmentally friendly practices of all kinds take hold. An article in the NY Times covered the topic about 4 years ago when they profiled the Fernwood Cemetary in northern California.

Take, for example, a recent article in The Walrus, a Canadian general interest publication akin to the U.S.-based Utne Reader. In the latest issue, writer James Glave, writes about the process of “promession”, which is actually a neologism used to describe the process of ecologically inclined disposal of bodies by way of freeze drying. In other words, the term may not have caught on yet, but the concept of freeze drying one’s remains to then be implanted into soil so that life may begin anew, is gaining purchase with the eco-friendly crowd.

On a more personal note, my experiences with freeze drying have primarily been with either Folger’s coffee or the disturbing (at the time) purchase of a freeze dried duckling my parents bought at a flea market back in the 1980s. Literally frozen in time, this little guy had been saved for posterity due to its cute factor—and the fact that it could be suspended in time, fuzz and all, in a perfect non-animated but life-like state—mesmerized and seduced my parents to purchase and display him in our living-room curio cabinet for years, where it remains to this day.

Categories
Burial

Prone Burials: Mortifying the Dead

Buried Face Down: Prone Burials
Current Archaeology, v.20(231), June 2009
Via National Geographic News

Face-down burial has long been regarded with a knee-jerk, not-right, benefiting-the-doubt reaction. Across cultures and through time, experts and laity alike have assumed prone burials to be accidents or the result of post-interment disturbances.

Following an extensive survey of documented prone burials around the world, however, anthropologist Caroline Arcini of Sweden’s National Heritage Board has concluded that face-down burial was done intentionally to shame the dead: prisoners of war, criminals and those of lower social status, accused as witches or harboring the wrong religion in the wrong place and time.