Do you feel that traditional cemeteries are a waste of space?

Better than golf courses IMO. I have a beautiful little cemetery right behind the house I am living in. I take walks over there all the time. Personally I plan on being cremated but, if I had to choose between a cemetery and golf course, cemetery wins, bottoms down. lol

The cemetery behind me is also a haven for all sorts of wildlife. deer grazing on the lawns, amazing trees, foxes scampering around after dark, even cougar sightings. It also has a “Pet Haven” section that is really sweet. I agree there is no point in canonizing anyone, but, I do like my cemetery excursions, better than backing up to an apartment building. haha I just hop over the little barb wire fence and it is like having a park in your backyard.

The view from my back fence…. www.westwoodhillsmemorialpark.com

Yes. Existing cemeteries are starting to run out of space, and it makes no sense to dedicate more and more land to burying the dead. It’s not like we’re going to run out of bodies to bury any time soon. So if we keep treating cemeteries as permanent monuments to the dead, eventually the whole planet will be a graveyard.

Technically yeah, they waste a lot of space. I think they look pretty though, but that’s hardly a reason to keep making more.

Yes. I see the overcrowded cemeteries in Queens and Brooklyn, I see Colma CA and I think of how that land will never be available. And for what? For most of the dead, 30 years later there is no one left to grieve or mourn or even just have a peaceful talk.

In Europe they at lease recycle the spots and disinter the old bones.

I’d rather people were cremated or buried without a box and set into a park with no gravestones. Or buried in a bluff overlooking the Pacific.

Yes, I’m more practical. I believe it should be common practice to recycle everything about the remains starting with the useable organs.

Throw my body in the ground and plant a tree I’ve always said. I never understood the whole funeral/burial process as a whole. Buy a $10,000 box to put inside of a cement box that is totally air tight so nothing will ever decomp.

I agree though, I think it’s is so much more powerful to go and visit a lost loved one and see this beautiful tree that they have given life to with their remains rather than some (again incredibly overpriced) rock.

@uberbatman Aye, that’s an excellent point. Buying a big fancy box for tons of money in which to bury the dead, yet there’s people out there sleeping in the streets. Seriously, what the fuck. Life is weird when I think about it. A tree would be much more practical, in all senses.

Happily, more are in agreement (way too few, of course, but I suppose there’s hope).

Soylent green is people!

Yes I do, I think about this a lot and do believe they will become redundant eventually.

@uberbatman—agree!

@syz, more specifically, Soylent Green is Edward G. Robinson.

yes

Yes

Definitely. Especially considering how seldom most graves get visited.

YES. A tremendous wast of space. On the other hand, it keeps us humans from killing the soul of that section of Earth.

At least the “footprints” are only little woodland critters not a bunch of retarded golfers buzzing around in their little golf carts.

I don’t care much about what happens to the postmortem me, but there might be some family members that should be consulted before they throw my ashes out. Funerals are for the living, and they might care how it’s members are dispensed with.

Other than that, I agree with Coloma. I really like cemeteries, especially old ones. I’m glad we have them, but I realized their days are numbered. I like big, fancy crypts—classic Grecian or Roman style, granite, marble, bronze and wrought iron work, exteriors covered with vines—with the grate unlocked revealing close, twilit interiors with marble benches and small stained glass windows. I like going through graveyards reading the stones, filling in the clues.

I was in Boston Commons a few years ago. They have an old grave yard right there in the park. The stones read from the 1600s to early 1800s when this was a common pasture for the town’s livestock owners. Right in the middle of this big, busy city. It’s not a big graveyard at all. But there are all these small, children’s stones all dated withing a couple of winters around 1702 or so. Something tragic happened here. So, I walked around, asked at a couple of nearby bookstores. Nobody even was aware that there was a graveyard there, it seemed. Finally I found a guy at old, dusty Brattle Books, America’s oldest bookstore, down in this section of winding cowpath streets. I wasn’t going to let it go. Turns out they had a Typhus epidemic. Freakin’ Salmonella killed their babies. Tragic, but solving the mystery made my day.

New Orleans has great cemeteries. Stockholm has some beautiful old ones and they often used to put the person’s most distinguishing characteristics on the stone, usually their occupation: Sven the carpenter, Ingela the teacher, Albin the soldier. On the Island of Ven between Sweden and Denmark, there is a small old cemetery with a grave above the village of Kykbacken with a dual stone. Two deaf sisters, twins, died at 13 years in the 19th century:

Katrina och Kirsten, Tvillingar, Döv och Stum. Tretton år

They died on the same day. I stood there, looking around for clues on the other stones. Nothing. It’s an island, fishing is a way of life. Maybe they drowned?

There are knights in sarcophagi in the basements of tall, clean, Nordic baroque churches that have outlasted the villages in which they were built in the middle of nowhere across the Scandinavian countryside. Beautiful, just standing in the middle of nowhere, doors unlocked, apparently unguarded.

There are great, beautiful places for the internment of heroes, celebrities, artists, and writers among commoners of the past two centuries like Paris’ Père Lachaise and the incredible monuments to the great French political and military heroes like the Panthéon or the Invalides, the world’s most beautiful VA hospital and burial place. Or the Panthéon’s British counterpart, Westminster Abbey. These are great treasures and I’m glad they are there.

I like cemeteries, because if you want to know the history of a place, go to its libraries, museums and newspaper archives. If you want to feel the history of a place, go to it’s cemeteries.

At one time cemeteries were regarded almost as parks. A place where families could picnic in the cool of the country on a Sunday.

@Espiritus_Corvus

There are many old pioneer cemeteries in my neck o’ the woods. Nothing dating back to the 1600’s, unless you count the local native american tribes that date back thousands of years.

I certainly thought that many times, all that acerage just so peope can say that is where so-and-so is buried.

And after a certain amount of decades nobody cares where so and so is buried.

True, but, at least they become mini-wildlife refuges. haha

But we can have that without the caskets and headstones, is what I’m saying. Like what @uberbatman said. Put my body in the ground and plant a tree over it. Maybe sometime in the future my kids or grandkids could put a plaque on it or something, if they want.

I like the headstone kind better than the plaque in the ground kind.

I totally agree with @uberbatman, too. I’ll have an oak.

Me too! Me too! I wanna oak.

Have you ever watched them lower a casket into a 10 foot, dark, black hole? I saw it the first time just 5 years ago. It was traumatic. It was horrifying. Like something out of a horror movie. I can’t imagine what seeing that could do to a little kid.

Only on TV @Dutchess_III. That’s as close as I intend my body to get to one. There were parts of “Six Feet Under” that I really enjoyed, though!

Absolutely.
Soylent Green is not a fundamentally bad idea.

Graveyards are monuments to death.
Instead of celebrating life, you scare yourselves with these vast fields of corpses.
If you want to “honour” and “remember” your ancestors, build a shrine to them at home, like the Japanese traditionally do.

“Graveyards are monuments to death.” ~ Raggy.