From Dust to Dust, Quickly

I don't know how long this USAToday.com link ("Going Green Eternally") will remain active, so if you're interested, check it out soon. It's a photo slide-show of a "green" burial at a "natural" (woodland) cemetery in South Carolina. Burial is in a cardboard casket; no concrete vault; a respectful gathering of family and friends. I've been watching this trend the last several years and agree 100 percent with it. Having buried two parents, the cost of modern funerals is . . . well, there's no need for it to be as complicated or expensive as it is. The last time I checked, in North Carolina it's legal to bury someone without embalming, etc., if burial is within 24 hours of death. It's now possible to purchase simple caskets—or have wooden ones made—from outlets other than funeral homes at a fraction of the cost of the bronze behemoths sold to grieving families by funeral homes. A good book on the subject is Grave Matters—A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial by Mark Harris (Scribner, 2007).

This pictorial gives a good overview of the process. The casket is driven to the woodland site in a family van, loaded into a small wagon pulled behind a golf cart, driven to a pretty chapel in the woods, then carried to the grave. Simple and respectful—just as it should be. (Except—the lady in the pictorial isn't playing a flute. Even my granddaughters know it's a recorder. Right, girls?)

2-15-10 update: When my daughter-in-law read this post and viewed the slide show she realized this was funeral and burial of a good friend of hers, a young mom whose children are in a homeschooling play group with my granddaughters in South Carolina.