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was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.

Cemetery Snapshot

Announcements

Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!

Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!

Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.

Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.

Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.

West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.

Ground Zero

Written by DeadGirl
Sunday, 09 April 2006
People are dying to get in, but with Toronto's finite space and soaring land values, soon there will be no cemetery space left to bury the dead By SANDY NAIMAN, TORONTO SUN For the living, real estate in Toronto is going through the roof -- but for the dead it's about to hit a wall. Many centrally located 19th- and early 20th-century cemeteries are filled and inactive or have only limited space available. "Toronto will be the first urban centre in Canada to run out of casket burial space," said Glen Timney, past-president of the Ontario Association of Funeral and Cremation Professionals. "But the industry is changing." In 1934, less than 1% of Canadians were cremated. Today, the Ontario cremation rate is at 55% and growing, although it's unlikely it will catch up to British Columbia's 90% because of our multicultural demographic -- including Muslims and Jews who do not sanction cremation. This growth is driven by a more mobile society of people who don't want to devote real estate to the dead. Cremation is more affordable and flexible. Urns are portable and space for their burial is more available. They can be stored in niches in columbarium walls, buried in the ground, or kept on mantlepieces. Ashes can even be divided among family members. SPACE GOING QUICKLY As cremation becomes more prevalent, demand for city burial land is not as great, said Timney. But with a finite amount of burial space, no new cemeteries opening in the city, and many vacant plots already purchased, any available space is going fairly quickly. "We don't know when it will run out. There are no statistics available and it's a competitive business," he said. "But there will be places to bury cremation urns in the city's cemeteries for several generations to come." This wasn't the case for Sherri Auger. Her mother died six years ago, the day before her father went into long-term care. At 35 and an only child with no extended family, she was on her own when she discovered her parents had made no funeral plans. Finding a desirable burial place became a life-changing ordeal. As a result, she began a service called Estate Matters to help families avoid her traumatic experience. "They say location, location, location is everything in real estate and that's true in life and in death," she said. Only a corner spot near some cedar bushes was available in the tiny cremation garden of Scarborough's 173-year-old St. Margaret's in the Pines Anglican Church. "I felt it wasn't an appropriate eternal resting place for my mother,"she said. "I just couldn't live with her there." While the funeral home stored the urn and her father grew depressed, she had to wait until existing spaces were sold before she could choose a more desirable one. After a year, Auger was finally able to bury her mother's ashes "in a peace-filled spot" under a tree near a bench, but her father died a year later never once visiting his wife's grave. LONGER DRIVES "It's a classic story of why parents should make their own decisions because the children will never know if they've done the right thing,"she said. Auger often visits their graves, located close to her home, but many Torontonians will increasingly face longer drives to family gravesites. Over the last 30 years, cemeteries have expanded beyond city limits to meet the demand for burial space. The Mount Pleasant Group owns five Toronto cemeteries dating from the 1850s, and now operates five more in the 905 region, said spokesman Rick Cowan. "Use of land is driven by a host of factors besides cremation rate, including the percentage of ethnic groups in the community and their preferences for traditional land versus mausoleum burials," he said. Many Italians and Portuguese prefer entombment in mausoleums, and Muslims require land burial facing southeast toward Mecca. "In many families, where younger members have moved away, they want their family members to be interred nearby," Cowan said. Toronto's Jewish community has also been looking ahead. Pardes Shalom, a 30-hectare burial ground north of the city was purchased in 1977. "With between 1,400 and 1,500 Jewish deaths per year ... we anticipate that it will be filled by 2015," said its president William Draimin. "But we won't be running out of space for a while." Another 50 hectares a little farther north was acquired in 1995, with enough land for 72,000 burials, he said. "We will soon be similar to other cities in the U.S.," said Timney, describing the ways in which communities have adapted to challenges of shortages of burial space. New Yorkers must travel to cemeteries in New Jersey. In the early 1900s, San Francisco banned inner city cemeteries and now buries all its dead in the suburbs. Because it's below sea level, New Orleans buries its dead in above-ground tombs called "cities of the dead." Back in the 1800s, Venice established San Michele, a beautifully designed cemetery island for its dead, now considered a peaceful tourist attraction. http://torontosun.com/News/TorontoAndGTA/2006/04/09/1526869-sun.html

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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

Taphophiles Speak

Have you decided on eternal repose?

	earthen burial
	entombment
	cremation
	donation to science
	cyrogenically frozen
	you mean I'm still alive?

Quote Repository

“I heard the bell tolled on thy burial day, I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away, And, turning from my nursery window, drew A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu!”

William Cowper (1731-1800)