Given that it’s Memorial Day weekend, we have been to the cemeteries where our folks and our relatives are buried, and I’ve been thinking about how much I’ve always liked cemeteries — they are quiet and cool, full of history, beautifully landscaped, and seeped in stories of long lives and short ones. And even, sometimes, we find beautiful art and architecture, masterful craftsmanship and typography, and inspiring sentiment.

Although I completely understand why many people these days feel that they want to be cremated when they die — it is the norm in many cultures, and it sounds good to me — many of our elders are more “used to” the idea of being buried, especially if there are family graves in the same cemetery or if their spouse is already gone. That’s the way it was with my mom. Our dad died over 15 years earlier.

So when the time came, our mom was very pleased that Mt. Pleasant Cemetery was the first in South Dakota to “go green” and facilitate burials that are simple, eco-friendly, and less wasteful of resources. Her parents and other family members are buried there, and so is our dad. She wanted to be with them but she didn’t want “all that fuss and denial.”

Mom was an avid gardener all her life, she maintained a chemical-free zone in the back yard for some 50 years, for growing food crops and perennials, and she saw no point to the idea of “preserving” her dead body by any of the funeral practices that are still common. She didn’t want a formal funeral and I can hear her saying, at age 99, “I’m already done with this body. Why would I ever need it again after this life?”

We went through the casket-and-vault routine when our dad died — only because mom thought she had to do so — but she was relieved and pleased we would bury her in a woven wicker basket and she would be allowed to decay into the earth over time, like mulch.

Funeral practices like chemical embalming may have made sense when there was no refrigeration available — as during the Civil War — but I believe it’s time we moved on and treated the land and the groundwater in our communities with as much respect as we do our deceased loved ones.

Surprisingly, there are not many cemeteries in the Midwest listed as certified by the Green Burial Council. At least this surprised me. This is an area of the country where agriculture is familiar and widespread, where seasons are significantly different from each other, and where the “cycle of life” is well understood. It baffles me why the natural order of life, growth, death, and decay seems to work for crops and gardens, yet doesn’t extend to people. I am not being disrespectful, I am being reasonable.

So, I would encourage families who have “always done it that way” to do some research and consider the options in their area for more “eco-friendly” burials. Maybe your local cemetery would consider “going green” also, if enough families asked about it and inquired why they haven’t yet done so.

More info here: Green Burial Council