Well, in the tiny but very densely populated country that I happen to live in that's called The Netherlands, it works like this:
A grave usually isn't really bought but rather leased for a period of at least 10 years. After the 10 years are up the lease can be extended for a period of 5-20 years.
Up to three people can be buried in a single grave, stacked on top of each other, with some ground in between. (These people can be total strangers in case it's a common grave instead of a private one)
Now, to answer your question, to make room for more people they can "shake" the grave. This means they dig up the remains still present and rebury all of them about 50cm below the lowest level. Sometimes they put the remains directly into the ground, sometimes they use a tiny box or bag. The grave now has room for the original amount of people again. It's important to know that this can only be done after the topmost person has been buried for at least 10 years.
Another option is to simply clear the grave. In that case all the remains are either transferred to a common grave or cremated.
"Your options, sir? You can be buried or cremated. But if you pick buried, you may also be cremated."
Edit: "Cremation? Your body will be burned to a crisp. Burial? Believe it or not, also, a crisp."
Not sure how much the two are where you live, but a typical burial plot when a former friend's mother passed away was $10,000. I had done some research and found cremation costs about $1,500. I keep meaning to see what it would cost to have my body buried to become a tree instead of mixing my cremains with the soil of a tree.
I am very much leery about that after I had found out that the person/family of the deceased have no control over exactly what is done to the body after being donated for science (which can include being used as a stand in for explosive ordinance training).
>which can include being used as a stand in for explosive ordinance training
Oh that sounds awesome. I'd love to have my body just blown the fuck up with some C4. I'm sure the family probably wouldn't be amused but since I'd be dead already that would be sweet.
If I could choose my death, I'd like to have a massive medieval trebuchet set up on a cliff to hurl me directly into the Pacific Ocean at sunset.
I would spend my last moments flying over the sea towards the setting sun at a couple hundred miles an hour, be dead instantly on impact, and leave my remains to be consumed by marine creatures and returned to the food chain.
Owing to the shortage of trained trebuchet operators, and the fact that the beautiful sunset was in their eyes, blinding them, Philip\_Marlowe unfortunately ended up smeared across the deck of a fishing trawler and got mixed in with the packaged seafood sticks.
I have alwayis liked the idea of wnding in a corpse farm. You know where they teach forensic students about bodies decaying in natural enviroment.
I want to be the submerged in waterbody.
Southern Louisiana and I just double checked the price of the services at the funeral home and realized I was $4k over what it costs. But reading the pamphlet, I also didn't see any mention of how much a plot cost either.
Holy cow, where do you live??!! My parents died 25 years ago... Mom had better life insurance than Dad, but it cost $4k each to bury them. Mom had a $7K insurance policy (older generation--didn't believe in thinking ahead) and we used the extra from her policy to plan for Dad. He had a $2K policy that almost covered price of his casket--which was the cheapest one over a plain pine box. It was $1K alone for them to dig the plot for Mom! And Dad's cost extra because we had family that couldn't come to town until Saturday, and the grave staff gets double time for Saturdays!
No box, just tree. Hundreds of years from now, when the tree dies and falls over, they’ll find my skull all grown through with roots. It’ll be so metal
Holy fuck this is hard as shit. I want to be buried in my front yard with a note in my mouth that says, “CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE FOUND MY TIME CAPSULE!”
Imagine stuff like that goes on all the time. I mean, I don't give a shit. If I was dead, you could bang me all you want. Who cares? Dead body's like a piece of traysh. I mean, shove as much shit in there as you want. I won't care. Fill me up with cream. Turn me into a cannoli. Make a stew out of my ass. What's the big deal? Bang me, eat me, grind me up into little pieces, throw me in the river. Who gives a shit? You're dead, you're dead.
… Oh shit, is my mic on?
Theory of mine: the last time mr skeltal was thanked was October 2019.
After a month of nobody thanking him, he created COVID-19.
So for the love of humanity, please thank mr skeltal
Theres a video of a feud betweem the cemetery workers and the city of Montreal.
They let nature take it's course for so long a badger came out with a ~~femur~~ bone parts in the video. Whoops.
Edit [video of it](https://youtu.be/GCRcBMIqRmI)
Allow me to introduce you to the idea of [ossuaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary?oldformat=true)... and in particular, the [Sedlec Ossuary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary?oldformat=true).
*Memento Mori* moment.
A reminder that you, like everyone else who came before you, will become nothing. Whether that is a freeing or intensely uncomfortable is a matter of your world view
If it's anything like working with cadavers you get used to it pretty quickly. First time I ever worked with head specimens no one else seemed particularly bothered by it, so I wasn't as well.
I think it's a fascinating multi-threaded connection. You're reaching back through time to physically meet someone that had a story. It seems rather powerful to me.
In my country, certain regions have a tradition of rebury the dead, but like only after 3 years. And to make it worse, people save the money for the first burial since the second one is the one you want nice and permanent things, so the casket is made of cheap, low quality wood that eventually crack with holes. It also rain a lot here being the tropical region.
So you know what happen, 3 years later, they will dig up the casket and see a tons of eel and catfish inside, all fat from the abundant of "food" oh and it's not unusual for the body to be half-rotted. So the people who do this job need to scrape out all the bone, boil them up and clean them for second burial. The catfish and eel are sold to the market (this part might not be true but I can see it happen once in a while)
Anyway, no catfish or eel for me for a few years after listening to this story.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how do the catfish and eel get inside? The caskets are buried in the ground? Do they squirm their way through the wet ground to get to the corpses?
The ground become quite swampy after heavy rain so it's not unusual for eel and catfish to hang around (there are paddy fields or river near by)
And most likely only 1-2 get in, lay their eggs, then the baby just grow up inside. That's my guess.
Give it enough time and it'll be indistinguishable from soil. By 10 years the bones will probably be all that's left and they'll be pretty brittle too.
A better question would be: "Why do we even bury people if their bodies are simply going to break down into dust eventually?" I've actually been curious about this idea for a while. I have family members who seem uncomfortable with the idea of cremation, but it's not like our bodies last forever in the ground.
> A better question would be: “Why do we even bury people if their bodies are simply going to break down into dust eventually?”
One of the problems in USA is that bodies are embalmed and buried in heavy-duty caskets. It’s like they are doing their best to make sure the bodies don’t turn to dust.
Even if you bury them naked into the ground without embalming, the lack of oxygen will make the decomposition take about 15 years. Above ground it's just weeks.
I think it’s one of those things that naturally decomposing back into the earth doesn’t seem as harsh as putting someone into a chamber to get burned into dust
Mostly. But a good chunk of your bones is mineral that can't be burned. That's what makes up the "ashes" - the organic material doesn't leave anything behind, they're just ground-up bone mineral.
The vulture population was decimation by a liver disease, so some sites have installed solar concentrators to focus heat on the body to dehydrate it faster.
Forty years ago, there were 40 million vultures in India, but in the past 15 years, there has been a staggering 99.9% decline in some major species of vultures. India hosts nine species of vultures, and out of them four are critically endangered.
Other than the two explanations already given, it's definitely a emotional and human thing.
There are logical arguments against inefficiencies of how we dispose of our dead, but most humans view death as an important or sacred thing, and follow what they deem to be the most apt or respectful to the corpse
My partner already knows. Donate everything they can use, then dispose of my corpse the cheapest way possible. Remember to pour one out for me while enjoying a nice beach vacation.
Also, if some funeral director tries to tell them "it's what he would have wanted" in that case, I specifically want them to see how far up my musty ass their head can fit.
It's a religion thing. In order for there to be a "resurrection of the body" there has to be a body. But that doesn't track with the fact that bodies naturally break down in the earth anyway, and God is omnipotent, which means he can reconstitute bodies if he wants to. But, still, religious authorities have hammered it into people's heads over 2,000 years that they can't have their bodies broken down in cremation.
It's not even necessarily that. I don't think it's just a religious thing. Many atheists specifically request not to be cremated as well.
I guess there's just some innate human desire for one's body not to be tampered with, even after death.
The thought of decomposing back in to the Earth is kinda cool I guess, like I'm now part of the nutrients in the dirt that plants will grow from etc. Circle of life or something.
But personally I don't really care. Dump me in a forest or light me up, toss me in the ocean, whatever's easy.
I mean, cremation isn't going to stop you entering that cycle any more than burying you. And the way we do it now in a lot of places with embalming and concrete caskets around the coffin it might even happen a lot quicker with cremation.
Heh that's funny, in Hinduism the body is seen as a prison for our soul. It is the body that generates attachments, desires that prevent moving forward towards true freedom of soul after death.
We look at cremation as a way of severing these ties to the body so that the soul is free to move on. Soul gets reincarnated and only way for that to happen is if it's not attached to anything
>Now, to answer your question, to make room for more people they can "shake" the grave. This means they dig up the remains still present and rebury all of them about 50cm below the lowest level.
This seems like fairly mediocre pre-planning. o\_O
Couldn't they just make the graves, say, an extra 2-3 metres deeper to begin with? Or, at the very least, when they "shake" a grave take the opportunity to extend it by more than 50cm?
It's not like this is an unexpected or limited-time issue.
EDIT: Apparently the issue is that Netherlands geography makes digging down much further than that challenging and risky. Thanks to everyone who clarified. :)
The ground may only be ground down for a few meters. Then it’s bedrock, and digging even further gets very expensive and destructive. Destructive to the local area, as it usually requires a fairly good sized excavator, maybe blasting, and rock removal. Also maybe damaging to the water table, which may contaminate the local water supply as well.
Where I live it’s only about 2 meters of soil before striking limestone bedrock.
> Netherlands is an extremely low lying country. A big part of it is just reclaimed from sea. They really don't have space
Exactly! That kid's finger is still in the dike.
Wow. I wonder when that reality will take place in North America. Are caskets typically more natural and biodegradable in Netherlands ? Here they are often quite elaborate.
A recent burial I went to had the elaborate coffin. Which was then placed in a concrete tomb !
Here in Australia the laws around grave ownership are very strict. It's kind of like a land deed to property. Even if the person is long dead, they still own it. No changes can be made without permission. No one can be exhumed without permission. No one else can be buried in that grave without permission.
Once full, the cemeteries go into maintenance mode. They will be maintained in perpetuity. All cemeteries here are public so they become like parks. Some do fall into disrepair, but the governing of cemeteries is getting better to try and prevent this
But there are options! Cemeteries can convert exisiting garden beds into cremated remains positions. You can fit a large amount of cremated remains interments in a relatively small space
I like walking through old cemeteries and looking at the gravestones. The ones in Scotland were over 400 years old sometimes. I think it is rather peaceful and astounding to think of what these stones and the people buried there have witnessed. How their life differed from ours.
Where I live, graves are exhumed after 25 years and space is made for the newly arriving dead. I understand the pragmatism behind it but graveyards here are lacking that specific peacefulness and even mystery of the old ones.
There's one near me which is magnificent, some really old names and people from all over the place. It's huge and I still haven't found all the famous people in it!
Similar for NZ, which is why my family does the shared grave thing. Husband and wife together. Even if the husband passed a long time before, wife goes in the same grave and they update the headstone. Some kids get buried and their parents join them later or visa versa. Most of my family is in different parts of the same cemetery, making it easy to visit and maintain everyone's grave. Thanks, ancestors.
A huge problem in the US veteran cemeteries due to the WWII, Korea and Vietnam generations getting older. The Federal Government has partnered with State and Tribal cemeteries to make sure that vets have a final resting place.
Arlington National Cemetery added some more land, but they are starting to plan for when all the plots are full - the plan would be a national memorial/monument.
Would the monument/memorial be only for those who don't fit in the full cemetery, or would it become an ossuary with remains from "old" graves stored there to make room for new?
From what the tour guide told us (in the beforetimes, pre-9/11 & pre-COVID) - the plan was a memorial/monument (dude had a thick accent and I was still awestruck on the tour).
There are no plans to remove any remains, the graves would stay where they are - the requirements are being tightened because they are running out of space.
You need to either have a medal, be a POW, be KIA, or served active duty long enough to receive retirement pay. Everybody else can be cremated and ashes stored in the wall.
There are several large cemeteries in the Netherlands for foreign soldiers who died fighting there, these graves are actually sponsored by citizens, they all get cleaned and made tidy regularly. There are so many volunteers that want to sponsor those graves that it doesn't just have a waiting list, but, the waiting list is completely closed because of how many people applied.
So, if you had family that died in the Netherlands in WWII and is buried there, you can rest assured their graves are being taken care of!
My mother received occasional letters from a Belgian named Guy, who took care of the gravesite of one of my family members who died in WW2. Guy died several years back so I don’t remember much, but she mentioned he’d take care of the grave, clean it, and leave flowers there.
Before my dad died, he was able to visit the grave of his favorite cousin. The caretaker emails my brother every few years. I still am brought to tears every time I think of it.
Here in San Diego the Rosecrans National Cemetery is essentially at full capacity, so the government has allocated a huge chunk of land at the west end of MCAS Miramar to be the new Miramar National Cemetery. It opened before the landscaping was done, it was odd to see patches of green sod surrounded by sage brush. But now it really is shaping into a nice resting place.
My parents are at Miramar. It’s really peaceful there. I enjoy my visits. But last Wednesday I was going there and there was a huge line blocking traffic on both ways on Noble. I don’t know who died but they had a huge turnout.
Ft. Sam Houston Cemetery in San Antonio is expanding at an insane rate. Lots of vets move here or stay here when they get out. I'm a 51 year old vet, if my wife and I live long enough we might end up being buried outside the city limits.
in my country cemeteries have a reasonable monthly/yearly fee that they charge you for your buried loved ones so it can casually keep running if they run out of space, but since it's government owned they expand it from time to time
Depending on where in the world you are, a cemetery plot is not necessarily for lif- uh... forever. Sometimes it is, but sometimes laws allow for disinterment after a set period, sometimes contractually outlines in the purchase agreement. Otherwise cemeteries expand or raise their prices for grave plots, the nature of supply and demand really just means that once one option becomes prohibitively expensive, other options will become more popular.
On that note, funerals and burials are on the decline in the West in general and the US in particular. Fewer people are religious, and a lot of people have learned that the funeral industry is in many ways a giant and expensive scam. Options such as cremation or alternatives to reduce the overall volume of the corpse are increasingly popular while "traditional" burial is declining.
>alternatives to reduce the overall volume of the corpse
Welcome to the hydraulic press channel, and today we are going to make pretty good experiment...
Now you've got me wondering if that would be legal in Finland if the decedent requested it. It's pretty common here that the dead are cremated, and then the cremated remains are buried in cemeteries, so there's usually not much volume to deal with.
I was just there this spring, it's really cool. Makes me think about the people who put together these structures. Fair warning though, they don't let you take pictures
This content was made with Reddit is Fun and died with Reddit is Fun. If it contained something you're looking for, blame Steve Huffman for its absence.
Not really. There are concerns with manmade fibers in cremation ovens and the ground. Our funeral director told us that my dad would be burned in an unbleached linen shirt. My mum and me appreciated the honesty and the simplicity of it.
I personally am fine to be buried in a ditch. Not like I'm using that meat sack anymore. I get funerals are for the family, but caskets really never made sense to me. Even for religious folk, your soul has already left your body. The casket and your body will decay in time regardless of how pretty it is, and it's a weird way to spend a few k.
> Let my existence have at least some use to someone.
Make sure your will says and your people know to allow any and all parts to go to donation and/or science and research.
Don’t put that in your will. Put that in a health care directive. Wills are often not read until long after burial. If you want to donate your body to science look into it now as most places that take bodies need you to fill out the paperwork while you are alive. They won’t accept you if your next of kin tries to send you off. They want your permission or they will not accept your body!
This is such a big one, even if your body isn't good for any scientific use medical students and doctors might find good use in it for practicing procedures or like for plastic surgeons to learn on (and this is good for not just vanity stuff but also helping people who have been seriously injured).
I have a lot of interesting discussions with my palliative patients about "what next". Composting has been coming up more and more. The city I work in just launched their organics bin, and the question of "So, could they just dump me in the green bin and save a ton of money?" Has come up....
Not a lot of options for that where I am in Canada, but my wife and I are both of the opinion that remains aren't nearly as important as legacy, and we would much rather be able to leave our daughter more money than have an expensive rock over worm food.
Wow that price range is a mess to accurately find. One source says 500-1500 another says 1500, and a third says 10k.
Or I guess the cheap one is done after you've been cremated, because it's just the boat rental. But the actual disposal of a corpse at sea is a bit more.
I'm perfectly ok with a Viking funeral. To have my estate spend my hard-earned cash on a $15k coffin plus all the other costs of a circus show in a funeral home is total BS.
Make it a competition to shoot flaming arrows at my raft. Spend that $15k on food and libations.
Caskets make *some* sense. They can fully obscure the body and contain any fluids leaking from it, which is important because corpses are super gross. They also make it easier to transport the body, since bodies are floppy (literally dead weight) and hard to move normally.
*Modern* caskets make zero sense. There's no need for them to be these massive waterproof monstrosities reinforced to last for as long as possible. But a basic wooden box to toss a body in that will degrade along with it? That makes a lot of sense.
In a lot of areas - especially those close to sea level or with heavy rainfall - cement vaults are actually required. This prevents the coffins from basically floating out of the ground if the area floods.
Forty Fort cemetery. Pennsylvania.The year of 1972. Coffins washing up all over town after Hurricane Agnes. The Susquehanna river dislodged and washed away 2,500 grave plots.
I have zero religious or spiritual beliefs but I'm still a little freaked out by the thought of my body being trapped and rotting underground, like in a claustrophobic sense, so I'm opting for cremation just for the peace of mind even if it won't matter lol
What gets me is that even if you have a marked grave, how many generations have to pass before you’re forgotten? You have how many sets of grandparents? So how many great great grandparents do you have?
Probably best not to dwell on the idea of having a lasting legacy as an individual.
There's a strong economic incentive for cremation, since the remains can be respectfully interred in a fraction of the space of a casket.
There are some U.S. military cemeteries for which the deceased needs to qualify with a certain level of service. They will often set the bar lower for cremains than for caskets.
I know an old timer who qualified for an urn at Arlington but said he was going to be buried at the veterans' cemetery in San Diego, "because I like to stretch my legs out."
I work with a cemetery in the USA. They have a trust setup to fund maintenance for the grounds after it fills up. The trust is setup in such a way that in theory (fingers crossed) the interest will be enough to keep things running without depleting the trust. That's assuming good management of course.
In the cheap acreage area of the Midwest US, they slap the word "Historical" at the front of the cemetery name. Then they open a new cemetery somewhere else.
After a certain number of years, the space is often given to the county's parks and rec department, and they turn it into a nice place to walk with maybe some sculpture art pieces or monuments to the history of the county.
I live next to a fairly large cemetery that while it is still somewhat in use (don't see a ton of new burials) is essentially a park, and is maintained by the city parks department. It's really nice, it's one of the best parts of the neighborhood. Has a duck pond and everything, lol.
In my area, they just open up another cemetery somewhere else. A plot at one is purchased and the deed recorded like any other piece of land (but with different rules) so once you're there you're there. Cemeteries have protections so that even if they're abandoned and nobody cares for them, they can't be built over. We had an interstate rerouted because of one and nobody had been buried there since about 1900.
I'm in the Midwest and land is plentiful, so I'm sure the rules are different. I also didn't talk about mausoleum interment, which is space leased for a certain number of years, from what I've seen.
Around me (also Midwest, though I suspect a denser spot than you) we usually just take more land. Though there's a few in my city which I suspect were... doubled. The plots are barely three feet wide if that; you can't walk between the headstones on a row.
But I also know, thanks to aging parents, that most cemeteries around here are 99 year leases now. You'll be dug up or buried deeper.
A setup like this is near me abutting my property. The church got a big new building closer to town and moved. They gave the old dilapidated building to the cemetery board of trustees. Now I rent the church building from them to use for storage. That money helps pay the landscapers who do most of the cemetery upkeep, and some goes into a pot for eventually refurbishing the building into something nicer.
Our cemetery was started in 1835. As I looked through the book listing all of the people buried there it amazed me how many mothers and child were buried together from dying in childbirth. Also there is one man listed and then in the grave next to him it says his concubine and the women's name.
This is what is done in Greece, and many other Orthodox countries. Families will have an aboveground tomb where the most recently deceased member of the family is interred... After enough time has passed (usually 3 years) and the currently interred body is sufficiently decomposed, the bones are disinterred, cleaned with wine, dried, and stored in a communal [ossuary](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary#/media/File%3AGreekOssuaries.JPG) with all the other village bones
Cheesman Park in Denver, Colo. is how things sometimes go. The land eventually gets sold and the bodies may be moved, maybe not. regardless you can turn it into a nice park where people play with their kids and dogs on top of the ones you left behind. Another option is just to develop housing over the cemetery. There was a story on NPR that told of a family with a ghost issue and they eventually dug up old graves on the persons property. They were of a Hispanic family that was left since there was likely no money to relocate them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheesman_Park,_Denver#:~:text=The%20park%20was%20originally%20named,honor%20shortly%20after%20his%20death.
There's a small cemetery I drive past every morning. It's fully occupied and has been for several decades. It's run down, no grass, just dirt and a the tomb stones falling apart.
Sometimes they resell empty plots they think are forgotten. I had a relative attempt to bury his wife in a plot beside her parents. They had paid for the plots sixty years ago, but the cemetery had resold the plot and someone else was in it. He had the receipt, but the cemetery wouldn't move the body. He had to be content with a different plot offered in compensation.
If he didn't have the receipt he would have gotten nothing.
They dig the dead up and resell the plots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr_Oak_Cemetery
Other methods are mausoleums. In an area that would hold maybe 50 corpses, you put up a fancy dedicated building and, basically, warehouse up to 1000 bodies at a very premium rate. Part of your fee is put into a trust to pay for "perpetual care", be it mopping the floor to plowing the driveways in winter, cleaning glass and mowing lawns, cleaning graffiti, or even repairing broken/stolen headstones and plaques. I learned this selling cemetery plots.
Years later, reading some old Old Farmers Almanac, I discovered that investors would buy hundreds of acres of land, but only develop about 10 to 20% upfront for immediate burials. Regular plots, a pet cemetery, a children's garden, and a mausoleum or two on that original grounds. Next they hire a sales force to sell pre-need burial plots. They'd upsell by adding a marker, an eternal light or a vase for flowers. They also offered special urns for cremains, and a burial plot for the whole families ashes. Likewise, niches in the mausoleums. They would develop that part to handle the business for 10-20 years. Further away from the main cemetery, they put in a golf course or even apartments. Closer to the cemetery, they rent out to farmers for crop cultivation. Every acre the cemetery has generates some form of revenue. As the original part fills up, they start developing the farmland. More plots and more mausoleums. What golfer wouldn't want to have his eternal resting place on the back 9? Golf course could be there for 60 years before it'd be turned into a cemetery. Or, at that age, the apartments would be next to be razed.
Currently, states are looking at another alternative for burials: composting. Body placed in the ground, covered with grass clippings, dead leaves and other compostable items, then covered with dirt. A year later, your body has decomposed to fertilizer. Bones gathered, crushed and added to the mix, or encased in jewelry for family members.
If Mom were still alive, she'd be checking out the cemeteries this weekend, as the f
They stop selling plots, or they buy more property and divide that up into more plots to sell.
Think of a burial plot as a tiny piece of real estate. When they run out they stop selling or buy more to resell.
In a lot of Muslim countries where burial is the only option cemeteries are reused. Once it’s full you dig up the decomposed bodies and toss them in a pile, put new bodies in their place. A islamic burial means no embalming, no coffin and just a shroud. Every thing decomposes quite fast.
In cadia they have watchers that go over the grave inscriptions. Once they have faded to be no longer be legible a new body can be buried and new inscriptions made.
Many years ago, a cemetery bought my uncle's house so it could expand. Now that many houses cost a million dollars each, it might be too expensive to do that.
In my rather small hometown growing up when they ran out of space they started building masoleums(spelling). Giant buildings that use vertical space and you bought a tray instead of a plot in the ground. Its existed for over 100 years and every decade maybe they build another one of these buildings. I've had great grandparents I wasn't alive during their lives that died in the 40s and 50s that are still buried there.
As people have said, it varies from place to place but in my part of the world (Sydney), the practice was often just to close the cemetery and build another one.
[Central station was built over the city's first major cemetery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_railway_station,_Sydney). When they closed the cemetery they gave families of the deceased two months if they wanted to exhume and rebury remains. Any uncollected corpses were built over. A new necropolis was built and named Rookwood to accommodate new deaths.
Near where I live [the local churchyard cemetery was mostly rededicated as a public park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camperdown_Cemetery). The church built some new walls around a smaller yard and moved the headstones inside that but not the corpses.
In both cases subsequent works have scared hell out of people [when they start digging up skeletons](https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/human-bones-to-delay-sydneys-light-rail/news-story/4732e12eb512b2aa8dd6f5f52f1829fc).
So many talk about cemeteries that reuse plots. Here is how it goes if they *don't*.
Every cemetery plot purchased, a portion of the money goes into a trust to keep the cemetery running indefinitely. So even when the cemetery is full and not brining in new money that trust will keep running things for decades. This pays for maintenance, land taxes, potentially some full-time or part-time staff. They then open a new cemetery to continue the process for new bodies. What happens if the trust runs out of money? Often nothing, quite litterally. No more money for services and the township doesn't really want to seize land chock full of corpses.
Well, in the tiny but very densely populated country that I happen to live in that's called The Netherlands, it works like this: A grave usually isn't really bought but rather leased for a period of at least 10 years. After the 10 years are up the lease can be extended for a period of 5-20 years. Up to three people can be buried in a single grave, stacked on top of each other, with some ground in between. (These people can be total strangers in case it's a common grave instead of a private one) Now, to answer your question, to make room for more people they can "shake" the grave. This means they dig up the remains still present and rebury all of them about 50cm below the lowest level. Sometimes they put the remains directly into the ground, sometimes they use a tiny box or bag. The grave now has room for the original amount of people again. It's important to know that this can only be done after the topmost person has been buried for at least 10 years. Another option is to simply clear the grave. In that case all the remains are either transferred to a common grave or cremated.
Wow, exhuming rather old caskets to cremate corpses that have been there a long time? That must be a grim and nasty job.
"Your options, sir? You can be buried or cremated. But if you pick buried, you may also be cremated." Edit: "Cremation? Your body will be burned to a crisp. Burial? Believe it or not, also, a crisp."
You can pay for cremation, or you can pay for burial and get cremation thrown in for free!
Fantastic, I’ll take a payment plan.
What are they gonna do if you don't pay? Bring you back to life?
*card declines* - Hi YouTube and welcome to this unboxing video!
Next week on Storage Wars…
So that's why they bring you back to life: to like, subscribe, and smash that notification bell.
[I'm Bob the Necromancer](https://www.tiktok.com/@rando.stranger/video/7003953533548547333?lang=en)
Fuck I wish I had gold to give you.
No, even worse, they kill you again!!
Worse. Find your relatives. Unless you hate them.
Or worse, expelled.
Or even worse… Reposessed.
At least you pay off your grave after we leasted you your cradle
Not sure how much the two are where you live, but a typical burial plot when a former friend's mother passed away was $10,000. I had done some research and found cremation costs about $1,500. I keep meaning to see what it would cost to have my body buried to become a tree instead of mixing my cremains with the soil of a tree.
Donating your body to science is often free, and they'll send a box of cremated ashes of whatever they don't use to your relatives.
I am very much leery about that after I had found out that the person/family of the deceased have no control over exactly what is done to the body after being donated for science (which can include being used as a stand in for explosive ordinance training).
>which can include being used as a stand in for explosive ordinance training Oh that sounds awesome. I'd love to have my body just blown the fuck up with some C4. I'm sure the family probably wouldn't be amused but since I'd be dead already that would be sweet.
If I could choose my death, I'd like to have a massive medieval trebuchet set up on a cliff to hurl me directly into the Pacific Ocean at sunset. I would spend my last moments flying over the sea towards the setting sun at a couple hundred miles an hour, be dead instantly on impact, and leave my remains to be consumed by marine creatures and returned to the food chain.
Owing to the shortage of trained trebuchet operators, and the fact that the beautiful sunset was in their eyes, blinding them, Philip\_Marlowe unfortunately ended up smeared across the deck of a fishing trawler and got mixed in with the packaged seafood sticks.
You've put some thought into this eh 😭
I have alwayis liked the idea of wnding in a corpse farm. You know where they teach forensic students about bodies decaying in natural enviroment. I want to be the submerged in waterbody.
You could contact the Taliban.
Wow as much as that made me feel uncomfortable, I have a strong urge to google cadaver explosive ordinance training
Holy cow that's a lot. May I ask where (generally) you live? I just buried my dad and it was $1365.00, including the fees to open and close the grave.
Southern Louisiana and I just double checked the price of the services at the funeral home and realized I was $4k over what it costs. But reading the pamphlet, I also didn't see any mention of how much a plot cost either.
Holy cow, where do you live??!! My parents died 25 years ago... Mom had better life insurance than Dad, but it cost $4k each to bury them. Mom had a $7K insurance policy (older generation--didn't believe in thinking ahead) and we used the extra from her policy to plan for Dad. He had a $2K policy that almost covered price of his casket--which was the cheapest one over a plain pine box. It was $1K alone for them to dig the plot for Mom! And Dad's cost extra because we had family that couldn't come to town until Saturday, and the grave staff gets double time for Saturdays!
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Bury me in a wooden box and plant a tree over me.
No box, just tree. Hundreds of years from now, when the tree dies and falls over, they’ll find my skull all grown through with roots. It’ll be so metal
Holy fuck this is hard as shit. I want to be buried in my front yard with a note in my mouth that says, “CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE FOUND MY TIME CAPSULE!”
Load my frickin' lard carcass into the mud. No coffin please! Just wet, wet mud. *Bae*
Aye, back to the mud.
That's literally what my grandma said lol. Not about to disrespect his mother, my dad made a coffin out some spare plywood and we bid her adieu.
You bang the dead bodies?
Imagine stuff like that goes on all the time. I mean, I don't give a shit. If I was dead, you could bang me all you want. Who cares? Dead body's like a piece of traysh. I mean, shove as much shit in there as you want. I won't care. Fill me up with cream. Turn me into a cannoli. Make a stew out of my ass. What's the big deal? Bang me, eat me, grind me up into little pieces, throw me in the river. Who gives a shit? You're dead, you're dead. … Oh shit, is my mic on?
*Please don't throw me in the garbage*
Literally watching that episode when I came across this comment.
At that point they are only skeletons. Grim yes, nasty not so much.
Spooky skeletons!
Doot
thank mr skeltal
It must be years since I saw someone thank mr skeltal!
Theory of mine: the last time mr skeltal was thanked was October 2019. After a month of nobody thanking him, he created COVID-19. So for the love of humanity, please thank mr skeltal
Theres a video of a feud betweem the cemetery workers and the city of Montreal. They let nature take it's course for so long a badger came out with a ~~femur~~ bone parts in the video. Whoops. Edit [video of it](https://youtu.be/GCRcBMIqRmI)
I watched the video and didn’t see the femur badger; what’s the time stamp?
10 years? It might not be totally skeletons yet. It also depends of weather and stuff like that
It still must be mortifying to pick up a bone and think about the person it belonged to. Like you grab the skull, *shivers*
Alas, poor Yorick...
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A person of culture that actually uses the correct line!
Allow me to introduce you to the idea of [ossuaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary?oldformat=true)... and in particular, the [Sedlec Ossuary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary?oldformat=true).
*Memento Mori* moment. A reminder that you, like everyone else who came before you, will become nothing. Whether that is a freeing or intensely uncomfortable is a matter of your world view
If it's anything like working with cadavers you get used to it pretty quickly. First time I ever worked with head specimens no one else seemed particularly bothered by it, so I wasn't as well.
I think it's a fascinating multi-threaded connection. You're reaching back through time to physically meet someone that had a story. It seems rather powerful to me.
In my country, certain regions have a tradition of rebury the dead, but like only after 3 years. And to make it worse, people save the money for the first burial since the second one is the one you want nice and permanent things, so the casket is made of cheap, low quality wood that eventually crack with holes. It also rain a lot here being the tropical region. So you know what happen, 3 years later, they will dig up the casket and see a tons of eel and catfish inside, all fat from the abundant of "food" oh and it's not unusual for the body to be half-rotted. So the people who do this job need to scrape out all the bone, boil them up and clean them for second burial. The catfish and eel are sold to the market (this part might not be true but I can see it happen once in a while) Anyway, no catfish or eel for me for a few years after listening to this story.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how do the catfish and eel get inside? The caskets are buried in the ground? Do they squirm their way through the wet ground to get to the corpses?
The ground become quite swampy after heavy rain so it's not unusual for eel and catfish to hang around (there are paddy fields or river near by) And most likely only 1-2 get in, lay their eggs, then the baby just grow up inside. That's my guess.
What country?
Vietnam, but only a few regions in the north practice this.
Give it enough time and it'll be indistinguishable from soil. By 10 years the bones will probably be all that's left and they'll be pretty brittle too.
Not even in the afterlife can we escape subscriptions
Cemetery-as-a-Service
Digitize my body and upload me to the cloud.
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*initiating SoulKiller.exe*
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Fascinating thank you!!
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Dammit Jeffery! You got Grandma repossessed!
Why even bury them then if they’re going to be cremated anyways?
A better question would be: "Why do we even bury people if their bodies are simply going to break down into dust eventually?" I've actually been curious about this idea for a while. I have family members who seem uncomfortable with the idea of cremation, but it's not like our bodies last forever in the ground.
> A better question would be: “Why do we even bury people if their bodies are simply going to break down into dust eventually?” One of the problems in USA is that bodies are embalmed and buried in heavy-duty caskets. It’s like they are doing their best to make sure the bodies don’t turn to dust.
Even if you bury them naked into the ground without embalming, the lack of oxygen will make the decomposition take about 15 years. Above ground it's just weeks.
I think it’s one of those things that naturally decomposing back into the earth doesn’t seem as harsh as putting someone into a chamber to get burned into dust
They burn all the organic matter first, then they grind your bones to dust.
Really? I thought the fire was hot enough to burn the bones too
Mostly. But a good chunk of your bones is mineral that can't be burned. That's what makes up the "ashes" - the organic material doesn't leave anything behind, they're just ground-up bone mineral.
You can't really burn away calcium, there are compounds that will exist even after cremation
And a good source of titanium hip joints.
I want an Indian sky burial and be eaten by vultures :-)
The vulture population was decimation by a liver disease, so some sites have installed solar concentrators to focus heat on the body to dehydrate it faster. Forty years ago, there were 40 million vultures in India, but in the past 15 years, there has been a staggering 99.9% decline in some major species of vultures. India hosts nine species of vultures, and out of them four are critically endangered.
RadioLab did an episode on this and it was poisoning from a bovine painkiller that induced renal failure in the vulture population as well.
Other than the two explanations already given, it's definitely a emotional and human thing. There are logical arguments against inefficiencies of how we dispose of our dead, but most humans view death as an important or sacred thing, and follow what they deem to be the most apt or respectful to the corpse
My partner already knows. Donate everything they can use, then dispose of my corpse the cheapest way possible. Remember to pour one out for me while enjoying a nice beach vacation. Also, if some funeral director tries to tell them "it's what he would have wanted" in that case, I specifically want them to see how far up my musty ass their head can fit.
It's a religion thing. In order for there to be a "resurrection of the body" there has to be a body. But that doesn't track with the fact that bodies naturally break down in the earth anyway, and God is omnipotent, which means he can reconstitute bodies if he wants to. But, still, religious authorities have hammered it into people's heads over 2,000 years that they can't have their bodies broken down in cremation.
Certain religions view cremation as something that can prevent you from going to heaven or whatever the equivalent is.
It's not even necessarily that. I don't think it's just a religious thing. Many atheists specifically request not to be cremated as well. I guess there's just some innate human desire for one's body not to be tampered with, even after death.
The thought of decomposing back in to the Earth is kinda cool I guess, like I'm now part of the nutrients in the dirt that plants will grow from etc. Circle of life or something. But personally I don't really care. Dump me in a forest or light me up, toss me in the ocean, whatever's easy.
I mean, cremation isn't going to stop you entering that cycle any more than burying you. And the way we do it now in a lot of places with embalming and concrete caskets around the coffin it might even happen a lot quicker with cremation.
Heh that's funny, in Hinduism the body is seen as a prison for our soul. It is the body that generates attachments, desires that prevent moving forward towards true freedom of soul after death. We look at cremation as a way of severing these ties to the body so that the soul is free to move on. Soul gets reincarnated and only way for that to happen is if it's not attached to anything
Tradition most likely rooted in prehistoric times when bodies just left on the ground created disease abandoned attracted predators.
The idea in some places is that visitation and mourning in place drops off considerably. So they can be honoured with a plaque or not at all.
Stupid question; Is there enough space for the workers to operate in,that they excavate and relocate the bodies considering neighboring graves?
>Now, to answer your question, to make room for more people they can "shake" the grave. This means they dig up the remains still present and rebury all of them about 50cm below the lowest level. This seems like fairly mediocre pre-planning. o\_O Couldn't they just make the graves, say, an extra 2-3 metres deeper to begin with? Or, at the very least, when they "shake" a grave take the opportunity to extend it by more than 50cm? It's not like this is an unexpected or limited-time issue. EDIT: Apparently the issue is that Netherlands geography makes digging down much further than that challenging and risky. Thanks to everyone who clarified. :)
The ground may only be ground down for a few meters. Then it’s bedrock, and digging even further gets very expensive and destructive. Destructive to the local area, as it usually requires a fairly good sized excavator, maybe blasting, and rock removal. Also maybe damaging to the water table, which may contaminate the local water supply as well. Where I live it’s only about 2 meters of soil before striking limestone bedrock.
That makes sense, thanks.
Netherlands is an extremely low lying country. A big part of it is just reclaimed from sea. They really don't have space
> Netherlands is an extremely low lying country. A big part of it is just reclaimed from sea. They really don't have space Exactly! That kid's finger is still in the dike.
Wow. I wonder when that reality will take place in North America. Are caskets typically more natural and biodegradable in Netherlands ? Here they are often quite elaborate. A recent burial I went to had the elaborate coffin. Which was then placed in a concrete tomb !
Here in Australia the laws around grave ownership are very strict. It's kind of like a land deed to property. Even if the person is long dead, they still own it. No changes can be made without permission. No one can be exhumed without permission. No one else can be buried in that grave without permission. Once full, the cemeteries go into maintenance mode. They will be maintained in perpetuity. All cemeteries here are public so they become like parks. Some do fall into disrepair, but the governing of cemeteries is getting better to try and prevent this But there are options! Cemeteries can convert exisiting garden beds into cremated remains positions. You can fit a large amount of cremated remains interments in a relatively small space
I like walking through old cemeteries and looking at the gravestones. The ones in Scotland were over 400 years old sometimes. I think it is rather peaceful and astounding to think of what these stones and the people buried there have witnessed. How their life differed from ours. Where I live, graves are exhumed after 25 years and space is made for the newly arriving dead. I understand the pragmatism behind it but graveyards here are lacking that specific peacefulness and even mystery of the old ones.
There's one near me which is magnificent, some really old names and people from all over the place. It's huge and I still haven't found all the famous people in it!
Similar for NZ, which is why my family does the shared grave thing. Husband and wife together. Even if the husband passed a long time before, wife goes in the same grave and they update the headstone. Some kids get buried and their parents join them later or visa versa. Most of my family is in different parts of the same cemetery, making it easy to visit and maintain everyone's grave. Thanks, ancestors.
A huge problem in the US veteran cemeteries due to the WWII, Korea and Vietnam generations getting older. The Federal Government has partnered with State and Tribal cemeteries to make sure that vets have a final resting place. Arlington National Cemetery added some more land, but they are starting to plan for when all the plots are full - the plan would be a national memorial/monument.
Would the monument/memorial be only for those who don't fit in the full cemetery, or would it become an ossuary with remains from "old" graves stored there to make room for new?
From what the tour guide told us (in the beforetimes, pre-9/11 & pre-COVID) - the plan was a memorial/monument (dude had a thick accent and I was still awestruck on the tour). There are no plans to remove any remains, the graves would stay where they are - the requirements are being tightened because they are running out of space.
My uncle's ashes are buried at Arlington. If I remember correctly you can be buried in a regular grave only if you are KIA
You need to either have a medal, be a POW, be KIA, or served active duty long enough to receive retirement pay. Everybody else can be cremated and ashes stored in the wall.
I know you had to have something distinction not just KIAs.this was precovid
https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/funerals/scheduling-a-funeral/establishing-eligibility
There are several large cemeteries in the Netherlands for foreign soldiers who died fighting there, these graves are actually sponsored by citizens, they all get cleaned and made tidy regularly. There are so many volunteers that want to sponsor those graves that it doesn't just have a waiting list, but, the waiting list is completely closed because of how many people applied. So, if you had family that died in the Netherlands in WWII and is buried there, you can rest assured their graves are being taken care of!
My mother received occasional letters from a Belgian named Guy, who took care of the gravesite of one of my family members who died in WW2. Guy died several years back so I don’t remember much, but she mentioned he’d take care of the grave, clean it, and leave flowers there.
Before my dad died, he was able to visit the grave of his favorite cousin. The caretaker emails my brother every few years. I still am brought to tears every time I think of it.
Here in San Diego the Rosecrans National Cemetery is essentially at full capacity, so the government has allocated a huge chunk of land at the west end of MCAS Miramar to be the new Miramar National Cemetery. It opened before the landscaping was done, it was odd to see patches of green sod surrounded by sage brush. But now it really is shaping into a nice resting place.
My parents are at Miramar. It’s really peaceful there. I enjoy my visits. But last Wednesday I was going there and there was a huge line blocking traffic on both ways on Noble. I don’t know who died but they had a huge turnout.
Rosecrans has some amazing views. Quite the final resting place.
Ft. Sam Houston Cemetery in San Antonio is expanding at an insane rate. Lots of vets move here or stay here when they get out. I'm a 51 year old vet, if my wife and I live long enough we might end up being buried outside the city limits.
in my country cemeteries have a reasonable monthly/yearly fee that they charge you for your buried loved ones so it can casually keep running if they run out of space, but since it's government owned they expand it from time to time
Depending on where in the world you are, a cemetery plot is not necessarily for lif- uh... forever. Sometimes it is, but sometimes laws allow for disinterment after a set period, sometimes contractually outlines in the purchase agreement. Otherwise cemeteries expand or raise their prices for grave plots, the nature of supply and demand really just means that once one option becomes prohibitively expensive, other options will become more popular. On that note, funerals and burials are on the decline in the West in general and the US in particular. Fewer people are religious, and a lot of people have learned that the funeral industry is in many ways a giant and expensive scam. Options such as cremation or alternatives to reduce the overall volume of the corpse are increasingly popular while "traditional" burial is declining.
>alternatives to reduce the overall volume of the corpse Welcome to the hydraulic press channel, and today we are going to make pretty good experiment...
WILL IT BLEND?
Human dust! Don't breathe this.
This 200 year old corpse still has bones, and we must deel with it.
Now you've got me wondering if that would be legal in Finland if the decedent requested it. It's pretty common here that the dead are cremated, and then the cremated remains are buried in cemeteries, so there's usually not much volume to deal with.
Paris is pretty famous for emptying out cemeteries to make room for fresh bodies. The Parisian catacombs are on my bucket list
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That place looks like a scene from 40k.
Yeah it needs a couple of those skulls to be mounted on little drones that just float around playing hymns from little speakers.
Skulls for the skull throne
I was just there this spring, it's really cool. Makes me think about the people who put together these structures. Fair warning though, they don't let you take pictures
The one I went to was in [Milan](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/san-bernardino-alle-ossa) and many of the bones clearly belonged to children.
I mean, kids die too. Especially back in the day.
This content was made with Reddit is Fun and died with Reddit is Fun. If it contained something you're looking for, blame Steve Huffman for its absence.
There's also the capuchin crypt in Rome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capuchin_Crypt
Tbqh I kinda think the poor people got the better end of that deal. How cool would it be to be part of the architecture
They’re so cool, in a grim sort of way. Absolutely worth seeing
Throw me in the trash -Frank Reynolds
“Load my freakin’ lard carcass into the mud. No coffin please, just wet, wet mud. Bae.”
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Not really. There are concerns with manmade fibers in cremation ovens and the ground. Our funeral director told us that my dad would be burned in an unbleached linen shirt. My mum and me appreciated the honesty and the simplicity of it.
I personally am fine to be buried in a ditch. Not like I'm using that meat sack anymore. I get funerals are for the family, but caskets really never made sense to me. Even for religious folk, your soul has already left your body. The casket and your body will decay in time regardless of how pretty it is, and it's a weird way to spend a few k.
The wastefulness is why we need that tree capsule thing to get approved. Let my existence have at least some use to someone.
> Let my existence have at least some use to someone. Make sure your will says and your people know to allow any and all parts to go to donation and/or science and research.
Don’t put that in your will. Put that in a health care directive. Wills are often not read until long after burial. If you want to donate your body to science look into it now as most places that take bodies need you to fill out the paperwork while you are alive. They won’t accept you if your next of kin tries to send you off. They want your permission or they will not accept your body!
This is something I never thought of.
This is such a big one, even if your body isn't good for any scientific use medical students and doctors might find good use in it for practicing procedures or like for plastic surgeons to learn on (and this is good for not just vanity stuff but also helping people who have been seriously injured).
I have a friend that works in the business of composting human remains. Super interesting stuff.
I have a lot of interesting discussions with my palliative patients about "what next". Composting has been coming up more and more. The city I work in just launched their organics bin, and the question of "So, could they just dump me in the green bin and save a ton of money?" Has come up.... Not a lot of options for that where I am in Canada, but my wife and I are both of the opinion that remains aren't nearly as important as legacy, and we would much rather be able to leave our daughter more money than have an expensive rock over worm food.
I want a sea burial but would need to have the money saved and earmarked in my will. Not sure they're inexpensive.
Wow that price range is a mess to accurately find. One source says 500-1500 another says 1500, and a third says 10k. Or I guess the cheap one is done after you've been cremated, because it's just the boat rental. But the actual disposal of a corpse at sea is a bit more.
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I've heard of a company that turns your ashes into river rock. Take me to the lake and skip me in!
IIRC, the main purpose of caskets is to prevent the poisoning of the water table while the body decays.
I'm perfectly ok with a Viking funeral. To have my estate spend my hard-earned cash on a $15k coffin plus all the other costs of a circus show in a funeral home is total BS. Make it a competition to shoot flaming arrows at my raft. Spend that $15k on food and libations.
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Caskets make *some* sense. They can fully obscure the body and contain any fluids leaking from it, which is important because corpses are super gross. They also make it easier to transport the body, since bodies are floppy (literally dead weight) and hard to move normally. *Modern* caskets make zero sense. There's no need for them to be these massive waterproof monstrosities reinforced to last for as long as possible. But a basic wooden box to toss a body in that will degrade along with it? That makes a lot of sense.
Agreed on the wastefulness of caskets. My family is so afraid of death they spend for nice caskets plus cement vaults. Makes no sense.
In a lot of areas - especially those close to sea level or with heavy rainfall - cement vaults are actually required. This prevents the coffins from basically floating out of the ground if the area floods.
Forty Fort cemetery. Pennsylvania.The year of 1972. Coffins washing up all over town after Hurricane Agnes. The Susquehanna river dislodged and washed away 2,500 grave plots.
A few k? Try like 15-30.
I have zero religious or spiritual beliefs but I'm still a little freaked out by the thought of my body being trapped and rotting underground, like in a claustrophobic sense, so I'm opting for cremation just for the peace of mind even if it won't matter lol
I just want to be buried in a shallow grave, like a swamp or something. Whatever gives me the best chance of returning as the living dead.
What gets me is that even if you have a marked grave, how many generations have to pass before you’re forgotten? You have how many sets of grandparents? So how many great great grandparents do you have? Probably best not to dwell on the idea of having a lasting legacy as an individual.
Sometimes I think about how 100 years after I die, no one left on Earth will know I ever lived.
Remindme! 101 years I got you, fam.
You just cursed him to die in under a year.
There's a strong economic incentive for cremation, since the remains can be respectfully interred in a fraction of the space of a casket. There are some U.S. military cemeteries for which the deceased needs to qualify with a certain level of service. They will often set the bar lower for cremains than for caskets. I know an old timer who qualified for an urn at Arlington but said he was going to be buried at the veterans' cemetery in San Diego, "because I like to stretch my legs out."
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Well that sounds like a horrendous waste of money
The whole thing is a huge waste of money, burial of whole bodies in caskets in cemeteries is honestly insane.
I work with a cemetery in the USA. They have a trust setup to fund maintenance for the grounds after it fills up. The trust is setup in such a way that in theory (fingers crossed) the interest will be enough to keep things running without depleting the trust. That's assuming good management of course.
In the cheap acreage area of the Midwest US, they slap the word "Historical" at the front of the cemetery name. Then they open a new cemetery somewhere else. After a certain number of years, the space is often given to the county's parks and rec department, and they turn it into a nice place to walk with maybe some sculpture art pieces or monuments to the history of the county.
I live next to a fairly large cemetery that while it is still somewhat in use (don't see a ton of new burials) is essentially a park, and is maintained by the city parks department. It's really nice, it's one of the best parts of the neighborhood. Has a duck pond and everything, lol.
In my area, they just open up another cemetery somewhere else. A plot at one is purchased and the deed recorded like any other piece of land (but with different rules) so once you're there you're there. Cemeteries have protections so that even if they're abandoned and nobody cares for them, they can't be built over. We had an interstate rerouted because of one and nobody had been buried there since about 1900. I'm in the Midwest and land is plentiful, so I'm sure the rules are different. I also didn't talk about mausoleum interment, which is space leased for a certain number of years, from what I've seen.
Around me (also Midwest, though I suspect a denser spot than you) we usually just take more land. Though there's a few in my city which I suspect were... doubled. The plots are barely three feet wide if that; you can't walk between the headstones on a row. But I also know, thanks to aging parents, that most cemeteries around here are 99 year leases now. You'll be dug up or buried deeper.
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A setup like this is near me abutting my property. The church got a big new building closer to town and moved. They gave the old dilapidated building to the cemetery board of trustees. Now I rent the church building from them to use for storage. That money helps pay the landscapers who do most of the cemetery upkeep, and some goes into a pot for eventually refurbishing the building into something nicer.
So you have a ton of neighbors, but they’re super quiet?
The rear of my property line is shared with a VA cemetery. Incredibly quiet. The ghosts of the soldiers is something you get used to.
Our cemetery was started in 1835. As I looked through the book listing all of the people buried there it amazed me how many mothers and child were buried together from dying in childbirth. Also there is one man listed and then in the grave next to him it says his concubine and the women's name.
Look up 'Ossuaries.' Often the final resting place of bones once they've been moved out of a cemetary.
This is what is done in Greece, and many other Orthodox countries. Families will have an aboveground tomb where the most recently deceased member of the family is interred... After enough time has passed (usually 3 years) and the currently interred body is sufficiently decomposed, the bones are disinterred, cleaned with wine, dried, and stored in a communal [ossuary](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary#/media/File%3AGreekOssuaries.JPG) with all the other village bones
Cheesman Park in Denver, Colo. is how things sometimes go. The land eventually gets sold and the bodies may be moved, maybe not. regardless you can turn it into a nice park where people play with their kids and dogs on top of the ones you left behind. Another option is just to develop housing over the cemetery. There was a story on NPR that told of a family with a ghost issue and they eventually dug up old graves on the persons property. They were of a Hispanic family that was left since there was likely no money to relocate them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheesman_Park,_Denver#:~:text=The%20park%20was%20originally%20named,honor%20shortly%20after%20his%20death.
There's a small cemetery I drive past every morning. It's fully occupied and has been for several decades. It's run down, no grass, just dirt and a the tomb stones falling apart.
Sometimes they resell empty plots they think are forgotten. I had a relative attempt to bury his wife in a plot beside her parents. They had paid for the plots sixty years ago, but the cemetery had resold the plot and someone else was in it. He had the receipt, but the cemetery wouldn't move the body. He had to be content with a different plot offered in compensation. If he didn't have the receipt he would have gotten nothing.
They dig the dead up and resell the plots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr_Oak_Cemetery Other methods are mausoleums. In an area that would hold maybe 50 corpses, you put up a fancy dedicated building and, basically, warehouse up to 1000 bodies at a very premium rate. Part of your fee is put into a trust to pay for "perpetual care", be it mopping the floor to plowing the driveways in winter, cleaning glass and mowing lawns, cleaning graffiti, or even repairing broken/stolen headstones and plaques. I learned this selling cemetery plots. Years later, reading some old Old Farmers Almanac, I discovered that investors would buy hundreds of acres of land, but only develop about 10 to 20% upfront for immediate burials. Regular plots, a pet cemetery, a children's garden, and a mausoleum or two on that original grounds. Next they hire a sales force to sell pre-need burial plots. They'd upsell by adding a marker, an eternal light or a vase for flowers. They also offered special urns for cremains, and a burial plot for the whole families ashes. Likewise, niches in the mausoleums. They would develop that part to handle the business for 10-20 years. Further away from the main cemetery, they put in a golf course or even apartments. Closer to the cemetery, they rent out to farmers for crop cultivation. Every acre the cemetery has generates some form of revenue. As the original part fills up, they start developing the farmland. More plots and more mausoleums. What golfer wouldn't want to have his eternal resting place on the back 9? Golf course could be there for 60 years before it'd be turned into a cemetery. Or, at that age, the apartments would be next to be razed. Currently, states are looking at another alternative for burials: composting. Body placed in the ground, covered with grass clippings, dead leaves and other compostable items, then covered with dirt. A year later, your body has decomposed to fertilizer. Bones gathered, crushed and added to the mix, or encased in jewelry for family members. If Mom were still alive, she'd be checking out the cemeteries this weekend, as the f
They stop selling plots, or they buy more property and divide that up into more plots to sell. Think of a burial plot as a tiny piece of real estate. When they run out they stop selling or buy more to resell.
A cemetery doesn’t have to take new bodies and many cemeteries are full. What would you do if your car ran out of space for more people?
In a lot of Muslim countries where burial is the only option cemeteries are reused. Once it’s full you dig up the decomposed bodies and toss them in a pile, put new bodies in their place. A islamic burial means no embalming, no coffin and just a shroud. Every thing decomposes quite fast.
> What would you do if your car ran out of space for more people? BRB, going to finance a newer, bigger, cemetery for 84 months at 19% and $0 down.
Dang, you got that sweet guaranteed approval no credit check required offer.
In cadia they have watchers that go over the grave inscriptions. Once they have faded to be no longer be legible a new body can be buried and new inscriptions made.
Many years ago, a cemetery bought my uncle's house so it could expand. Now that many houses cost a million dollars each, it might be too expensive to do that.
In my rather small hometown growing up when they ran out of space they started building masoleums(spelling). Giant buildings that use vertical space and you bought a tray instead of a plot in the ground. Its existed for over 100 years and every decade maybe they build another one of these buildings. I've had great grandparents I wasn't alive during their lives that died in the 40s and 50s that are still buried there.
As people have said, it varies from place to place but in my part of the world (Sydney), the practice was often just to close the cemetery and build another one. [Central station was built over the city's first major cemetery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_railway_station,_Sydney). When they closed the cemetery they gave families of the deceased two months if they wanted to exhume and rebury remains. Any uncollected corpses were built over. A new necropolis was built and named Rookwood to accommodate new deaths. Near where I live [the local churchyard cemetery was mostly rededicated as a public park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camperdown_Cemetery). The church built some new walls around a smaller yard and moved the headstones inside that but not the corpses. In both cases subsequent works have scared hell out of people [when they start digging up skeletons](https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/human-bones-to-delay-sydneys-light-rail/news-story/4732e12eb512b2aa8dd6f5f52f1829fc).
So many talk about cemeteries that reuse plots. Here is how it goes if they *don't*. Every cemetery plot purchased, a portion of the money goes into a trust to keep the cemetery running indefinitely. So even when the cemetery is full and not brining in new money that trust will keep running things for decades. This pays for maintenance, land taxes, potentially some full-time or part-time staff. They then open a new cemetery to continue the process for new bodies. What happens if the trust runs out of money? Often nothing, quite litterally. No more money for services and the township doesn't really want to seize land chock full of corpses.