Tombstone vs Ashes, I can’t decide…

Several years ago I attended an outdoor concert with my wife Kate. The main performers on that beautiful summer evening were an indie-rock band named Carbon Leaf.

One of the songs they played, “Tombstone vs Ashes“, stuck in my mind because it usually makes us uncomfortable to think about death – even though it is on the horizon for all of us.

Tombstone versus ashes
I can’t decide
Cast my spirit heaven-bound?
Seal my bones up tight?
Tombstone versus ashes
Ain’t it all the same?
Cast my spirit heaven-high
Let the ashes drift away

Ain’t we just like hay?
Cut and dried and baled
Our bodies grown to harvest souls
And used in some new way
Yeah, ain’t we just like hay?
We’re born to drift away
Til it’s lesson time, when we’re cut and dried
For the reasons why we’re made

All this time, like firelight
A glimpse of what’s in reach
Flickers out into night
All this time, like firelight
A glimpse of what’s in reach
A box of watches and sweet memories
Are all that’s left behind

Tombstone versus ashes
I can’t decide
Cast my spirit heaven-bound?
Seal my bones up tight?
Tombstone versus ashes
Ain’t it all the same?
Cast my spirit heaven-high
Let the ashes drift away

Song Lyrics: Tombstone vs Ashes by Carbon Leaf

When I was a boy, one of my friends happened to live next to a large cemetery and a group of us spent fun days riding our bikes and playing games in and around that warren of interconnected cemetery pathways. We even pitched a tent and had sleepovers on the cemetery grounds – although we didn’t manage to do much sleeping.

It just so happened that when I was in college, I landed a summer job as a member of a maintenance crew that was responsible for mowing and landscaping that same boyhood cemetery – along with 3 other public cemeteries in the city of Gardner. I used to joke that it was a great job because I had a lot of people under me.

During that time I learned how grave sites are prepared for upcoming funerals and I gained first hand knowledge about the equipment used in a typical American burial.

It was death on a more personal level that I came to experience in the subsequent 40 years since that cemetery job, having to witness the death and burial of my grandparents, uncles, father, wife and friends.

Maybe it is this background of mine that has contributed towards my tendency to sometimes stop at unfamiliar cemeteries every now and then and stroll around the grounds thinking about the inevitability of death and contemplating how I would like to see my body disposed of when my time comes.

So, when I happened to notice the book Grave Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial by Mark Harris sitting on the shelves at my local library it is no surprise that it found its way into my book bag.

The book paints a vivid picture of what actually happens to the body after it dies and makes it clear that the way our remains are handled in the hours and days after our death depends primarily on the burial choices we make before we die or, absent that, the choices our loved ones make for us after we are gone.

Cringe-worthy details on the process of embalming are provided, along with burial regulations that are imposed by cemeteries and local governments. Different chapters describe alternatives to the traditional American burial such as cremation, burial at sea, transformation to coral sea reefs, backyard burials or interment in nature cemeteries.

Like most people, I hadn’t given too much thought about the end of my life and I just assumed that my death and burial would take the same form as those I witnessed when I was a young man. That is to say, my dead body would be preserved, a wake would be scheduled for family and friends to gather and reminisce, a funeral Mass would be conducted in accordance with the rites of the Catholic Church and a final commendation would be spoken at the graveside – at which point my casketed body would be lowered into a concrete vault and sealed.

This has been the typical form of burial in the United States for over 150 years now, but Harris describes in his book how this “modern” form of burial only became popular during the second half of the 19th century.

Prior to that, most burials were considered family affairs and it was the members of the deceased person’s family who carefully attended to the dead body, laid it out in their home parlor for neighbors to pay their respects, saw to the building of a coffin and dug the grave site at the town cemetery or on their property burial plot. Preserving the body through embalming techniques was not practiced at that time and the funeral industry was not yet established.

The Civil War was the catalyst that led to the transformation of how burials were conducted. The bloody five year war raged across battlefields of the rural South. Military tradition of the time called for the dead to be buried where they fell, sometimes covered in nothing more than blankets or the uniforms on their backs.

For Union families, such an ignominious burial on enemy soil only served to multiply their sorrows and deny them the comfort of a traditional funeral and burial in the family plot. To avoid this fate, Northerners began dispatching friends and relatives to battleground grave sites or hospital morgues in an effort to locate and ship the remains of their loved ones back home.

During the long journey North in train railcars the battle torn remains of the slain Union soldiers would begin to actively decompose – in the sweltering summer months, they would putrefy badly. Even when the remains were placed inside airtight containers, the gases from the decaying corpse would sometimes build up to such a high degree that the container would explode.

This led Northerners to begin exploring an ancient strategy of preserving their dead that they called embalming. Embalming undertakers set up operations outside Civil War battlefields working to preserve the many thousands of slain soldiers using a variety of chemicals – primary among them arsenic and mercury.

Those first embalmers delivered well preserved and natural looking corpses that comforted bereft families and impressed onlookers. Stories of successful embalmings of military Generals circulated widely in the newspapers of the time which helped to advertise and sell the new technology to the public.

The final embrace of embalming by the public came with the death of President Lincoln. The body of the slain President was embalmed, displayed at the White House and loaded onto a funeral train bound for Springfield Illinois. The trip took two weeks. The train stopped at each major city and more than a million mourners filed past the open casket to view the peaceful and natural looking embalmed face of the 16th American President. Lincoln’s well preserved corpse proved the viability of embalming to the public and they began to request the technique for their loved ones.

Embalming came to become a standard element of the modern American funeral – despite the ending of the war and the advent of refrigeration which became available as another means to slow the decaying process. This change helped to turn the American funeral from an intimate family event into an expensive, resource-intensive, and sterile act.

It is easy to understand why families came to prefer embalming for their dead. Embalming transforms an ashen lifeless corpse into a lifelike body at rest – a “memory picture” and gives mourners the pleasing illusion that their loved one has simply slipped off to sleep.

But I wonder how many people would still wish embalming for their loved ones if they knew of the indignities that are visited upon the dead body in order to achieve that pleasing “memory picture”. The steps in the embalming process, as described in graphic detail by Mark Harris, are as follows:

• Wads of cotton or plastic plugs are placed in all the orifices of the body to prevent “leaking” of bodily fluids.
• The breasts of women are sutured together to make them “stand up”.
• Plastic eyecaps are glued to the underside of the eyelids and placed over the eyeballs.
• Mastic putty is placed inside the mouth to keep the cheeks from hollowing.
• A staple gun attached to wire is fired into the roof of the mouth and lower jaw bone and the wire is tightened to force the mouth to stay closed.
• A 2 inch gash is made in the carotid artery into which a tube connected to a pumping machine pushes out 3 quarters of a gallon of blood from the body, replacing it with pink formaldehyde based embalming fluid.
• To eliminate bacteria from growing and thriving around the internal organs, a hole is punched into the abdomen using a long hollow needle called a trocar. The trocar is maneuvered around the abdomen to siphon out the heart, lungs, stomach, colon, intestines, liver and bladder. The emptied abdomen is then flooded with formaldehyde and phenol.
• Any visible external wounds on the body are closed using superglue
• The final step is to shave and wash the body, style the hair and apply makeup.

At the completion of this process the embalmed body can be safely kept at room temperature for a week without refrigeration.

It’s hard for me to imagine anyone who would want their dead bodies to be prepared for burial in such a violent and toxic way. That is why there is a growing interest in what have been labeled green funerals.

Green (or natural) burial emphasizes simplicity and environmental sustainability. The body is neither cremated nor prepared with embalming chemicals. It is simply placed in a biodegradable coffin or shroud and interred without a concrete burial vault. The grave site is allowed to return to nature. The goal is complete decomposition of the body and its natural return to the soil.

We sometimes refer to our cemeteries as parks or greens, yet the typical American graveyard hardly qualifies as a natural environment. Our cemeteries function more as landfills for the materials that are used to preserve and encase us than they do as nature sanctuaries.

A typical 10 acre cemetery contains enough coffin wood to construct more than 40 houses, over nine hundred tons of casket steel and over twenty thousand tons of vault concrete. These wasteful and lavish burial ceremonies have served to extend our large carbon footprint even past the moment of our death.

Like the contents of any landfill, the embalmed body’s toxic cache of chemicals eventually escapes its host and leaches into the environment, tainting surrounding soil and groundwaters. In older cemeteries arsenic may be the longest enduring contaminant. In newer cemeteries, researchers have found elevated concentrations of copper, lead, zinc, and iron (metals used in casket construction) as well as the human carcinogen formaldehyde, one million gallons of which is buried into cemetery grounds each year.

And what purpose does the casket and vault serve? Some feel that they offer a comfortable resting place for the deceased and it protects the corpse from ever touching the ground or fully rejoining the elements. These reasons again focus primarily on lessening the squeamish feelings of those that are living rather than on what would benefit the dead best.

Cemeteries require casks and vaults not because it is best for the dead but because it avoids exposing the dead to the mourners and it prevents the cemetery grounds from collapsing around the decaying caskets.

In a natural burial remains are returned directly to the earth. Vaults are banned, embalmed remains prohibited. The idea is to allow physical bodies to degrade naturally and become incorporated into other living things like the trees and flowers – to be caught up in life’s continuing cycles of growth and death, decomposition and rebirth. It is a comfort to the dying to know that their death will contribute to the growth of new life and the preservation of nature.

For thousands of years, orthodox Jews have honored the Old Testament admonition to let dust return to dust by interring unembalmed remains wrapped in nothing but shrouds or in plain wood coffins with holes bored into the bottom which invite the earth elements into the casket.

Having now thought about it and considering all the options for my burial, my preference in an ideal world would also be to have a green funeral – buried shortly after my death in a forest or field overlooking one of my favorite fishing spots, wrapped only in a shroud.

However, I am bound by some constraints that prevent me from pursuing that ideal. My choices are constrained because I want to be buried next to my first wife Elaine who is in a cemetery that does not allow natural burials (the cemetery requires dead bodies to be placed in a casket and sealed in a vault). I also want to be buried in the same plot with my second wife Kate (if she agrees).

Since cemetery rules do not allow two bodies to be buried in the same plot, Kate and I would have to choose to be cremated so that our urns could be buried together and share the same grave plot. I am not thrilled with the wasted energy involved in cremating a body (which requires as much energy as driving a car 4700 miles), but cremation is the option that allows me to be buried together with my loved ones while also bypassing the need for embalming and eliminating the requirements for burial of a casket and vault.

Instead of selecting Tombstone or Ashes, these burial choices of mine would lead me to have a combination of both in this way.

• Cremation of my body soon after my death.
• A Catholic funeral Mass and final commendation at the graveside.
• An urn of my complete ashes to be buried at St Louis De Gonzague cemetery in the plot next to my first wife Elaine.

I will be reduced to the dust from whence I came and returned back to the earth, but I will also have a tombstone marking my final resting place for other pilgrims to walk amongst while contemplating their own journeys.

One final thought/prayer for Leslie, wherever you are…

When I checked out the Grave Matters book from my local library and began to read it, I came across an appointment card that was left in the book for a woman named Leslie.

It was for a July 3rd, 2007 appointment at the Regional Cancer Center. Finding that card gave me pause and it made me wonder what became of Leslie. It may be that Leslie and I passed each other in the medical center hallways as my wife Elaine was in the midst of her own struggles with cancer.

I pray that Leslie is still among us, but if not I hope she arranged to set in place the plans for a fitting and dignified burial and that her death is even now contributing to the growth of new life.