Green funerals

Some believe that services at home and simple caskets gradually will change how society deals with death.

By John Richardson

Klara Tammany’s mother didn’t want a typical American funeral. No embalming, no metal casket, not even a funeral home.

When she died after a long illness a couple of years ago, family members and friends washed and dressed her body and put it in a homemade wooden casket, which was laid across two sawhorses in the dining room of her condo in Brunswick, Maine.

Then, for two days, friends and family visited, brought cut flowers, wrote messages on the casket’s lid and said goodbye.

“We had this wake, and it was wonderful,” Tammany said.

The home funeral is part of an emerging trend that some believe will change the way Americans deal with death. Send-offs like the one Tammany planned with her mother are called “green” funerals because they avoid preservative chemicals and steel and concrete tombs, all designed to keep a body from decomposing naturally.

After the wake, Tammany’s mother was cremated and her ashes buried near the family’s camp in Monmouth.

Another alternative that is just emerging in Maine is natural burial in a green cemetery: wooded graveyards that ban chemicals and caskets that won’t easily decompose.

Two such cemeteries are now preparing to do natural burials in Maine, in Limington and in Orrington. There are only about six operating green cemeteries in the United States, but many more are planned, according to those tracking the trend.

“I think it’s a tidal wave that’s coming,” Tammany said. “The cultural way of dying and taking care of the dead is changing.”

Next weekend, green funerals will be the subject of the annual meeting of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Maine, a nonprofit group that provides information about alternatives to modern funerals. [This event occurred in October 2007. —Ed.]

Mark Harris, author of Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, will be the keynote speaker.

“I think it’s going to change the funeral practices in our time. The demographics are just too strong,” Harris said during an interview last week, referring to the baby boomers.

“This is the generation that brought us the first Earth Day ... that brought organic food into the grocery store,” he said. “I think they’ll bring the same environmental consciousness to bear to the end-of-life issues as they approach them.”

The idea of earth-friendly funerals is catching on as part of that broader green movement. But there are other factors, too, including distaste for the embalming process and modern commercial funerals that can cost $10,000.

A green burial can cost $1,000 to $2,000, although there is no market standard. Tammany’s mother’s funeral and cremation cost about $350.

Some also have the desire to return to a simpler, personal way of laying loved ones to rest.

“It’s a lot more than just about the environment. It’s a return to tradition. It speaks to the idea of dust to dust,” Harris said. “This is the way we used to bury people, in the first hundred years of our country’s history.”

Funeral directors’ opinions

Around the country, Harris said, some funeral directors are opening up to the trend. Many advocates expect funeral homes and cemeteries to offer more “green” alternatives, such as preservative-free burials.

But there also is resistance.

Peter Neal, a funeral director based in Guilford and spokesman for the Maine Funeral Directors Association, said the trend sounds good on the surface, but presents problems when you dig into the details.

“The green concept is a wonderful concept. There are many areas of our lives that we can” reduce environmental impacts, Neal said. “But this one’s a little bit more of a problem.”

In Maine, for example, the ground can freeze in winter and make it harder to dig graves. Funeral homes typically store bodies for spring burials, something made easier with formaldehyde and the embalming process.

And embalming, developed during the Civil War, also protects against the spread of bacteria and disease, he said. “It’s my great hope it stays in the hands of professionals,” he said.
Neal doesn’t see a large movement toward green funerals and burials. He oversees five funeral homes and has had one family request a green burial. He turned that one down.

“It’s a very small group that’s talking about it. It’s not for everybody, just the logistics of it,” he said, noting that the earth-to-earth idea might not have wide appeal.

“You may or may not want your loved one’s body to go back to the earth as soon as possible. [Preservation] was very important to the Egyptians, and it has some importance to people today,” Neal said.

Green advocates agree that the trend is not for everyone, but they shrug off the criticism from the funeral industry.

Burying in winter is less of a problem in a forested cemetery than in an open field, they say. A green cemetery near Ithaca, N.Y., has buried 21 people since opening last year, and did not have a problem with frozen ground last winter, according to the owner. The cemetery also has equipment to heat the ground, if necessary.

Tammany said her mother’s two-day wake proved to her that there is little need for embalming, a process she called disrespectful to the body.

Although a body might need to be kept cool with ice or dry ice in the summer, Tammany said, her mother died in October, and she kept a door cracked to keep the body from decomposing.

Embalming is not required by the state and is not necessary for health reasons, said Dora Anne Mills, director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control. Chem-free burials are done in most of the world and are not a health risk under normal circumstances, she said.

Green burials

Green burials are routinely done in this country as well, in the Jewish community.

“Our people are always buried in wooden caskets. There’s no metal (and no embalming), so everything decomposes in its natural state,” said Darrell Cooper, administrator of Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish funeral home in Portland.

“We’ve been practicing this for thousands of years, and now it’s coming into vogue.”

Jews do not cremate bodies, although cremation is frequently part of the green funeral trend.

The cremation option has grown rapidly in the United States, and nearly 60 percent of Mainers now leave the world by the ashes-to-ashes route.

Cremation is considered a greener alternative to modern burials, especially with limited options in family or green cemeteries. But it also has environmental impacts, including pollution from crematories.

Maine crematories release about 20 pounds of mercury into the air each year, for example. The mercury, a neurotoxin that can get into the food chain, comes from amalgam dental fillings that most people have.

For Klara Tammany and her mother, a home funeral with cremation was the best alternative to a funeral home and the embalming process.

Now that the alternatives are growing, Tammany likes the idea of a green burial when her turn comes along.

“I came from the earth,” she said. “Put me back in the earth and I’ll make something grow.”

This article is reprinted with permission of Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. Reproduction does not imply endorsement.

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