The Centre for Natural Burial

The Globe and Mail. Toronto

Travelling to the sweet hereafter doesn’t really require a coffin able to withstand ‘a direct nuclear strike.’ In fact, MARY AMBROSE reports, shunning high-cost funeral options is not only eco-friendly — it’s all the rage

When their mother died recently, Bill and Kirk Fuller didn’t know what kind of funeral to arrange. They had tried to discuss it with her, but Patricia Fuller was elderly and “despite a fair amount of urging,” son Bill says, “she didn’t give directions to us. So we made a decision.”

They buried her at Fernwood, the largest “green” cemetery in the United States.

This isn’t just a “California story.” When a PBS-TV special about home funerals aired last August, requests for information from the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA) about “green burials” and home funerals doubled. Last year, when the American Association of Retired Persons conducted a poll on burial preferences, more than 70 per cent of respondents chose a green one.

At the same time, more and more North Americans are opting for cremation rather than burial. It’s cheaper and much more environmentally conscious. After all, most people in other parts of the world don’t fill their loved ones with preservatives, sheathe them in concrete and put them in the ground.

Patricia Fuller certainly wouldn’t have described herself as an environmentalist. Bill says she was fond of traditions and happy to do things the way they had always been done. But she also had a friend buried at Fernwood, and her sons feel sure that she would have eventually made the same choice.

Located just minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge, Fernwood is a 19th-century cemetery that is being transformed into one that seems to better reflect our times. Non-denominational and environmentally friendly, it has adopted an ethos that suggests we try to ensure the Earth’s longevity rather than ours.

Dr. Billy Campbell, a part owner, created the first U.S. commercial green cemetery in South Carolina. He did so because, in talking to a funeral director about burying his father in a vault, he realized that he was buying enough protection for the corpse to withstand “a direct nuclear strike,” as he put it. In reality, he was protecting him from nature, which struck Dr. Campbell as, well, unnatural.

So anyone laid to rest at Fernwood can’t be embalmed or buried in a casket that is not degradable — no plastics and no metal hinges.

As well, no traditional monuments, such as tombstones, are allowed. The only exceptions, says Fernwood manager Gary McRae, are a “native California rock or a planted tree.” Indigenous grasses are replacing the non-indigenous eucalyptus, and hiking trails are being laid.

The transformation from old-style graveyard to natural park also reflects the locale. Fernwood’s 32 acres are in the sweet hills of Marin County, a San Francisco suburb that is home to celebrities, such as writer Isabel Allende, director George Lucas and actor-director Sean Penn, and some of the country’s highest-priced real estate.

Residents pride themselves on their tolerance, latent creativity and respect for nature, so money happily sits beside spirituality, and Fernwood’s owners know exactly how to approach them.

In the reverse of mining, Fernwood charges for insertion rather than extraction rights. And those in the surrounding mansions are happy to pay up front, ensuring both a bargain resting place and the land remaining undeveloped. Mr. McRae says this is 40 per cent of its business.

This shouldn’t suggest a similar cemetery elsewhere would be equally successful. As in life, Marin Country is on the cutting edge in death. According to the FCA, about 45 per cent of Vermont residents choose cremation, while in Marin the percentage is closer to 80. That’s high for the United States but roughly equal to Britain, where green burial spots have a long tradition.

“The U.S. and Canada,” asserts FCA executive director Joshua Slocum, “are the only countries in the world that routinely embalm, put bodies in steel caskets and put them in concrete.” It doesn’t come cheap.

Writing in nearby Oakland, Jessica Mitford deplored the high cost of funerals in her 1963 bestseller The American Way of Death . When she herself died in 1996, she was working on an update in which she asserts that “the average undertaker’s bill — $750 in 1961 for casket and ’services’ — is now $4,700.” She also claims that many of the measures adopted after her original exposé — such as forcing funeral directors to display cheap caskets along with pricier ones — had been abandoned.

According to the FCA, her numbers were conservative. The average North American funeral, which it says includes body pickup, embalming, makeup, funeral-home viewing, hearse rental and graveside service, but not burial or cremation, now costs about $6,500 (U.S.). And “a burial over a cremation,” Mr. Slocum says, “adds thousands.”

But he also warns that “environmental branding” by cemeteries “can be exploited,” adding that “green is not a logo.” Even at Fernwood, which he calls “a boutique experience,” scattering ashes runs a scant $56 and a cremation burial spot is about $1,000, but the cost can easily creep up to several times that amount.

For example, Fernwood describes itself as the world’s first interactive cemetery, offering a hand-held computer with a geographical positioning program that allows visitors to view a Fernwood-produced digital “life story” video (with soundtrack) of the deceased while they walk to the spot the person was buried or the ashes scattered.

Jeri Lyons, meanwhile, believes that the funeral of a loved one should be an intimate experience, rather than a commercial one. For almost a decade, she has taught people how to have home funerals.

It’s not that complicated. There’s paperwork, of course, but for what Ms. Lyons calls “the lying in honour,” as generations have done in the past, you wash and dress the corpse, pack it in ice (preferably dry) and put it on a table.

Putting ice under the body is the hardest, because she says, we’re so used to “keeping the person warm.” Or you can simply paint the casket or cremation urn with your own images for the dead person.

It’s often very hard to accept a death right away, and Ms. Lyons says participating in a funeral is a hugely healing experience. The family “can see the person’s energy field shrink,” and “know that the person is gone, and their body looks like a shell.”

She trains people to help families through the experience. “I’m teaching people how to help others,” she says. “Like the home-birth movement, I’m training midwives.”

However, Bob Biggins of the National Funeral Directors says the homespun approach disregards potential problems. “There are lots of regulations, and you have to do your homework,” he warns, citing restrictions about corpses that concern “groundwater, infection and zoning.”

The FCA’s Mr. Slocum agrees that people who want home funerals often run afoul of local government. But he encourages anyone who is stonewalled by obtuse regulations to ask to see them in writing, and he scoffs at funeral directors who cite health concerns when they “put a class A carcinogen like formaldehyde in the ground.”

Patricia Fuller’s sons may have avoided that, but like many funerals, hers included a priest, a few flowers and a bagpiper. There were chairs for the older people. It was a simple service and, according to one woman who attended, “very moving, lovely.” It cost less than $2,000.

More important, Brian Fuller says, burying his mother did require “outsourcing one of the key experiences of my life.”

Mary Ambrose is a Canadian writer living in San Francisco.

Only in Canada

Although Canadians have expressed interest, Canada still has no green cemeteries. But as Joshua Slocum of the Funeral Consumer Association says, that doesn’t mean that you have no choices.

To anyone seeking an ecologically “considerate” funeral, he suggests:

* Don’t get the body embalmed.

* Insist on a simple box or even a shroud in which to bury the corpse.

* If the cemetery demands that you buy a grave liner, which he describes as “a box for the box” and insists is unnecessary, request one with an open bottom so it will eventually disintegrate.