Art of Dying Art of Dying_Volume III_joomag | Page 44
ELLEN MACDONALD
We should let
dead people look
like dead people.
Eloise Woods Community Natural Burial Park is
different from a conventional cemetery – everything
has to be readily biodegradable. Bodies are not
embalmed. We don't use any plastic or metal
containers, and there are no concrete grave liners
in the soil. Our graves are shallow, and we don't
use any upright headstones or allow any plastic or
artificial decorations. Everyone has a flat, natural
field stone. It doesn't look like a cemetery. It's more
like a nature preserve.
Back when everybody was pretty much on the
same page, all families had the same idea of
how they would show their respect to someone
that they loved who had died. It was usually an
ostentatious spending of a lot of money buying
the most expensive casket for an embalmed body
and huge displays of flowers—how much you
loved this person was reflected by how much you
spent. Now people are realizing that spending a
lot of money and hurting the environment is not
the best way to honor somebody.
I had never heard of green burial until I saw an
episode of Six Feet Under where they portrayed
someone having what I considered a beautiful
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burial ceremony that I wanted for myself and I
couldn't get at the time. I immediately knew that
this was something I wanted to do. I bought the land
specifically for this purpose and plunged ahead,
learning everything along the way. Eloise Woods has
grown considerably. Funeral directors are getting
more requests for green burials and are starting to
come on board.
I buried several animals before burying my first
person. We've had many people buried with their
pets. Sometimes the person is here first and their
pet is buried on top of them. If the pet dies first, the
person is buried beside their pet’s grave.
There aren’t any laws about burying animals. For a
person, if you're in what they call an impermeable
casket, something plastic or metal, you only need
to be a foot and a half below the soil. But if you're
in something they call permeable, like a shroud,
a basket, or anything that water can soak through,
then you need only two feet of soil above you.
Wild animals can't smell any further than 18 inches
beneath the soil. Someone did a survey asking all
the natural burial parks if they'd ever had any animal