Cemeteries: Suburbia for the dead

Cemeteries: Suburbia for the dead

Re-thinking the burial

Cemeteries are Ivory Homes suburban cookie cutter spec. home developments for the dead.  Stuffed corpses are packed into uniform, gridded plots with only trivial differences such as the size and detail of the headstones.  Ancestors visit the plot once a year to make sure that it has more flowers, balloons, and cheesy decorations than the neighbors’ plot.  If you can plant your corpse at the end of a really nice graveyard cul-de-sac on a hill you’ve really made it.  Sometimes kids need to be yelled at for playing on grave lawns.  Transitioning from a deadened suburban existence to a cemetery is practically seamless; just move your bloated corpse from the couch to the casket.

Texas graveyard law states that the casket must be buried 1.5 feet deep if the top is made of “impermeable” material, 2 feet if not. This is gross.  Think of the flooding in New Orleans, there were floating caskets.  Now think of global warming and sea levels rising.  Ewww. 

Most cemeteries in the United States are actually for-profit and rely on aggressive ‘pre-need’ plot sales.  Teams of sales people cold call the living to get them to act now and finance (mortgage?) their plots while supplies last.  Apparently this business is recession proof according to a brief survey of the industry. Capitalism always thrives on death.  

The burial process itself is disgusting.  Corpses are pumped full of toxic chemicals in order to preserve them forever and eventually they leach into the ground and pollute.  In no other context is it ok to pour gallons of toxic chemicals into the ground (at least not openly and ceremoniously).  At least 2 liters of nasty fluid are pumped into an adult during the embalming process.  Do the math.  Also, opulent caskets that cost thousands of dollars are immediately buried and left forever to rot. 

Xeriscaped cemeteries?  When hell freezes over.  Saudi Arabian graveyards are more lush than their golf courses.  I understand there’s a movement toward “green cemeteries.”  Sounds like “green” nuclear waste dumping to me.  Perhaps energy solutions could get a deal to import corpses from U.S. carpet bombing overseas when we finally reach peak capacity.

Zombie movies often involve cemetery mayhem of apocalyptic proportions and prove at very least that 2 feet deep is not enough.  One sign of the biblical apocalypse is when the dead rise from the grave.  Not even corpses can stand the places.  Grave robbers are the next pirates and should not be tempted by further populating these morbid suburbs of death.  Is it any coincidence that two of the scariest movie genres revolve around suburbs and cemeteries?

Some may say that headstones are cool.  I can agree with that.  Burying bodies stuffed with pollution is not a prerequisite. Necrophiliac orgies are also not an argument in favor of the graveyard.  After a week or so the magic kind of goes away, I’m told.

Seriously though, when will it end?  We are going to bury all 9 billion people currently living on the planet (minus those who are cremated or otherwise laid to rest) in graveyards.  The logical conclusion is that the entire earth will eventually become one massive cemetery. 

Inevitably we must rethink the burial.

When I die I want my family to pay off the mortician (since it is illegal to take possession of your own corpse) and take my body before they pump it full of formaldehyde.  I want them to drive me to the mountains and bury me in a previously decided secret location in the wilderness.  I want to be planted beneath a young blue spruce and allowed to decompose into rich compost so that my ancestors can come and visit the tree and know that it is me.  If I am loved, perhaps my loved one can be buried next to me in the same fashion.