Then, the other day, I ran across this article which addressed my worst fears:
Full Cemeteries Lead to Alternative Burial Practices
by Nancy Mullane
What happens when there is no more earth to sell at the cemetery to pay for the cemetery? It's a problem across the nation. The city of Sonoma, Calif., recently voted to build a new mausoleum to stack caskets and burial urns. Meanwhile, a private cemetery in a neighboring town is offering environmentally correct green burials: no headstones, and hand-held global positioning devices to find loved ones on hillsides restored with native plants.
Can you imagine?
From a marvelous essay by Annie Dillard, "The Wreck of Time":
ReplyDelete"The dead outnumber the living, in a ratio that could be as high as 20 to 1,” a demographer, Nathan Keyfitz, wrote in a 1991 letter to the historian Justin Kaplan. “Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on the earth run from 70 billion to 100 billion.” Averaging those figures puts the total persons ever born at about 85 billion. We living people now number 5.8 billion. By these moderate figures, the dead outnumber us about fourteen to one. The dead will always outnumber the living.
"Dead Americans, however, if all proceeds, will not outnumber living Americans until the year 2030, because the nation is young. Some of us will be among the dead then. Will we know or care, we who once owned the still bones under the quick ones, we who spin inside the planet with our heels in the air? The living might well seem foolishly self-important to us, if overexcited.
Cremate, cremate, cremate, and put me in an urn on the mantel.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous = Jessica