This part cracks me up a bit... She thinks it was bad for her, imagine how dad felt!
Claire: You'll be stone dead in a moment!
Dad: I think I'm getting better!
Posted on 06/30/2006 4:41:30 PM PDT by robowombat
Why dad's eco-funeral went horribly wrong
My father was buried in a cardboard coffin and placed next to a pet cemetery miles from our family home. Read about the 'green' funeral that went horribly wrong:
By CLAIRE WALLERSTEIN Daily Mail 8th June 2006
As his final statement, a 'green' burial seemed the perfect way for my father to take his leave of planet Earth.
Not only would it avoid rare tropical hardwoods being felled and carted halfway around the world for a coffin that would be seen for only a few hours, but the burial would cost fraction of the amount of a more conventional send-off - which was particularly pleasing for a man who would re-use every Styrofoam cup and piece of string.
My mother had booked plots for my father and herself by phone with a Somerset-based green undertakers after reading a newspaper article about eco-burials several years ago.
At the time, there were only a handful of green burial sites in the country. Today, there are around 200, and you can choose from seven different models of cardboard coffins, costing around £55 including overnight delivery.
If cardboard's not your style, you could be buried in a bamboo casket, a moss-lined woven willow nest or even a sack. The service can range from nothing at all - the simple deposition of a shroud-clad corpse into the earth - to the full religious works with horse-drawn hearses, music and a priest. (While sites are rarely consecrated, a priest can bless an individual plot.)
Once my mother had paid, we didn't really discuss it further. I preferred to put the whole thing out of my mind and, in any case, it hardly seemed urgent.
It wasn't until my father, a lifelong smoker, died of emphysema in 2004 and I decided to take charge of arrangements, that I realised we didn't even know where the burial site was, except that it was somewhere near our home in Cornwall.
The number of green burial sites nationwide may have mushroomed, but they are still far from mainstream, and so the green undertaking firms servicing them often cover large areas.
The staff at the company we used were friendly and supportive, but the fact they were based in Somerset, two counties east of us, meant we had to make many of the arrangements ourselves.
There are no binding regulations governing green burial sites - after what we experienced, I've come to the conclusion someone should do something about that.
Sobbing uncontrollably
I hadn't anticipated, for example, having to ring the gravedigger while my father was still alive (just), so that the man would be able to dig the hole in time. I was sobbing so uncontrollably that I had to call back three times.
For a couple of hundred pounds, I suppose we should not have expected the tailormade 'death care services' of TV's comedy series Six Feet Under, but I was definitely starting to wish I had found out more about what to expect before we got to this stage.
While some people actively choose to make their relative's death even more Do-It-Yourself than ours - washing and laying out the body at home, for example - I was glad that we had not gone so far down this path.
I had previously thought being 'numb with grief' was a cliché, but I found it hard even to remember the undertaker's simple instructions about, for example, what certificates to collect and where to take them.
After he died, my father was taken to the local funeral parlour, where he received all the normal treatment except for the environmentally unfriendly embalming process.
However, we had not realised - with hindsight, perhaps naively - that this also meant we would be unable to visit my body in a chapel of rest, as an unembalmed body cannot legally be put on view. So he lay in a freezer in a funeral parlour on an industrial estate.
Cardboard coffin
A couple of lovely men from the Somerset undertakers met us at the funeral parlour on the day of my father's burial four days later, having already transferred his body to its white cardboard coffin. It only briefly crossed my mind that it looked a little like some kind of IKEA flat pack.
My uncle had gone to view the burial site a few days earlier and found a bungalow surrounded by decaying motorbikes and children's toys. We had been seized by dread that my dad was going to be buried under this garden detritus.
Thankfully, the bungalow turned out to be the proprietor's home, and the graveyard itself was on a nearby hillside overlooking a beautiful wooded valley.
We had chosen to carry my father's coffin ourselves - it seemed like a final service we could perform for him, much more personal and fitting than asking the men from the undertaker's do it.
Pet cemetery
However, what we did not expect was that half the site would be given over to a pet cemetery. It was rather surreal to read signs such as 'Cassie, a brave pony' as we carried the coffin past.
My mother and I, both animal lovers, didn't mind, but my brother found this shockingly disrespectful to the human dead.
We were at last able to see Dad again when his coffin was opened at the graveside for a final goodbye.
As requested, the local undertakers had dressed him in his favourite clothes, false teeth and laid him on the fleecy dressing gown he'd worn so much towards the end of his life.
For a 'service' we kept things simple and personal and free from religion - we held a proper memorial service a month later in home village.
Another thing we all liked about green burials was that, instead of an impersonal marble headstone, a tree would be planted on my dad's grave, converting the nutrients from his remains into new life in a site that would eventually revert to woodland, providing food and shelter for wildlife.
We were told we had to wait for the soil to settle, and so it wasn't until a few months later that we came back to the site to plant our rowan sapling, having first called the proprietor and arranged for him to have a hole dug ready on the grave site.
After a 45-minute drive, we arrived to find no hole and no owner. After frantically and fruitlessly trying all the phone numbers on the sign outside his deserted house, I finally made contact with the apparently unapologetic owner, who said he would send his son.
After a half-hour wait in the drizzle, the shovel-bearing son arrived. Together we tramped up to the cemetery - whereupon a terrible realisation dawned; none of us could remember where my father was buried.
The boy called his father, who said my dad was in Row One, Plot 16. Around 30 people had already been buried in the site.
Although some of these plots had trees growing on them (many of them ornamental garden ones - not the indigenous woodland species that I'd expected), others, like my father's, still had yet to be marked in any obvious way.
It was therefore hard to tell where one stopped and the next started. So we all started to pace the distance out, like pirates searching for buried treasure on a desert island. Eventually, the owner's son decided on my father's whereabouts, and started to dig.
A foot down, when he hit solid slate, he became rather less sure. 'I normally only do the pets,' he beamed, by way of explanation.
Soaked, tired, and with my grizzling baby and elderly mother in tow, it seemed churlish to kick up a fuss.
And so he dug a hole and we planted a tree, not totally sure whether it was actually on my father's grave, on someone else's grave or in a patch of undisturbed field.
Legally, graveyard plots must be identifiable for the burial register, and I am sure the owner himself would have been able to tell us which plot was my father's - had he actually done as we asked.
We now assume, as no one has ever asked us to move it from their relative's grave, that our tree is in the right place. But it would be nice not to be left with niggling doubts.
Luckily, my father was a very unconventional character, and I'm sure he would have seen the funny side.
My mother was less amused, but she didn't complain because she was worried the owner wouldn't look after the tree we had planted. Her fears were apparently confirmed the next time we returned.
It was looking in very poor shape and ants had obviously nested in the roots, though a year later it has now rallied.
Nonetheless, she still has no regrets about being buried in the same place as my father. "I'm not going to be around to worry about it," she explained. "I'll be happy as long as I'm buried and a tree is planted."
I, too, still think green burials are a good idea and would like one for myself. However, I would definitely visit the site first, and get recommendations from other families about the site and its proprietor.
Like most people, I suppose, we didn't want to think too much about the death process until it became unavoidable.
However, having chosen to operate in somewhat uncharted territory, we probably should have done.
Though we can now laugh at most of the 'lapses' we experienced, for other bereaved people these could have been utterly devastating.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=389741&in_page_id=1879
Are you sure this isn't from the Onion?
How much would it have cost to rent a wood chipper for an hour or so?
How did these free spirits ever raise such a speciesist?
Maybe we could all chip in and get this for Algore.
My wish is to go "green" as well but the desires of the living take precedent, so who knows.
I'm gonna be bronzed.
How very enlightened of you.
Put a walnut in their mouth before you bury them and then you don't have to worry about planting a tree. The ancient Celts would do that with walnuts, acorns etc.
Claire, you're about as sharp as a bowling ball.
You want a green funeral with no frills, and yet you want the services of a professional funeral home. Which is it Claire? We buried my mother's ashes ourselves, and we brought our own shovel to plant the tree. Because the cemetery is an unmanaged one, we went ourselves to water the tree if it needed water. The things she wants cost the bucks she didn't want to spend.
This part cracks me up a bit... She thinks it was bad for her, imagine how dad felt!
One more reason I will request cremation and dispersal of my ashes. No need to have my family be tied to a specific spot for remembering or honoring me.
"Green funeral? We got those!"
I thought being "green" was a religion.
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