The Centre for Natural Burial

By Marc Hansen, Hansen Register columnist

While Iowans still prefer burial plots to cremation urns, cremation seems to be gaining ground. So to speak.

The positives, according to a story in Monday’s Des Moines Register, “Families choose cremation often instead of burial,” outweigh the negatives in more minds than ever.

People keep dying, but land remains a finite resource. Should we really be turning the planet into a human landfill?

The burial process is much more expensive. Tomorrow’s burial plot will cost as much as today’s one-bedroom condo. Maybe more.

To some, the burial tradition seems wasteful. The surviving family members buy a beautiful mahogany casket. They lower it into the ground, and that’s the last they see of it, at least on this plane of existence.

It isn’t quite the same as buying a new car and pushing it into a lake, but there are parallels.

People object to cremation for a number of reasons. Some equate it with the fires of hell or the ovens of the Holocaust.

The bereaved sometimes find it difficult to reach closure without an open casket. It’s easier to say goodbye to a body. The casket and burial site provide a final link to the loved one.

Cremation might not be the biblically preferred method in many churches, but it isn’t an automatic deal-breaker. Still, there are religious objections. If it’s good enough for God’s people in the Bible, some say, it’s good enough for God’s people on Earth.

Others find comfort in the idea of friends and loved ones visiting a grassy, leafy, public grave site. They won’t be there when the friends and loved ones show up, but it’s reassuring when they’re alive.

Cremation isn’t a boon to police investigations or B-movies. If everyone were cremated, it would be impossible for forensic examiners to exhume the body and find the real killer.

Actors who play zombies would have trouble getting work. “The Night of the Living Dead” and other classics wouldn’t exist.

Instead of visiting the famous grave sites of Gandhi, Garbo, Chekhov, Beethoven, Van Gogh, Einstein, Mozart, Churchill and Elvis, tourists would be forced to find other attractions.

Personally, I lean toward cremation for selfish reasons. I can picture puzzled friends and family members peering into my casket.

“Who’s THAT guy?” one asks.

“I have no clue,” says another. “His hair is neatly combed and he’s wearing a tie. We must be in the wrong place.”

Do you want friends and loved ones gawking at a chemically gussied-up dead you?

If they’re going to sew your eyes shut and pump you full of embalming fluid, they might as well go all the way and light the fire.

There’s a third way that hasn’t caught on yet, especially around here. But it might be the future. It’s the eco-friendly, or green, burial.

No expensive hardwood coffins. No headstones or monuments. No embalming fluid, concrete or steel.

The deceased is buried in a handmade, biodegradable “eco-pod” made out of untreated pine, recycled newspapers, cardboard, wicker, bamboo or some other papier-mache-like renewable material. The corpse is left to decompose at nature’s pace.

In this new world, the New York Times says, graves aren’t just graves, “They are ecosystems in which ‘each person is replanted, becoming a little seed.’ ”

Save the environment even as you return to dust.

There’s even a Green Burial Council. It’s a nonprofit located in New Mexico. The executive director is Joe Sehee, who says the market is minuscule but emerging.

With 200 facilities, England is the eco-burial motherland. One cemetery in Iowa - Cedar Memorial Park in Cedar Rapids - is working to develop a green burial ground adjacent to the traditional cemetery.

For the record, Sehee says cremation can be very green: “The amount of CO2 from the typical emission is minimal.”

That’s good to hear. I know a guy who keeps his parents’ ashes in the trunk of his car.

True story. Both parents lived long, wonderful lives. Both asked to be cremated. When one dies, they said, keep the ashes around until the second goes.

Collect both urns, take them out west and spread the ashes with their grandson’s.

As soon as the son finds the time, he promises to follow through on his parents’ request.

Until then, the ashes share trunk space with the spare tire.

“You never know,” the man says. “On an icy road they might come in handy.”

He’s joking but making a point at the same time. His parents believed their remains were just that and no more.

The man’s niece had the car recently. On Good Friday, he called her.

“Don’t forget to take Grandma to church,” he said.

Columnist Marc Hansen can be reached at (515) 284-8534 or mahansen@dmreg.com