Grave problems: Even when you die, there’s a housing crisis to deal with

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Todd Harra is a funeral director and embalmer based in Wilmington, Del. He is the author of Last Rites: The Evolution of the American Funeral.

At 8:30 a.m. on Dec. 6, 1876, a penniless Bavarian nobleman was slid headfirst into a blazing coke-fired oven – and history was made.

Baron Joseph Henry Louis Charles de Palm claimed he had witnessed someone almost get buried alive, and was terrified that the same fate might befall him. And so, after his body was “covered with flowers and aromatic spices and gums,” according to The New York Times, de Palm became the first person to be cremated in America. The press, amused (and perhaps a bit befuddled) by the newfangled form of disposition, derided the event as “To-day’s Corpse Roasting” and “Baron Burning.”

But things have come a long way since then. When I started in this profession 20 years ago, the national cremation rate in the U.S. was somewhere around 35 per cent. That number continues to surge, growing at well over 1 per cent each year, and today, six out of 10 Americans choose cremation as their method of disposition. The number is even higher in Canada, where it hovers around 75 per cent.

Burial, it seems, is out of fashion – and it may be getting buried itself, thanks in large part to a housing crisis of its own.

With populations having exploded dramatically around the world since the 1800s, sprawling cities have engulfed what were once “rural” cemeteries. Those large populations also mean more people are dying than ever before, and now, historic landlocked burial grounds are nearing capacity, with the rights to permanent resting places being generally, well, permanent.

Many cemeteries have had to get creative. Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington– founded in 1853, and known for temporarily holding Willie Lincoln’s remains during his father Abraham’s presidency – is removing redundant pathways to create new graves, and burying caskets under paths while engraving the decedent’s name on the slate. “Burial spaces become the walkways,” says Oak Hill superintendent Paul Williams. And in an effort to maximize space and meet consumer demand, the 186-year-old Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y., is building two columbaria – niches for urns containing cremated remains – and continues to position itself as a tourist and community destination with concerts, community events and tours, in addition to opportunities to enjoy nature. Green-Wood’s president, Richard Moylan, is optimistic that “families with additional space in their lots will continue to utilize the cemetery for generations.”

Even what may be the U.S.’s most famous burial ground, Arlington National Cemetery – the venerated Elysian Fields for American service members – has had to undergo development to ensure there’s no disruption. More than 400,000 service members have been buried there since Private William Christman of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment was interred in 1864, including astronaut John Glenn, Jr., and former president John F. Kennedy. Arlington is in the midst of a second recent project – the Southern Expansion – to expanded its acreage and add tens of thousands of interment spaces and columbarium niches so that disposition operations can continue, according to Arlington’s media chief Becky Wardell, until “the early to mid-2060s” without changes to current eligibility.

Canada is not immune, either. In 2020, Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery began to densify, allowing strangers to share grave sites and billing it as “an environmentally friendly, shared occupancy.” And in 2016, Toronto City Council was warned that all of the 23 active cemeteries in the city would start running out of burial space in 10 to 30 years; little has changed since. “The living city mirrors the city of the dead. How you live is how you die,” Nicole Hanson, an urban planner with a specialty in cemeteries, told The Local earlier this year. “Cemeteries reflect the housing crisis that we’ve been dealing with in Toronto, with land being at such a premium.”

But the evolution of disposition can’t end at cremation, because that process can require real estate, too. While there are a dizzying array of memorialization options for the ashes – they can be transformed into a barrier reef, turned into custom-blown glass art, or pressed into a vinyl record, just to name a few – cremains are often interred or placed in a columbarium. And in densely populated, geographically small countries such as Japan and Hong Kong, columbaria availability is plummeting while prices skyrocket.

So with death being one of the few guarantees of life, we need to keep innovating on what we do with our bodies after we die. Is there anything we can learn from the burning baron’s approach, almost 150 years ago, to find other ways that are just as creative and efficient – and, perhaps most importantly, meaningful?

Cremation didn’t catch fire right away in the West. But while the popular hypothesis is that belief in the Christian dogma of resurrection held back its growth, the real reason may have been one of supply.

In the mid-1800s, Dr. F. Julius LeMoyne, a Pennsylvania physician, became convinced that the mouldering remains in the local cemeteries were contaminating the drinking water, and so he designed and built a crematorium in 1876, for his eventual demise. Since it was the first crematory in the country, LeMoyne was forced to conduct “muttony experiments” on sheep to prove his machine’s mettle.

But for eight years, LeMoyne’s remained the only crematory in America. Even after the landmark cremation of Baron de Palm, he turned down numerous other requests to use his crematorium, as his goal was never to promote cremation by being a public provider – it was merely to prove that sanitary reform was feasible by this method. (In 1879, LeMoyne himself became just the third person to be cremated in his machine.) A public crematorium was eventually built in Greenwood Cemetery in Lancaster, Penn., in 1884, but by 1900 there were still only 25 crematoriums nationwide; in the quarter-century after de Palm’s body turned to ash, the cremation rate was less than 0.001 per cent.

Jason Engler, the historian for the Cremation Association of North America (CANA), also speculates that “cremation faced a lack of acceptance due to its being often associated with people who were non-traditional in a time steeped in tradition.” De Palm, for instance, was a member of the Theosophical Society, and he had asked for a cremation in part to illustrate “the Eastern notions of death and immortality.” As Mr. Engler notes, the connotations with “free thinkers, elites, followers of controversial religions and reformers” made burial the path of least social resistance – something that apparently matters even into the afterlife. Cremation had to overcome generations of burial inertia and societal convention in order to get rolling.

How exactly that happened is hard to pinpoint. The activation energy – to use another scientific metaphor – needed to propel cremation on its meteoric rise began in the 1960s, after Jessica Mitford’s scathing exposé The American Way of Death reported that the funeral rite (specifically, traditional burial) had been boiled down to a mere financial transaction. While I politely disagree with the late author’s conclusions, from a practitioner’s viewpoint, the reasons for the continued growth of cremation are practical: simplicity and flexibility in memorialization, ease of transport in a neo-local society, and yes, sometimes, the bottom line – price.

In 1884, Hugh S. Wyman wrote a letter to his former teacher, Hugo Erichsen, the founder of the organization that would become CANA. “I believe cremation among the civilized will necessarily become generally practiced in the future, and without ideas of horror, when people are more fully enlightened, especially in hygienic principles,” he said. Wyman was prescient. But what about our future?

In the states where it is legal, natural organic reduction (NOR) has become fertile ground for those looking for a new alternative to burial or cremation.

The concept is relatively basic: place the remains in a chamber with bio-elements (such as straw, wood chips or alfalfa), heat, oxygenate, and voilà. Anyone who’s ever tried their hand at backyard composting knows the pile has to be rotated to ensure proper oxygenation of all the elements, and with NOR, the chamber is indeed rotated. After about two months’ time – the timeline is a bit different for each provider – the loved one’s family gets a cubic yard (roughly a thousand pounds) of sterile soil that can be used, instead of five to seven pounds of cremated remains.

This new form of disposition has struck a chord in the public consciousness, likely because it offers the same value as cremation – but not in the monetary sense. Whereas there’s permanence in a traditional burial site, NOR offers America’s increasingly mobile population flexibility in how they memorialize their loved ones and – in what is increasingly a selling point – an opportunity to be greener, too.

“We find that people want the last choice in their life to be one that gives back to the Earth,” says Micah Truman, the founder of Seattle’s Return Home, a green funeral home that offers NOR. He believes there’s a groundswell of interest in NOR, and proved this in 2022 by conducting an equity crowdfunding campaign, raising $400,000 in under two weeks. But Mr. Truman isn’t waiting for the word to spread. He is bucking industry convention by evangelizing on social media, and his TikTok videos regularly garner hundreds of thousands of views. Washington was the first U.S. state to allow NOR, in 2020, and seven others quickly followed, with legislation still pending in other states, too. Delaware, where I practice, became the eighth state to legalize NOR when HB 162 was signed into law in May.

Flame, field or fertilizer aren’t the only choices, either. Most Americans have never heard the term alkaline hydrolysis, sometimes colloquially called “water cremation” or “flameless cremation.” Patented as an agriculture process in 1888, it’s been legal for more than two decades for human disposition, and is available in 26 states in the U.S. The process involves water, heat, pressure, and an alkaline such as potassium or sodium hydroxide. Many families say they’ve chosen alkaline hydrolysis over flame cremation because they perceive it to be gentler. Whether one chooses water or flame, the resulting remains look remarkably similar – though, for whatever it’s worth, alkaline hydrolysis gives the family about 30 per cent more remains, because the process isn’t as desiccating.

So, what does all this mean? Sure, our culture loves choices: the more the better. Buttons and gewgaws on the newest automobile delight the consumer, as do the mixology selections at the corner beanery – and now there are just as many options when we die.

But as the menu for the terminus of our corporeal remains expands, it’s imperative that they don’t distract from the fact that the many options are only means to an end.

Cremate me and shoot me to the moon; compost me and fertilize a sapling on the Washington Mall; hydrolyze me and turn me into a diamond (yes, that’s a thing); hell, bury me in the front lawn of the funeral home if the neighbours don’t kick up too big of a fuss. The bottom line is that I won’t care because I’ll be, well, dead. What matters – the thing – is all the stuff that comes before the grand finale.

Since time immemorial, humans have gathered around our dead to share, to cry, to laugh, and to pray. We bear witness to the dead and offer consolation to the bereaved. We move to the place of rest – whether it be field, flame or fertilizer – and then we break bread in sorrow, and experience an elemental pathos at the funeral service.

So, no matter what the form of disposition, be sure not to lose sight of the thing. Our rituals for the dead are what make us human. Let’s make space for them – both physically, in our crowded world, and emotionally, too.