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For Some, A Casket Just Isnt Natural |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Tuesday, 26 April 2005 |
By Mark Pothier April 25, 2005
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- Death-care trends usually sweep from west to east, funeral industry officials say. Cremation rates in Oregon and Washington have surpassed 60 percent and in Marin County, Calif., it is about 80 percent. The Cremation Society of Los Angeles even allows arrangements to be made by fax or phone.
''That's the cutting edge," said Ron Hast, publisher of Mortuary Management magazine and the Funeral Monitor newsletter.
Not for Ray Karno. On a Saturday morning earlier this year, he trudged up a soggy path to the crest of a ridge overlooking Mill Valley. Below, a sun-splashed meadow melted into woods thick with eucalyptus trees. ''Beautiful," he said. ''This is a dream come true for me."
Upon his death, the Oakland man wants his body brought to a spot like this one, wrapped in unbleached cloth, and lowered into a grave marked by a tree or indigenous stone. No embalming, coffin, or headstone. All natural.
''To me, the idea that I could become worm food is an honor," Karno said.
He is one of hundreds of people who have contacted the Forever Fernwood cemetery since it began offering ''green burials" last August, according to Joe Sehee, one of its founders and a partner in Memorial Ecosystems, a company that is not associated with Fernwood. Plots are pinpointed with global-positioning devices, and biographical information will be accessed through hand-held computers. The concept may sound left-coast, but in a recent online poll conducted by the AARP 25 percent of respondents said they would prefer a green burial.
Not far from where Karno stood, a mound marked a fresh grave. The soil will level as the body decays, Sehee explained.
In the Fernwood parking lot a half-hour later, Karno retrieved a laptop computer from his car to play a scene from the 1971 cult movie ''Harold and Maude" that features a close-up of a casket's ''permaseal" label. The implication -- that a body remains intact after interment -- is a ''ridiculous" notion the funeral industry perpetuates to make money, Karno said.
Sehee envisions Memorial Ecosystems working with planners and conservation groups to purchase parcels that will be both nature preserves and cemeteries. The business model will ''significantly disrupt" the funeral industry, he said from behind a conference table in Forever Fernwood's bunkerlike office.
''Funeral directors might think this is a fringe thing, that the economics don't seem to make sense. But they don't want to do anything that's going to pull people away from traditional burial," he said. ''They have too much vested in it."
Sehee, 44, favors turtlenecks and jeans over suits, and his demeanor is as tranquil as Fernwood's setting, even when he rails against the funeral business. Undertakers once ''cloaked themselves as quasiclerics. That held up when people still took their cues from organized religions," he said.
David Walkinshaw, who owns Saville & Grannan funeral home in Arlington, said the industry is ''actually embracing change." He has already prearranged a natural burial for a Cambridge woman at a New Hampshire cemetery. ''If there is a demand, someone is going to open [a green cemetery] in Massachusetts, probably in a rural area," Walkinshaw said.
Gisela Pikarsky could not wait. When her husband, Jacob, died in a Lexington nursing home in January, she had his body flown to South Carolina's Ramsey Creek Preserve for a proper burial -- in a shroud, under a blueberry bush.
''I would have been happy to have done it in Massachusetts," she said. ''We use fine hardwood, embalm people, and pollute the earth. It's awful. Nature will decompose you. There's no reason it can't be done here."
And some day, Pikarsky said, ''I am going to have blueberries from my husband."
Source: The Boston Globe
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