The Centre for Natural Burial

By Karyn Chenoweth, M&C News

Death comes to us all, but many are bucking the trend for expensive lavish funerals in favor of more personal arrangements.

The Maine Sunday Telegram reported that many believe that services held at home and simply constructed caskets gradually will change how society deals with death.

Reporter John Richardson writes that “Klara Tammany’s mother didn’t want a typical American funeral. No embalming, no metal casket, not even a funeral home.

When she died after a long illness a couple of years ago, family members and friends washed and dressed her body and put it in a homemade wooden casket, which was laid across two sawhorses in the dining room of her condo in Brunswick, Maine.”

The simplicity and cost savings allowed the family to celebrate a life with dignity and not stress the family financial reserves.

Richardson points out that the emerging trend of lower key “green” funerals, dubbed this because they avoid preservative chemicals and steel and concrete tombs, all designed to keep a body from decomposing naturally, are growing in popularity with people tired of hgh sales pressures at a vulnerable time.

Richardson also noted that in Maine there are cemeteries that allow natural burials for those who prefer to avoid the corporate embalming and mortuary route.

“I think it’s a tidal wave that’s coming,” Tammany said to Richardson. “The cultural way of dying and taking care of the dead is changing.”

Mark Harris, author of “Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial,” will be the keynote speaker at the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Maine.

“I think it’s going to change the funeral practices in our time. The demographics are just too strong,” Harris said to Richardson, referring to the baby boomers.

“This is the generation that brought us the first Earth Day … that brought organic food into the grocery store,” he said. “I think they’ll bring the same environmental consciousness to bear to the end-of-life issues as they approach them.”

Richardson noted the high price of death: Embalming process and modern commercial funerals can cost $10,000 and more.

A green burial is substantially less:  $1,000 to $2,000, although there is no market standard according to Richardson. Tammany’s mother’s funeral and cremation cost about $350.

Peter Neal, a funeral director based in Guilford and spokesman for the Maine Funeral Directors Association, told Richardson that the trend “sounded good on the surface, but presents problems when you dig into the details.”

“The green concept is a wonderful concept. There are many areas of our lives that we can” reduce environmental impacts, Neal said to Richardson. “But this one’s a little bit more of a problem.”

Freezing grounds in New England were cited, bodies are often stored till Spring by mortuaries.

Neal also noted embalming prevents the spread of diseases.

Embalming is not required by the state and is not necessary for health reasons, countered Dora Anne Mills, director of Maine’s Center
for Disease Control. Richardson reports that chemical-free burials are done in most of the world and are not a health risk under normal circumstances..

“Our people are always buried in wooden caskets. There’s no metal (and no embalming), so everything decomposes in its natural state,” said Darrell Cooper, administrator of Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish funeral home in Portland.

“We’ve been practicing this for thousands of years, and now it’s
coming into vogue.”

Richardson reports that Jews do not cremate bodies, although cremation is frequently part of the green funeral trend.