What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?

25:25So grieving is really hard, right? It's very hard to grieve in that situation because everybody's telling you, okay, we understand. Now, can we talk about you going back to work? Yeah. Yeah. Grieving in American society, grieving death in particular, feels like you leave society. And you're culturally permitted to leave society with the expectation that you'll return. But I feel like that's the thing that anyone who has lost anybody relates to, is that feeling that you just leave the world, and the world does not join you in that place. And it's very strange to imagine that that experience is not—that it's a cultural experience, and that in a different culture, you might feel differently.

26:02Totally different. Huh.

26:08Before our culture changed, back in the 1900s, the 1910s, if you walked through an American cemetery, you might have seen lots of mourners on any given day. They wouldn't necessarily have been mourning the same person. They wouldn't have necessarily known each other. But they might have felt a sense of connection, even without talking. They might have been reminded that the world is always losing people and leaving others behind. And they could have gotten to mourn without that feeling of exile the modern grief carries. The discomfort we feel when we've left the funeral but are not yet ready to go back to the office.

26:42Of course, the nice part of our modern relationship to death is that when we lose someone we love, while we might feel pressure to return to normal, at least we don't feel pressure to stay in the grief. You don't have to wear black for the rest of your life. You can remarry. Time can move on, even if we're not always sure we want it to. Our modern death culture, move-on culture, it was already emerging by the 1930s. And David says today, the cemetery business is one where if you run a cemetery, you can pretty much predict the few days of the year when visitors will show up. Memorial Day, Easter, Christmas, somebody's birthday.

27:21Those are the big days where people will show up and fix the grave, put out flowers, do things. The rest of the time, there's the regulars. People will come on a weekly or biweekly basis, and they'll sit and talk to their loved ones. They're sort of out of that older culture. That newer culture is, oh, let's take the grandkids and see grandmother at the cemetery because they met the grandmother, but now she's passed away, and we'll go on her birthday. Yeah. And we won't go back for another year, or we won't go back at all. So this sort of leads into one of the things that I was curious about, is I was hoping you just sort of paint a picture for me in our time, like now, the way you're describing it, like I have friends who have culture jobs where they like, I have a friend who has a roller skating rink.

28:11I have friends who like, who do things for a living where they're like, this time of the year is hot, this time of the year is cold. This is where we make all of our money. This is like where we kind of struggle through. Like the cemetery just as a business, not as a cultural space of grief. What are the basic economics of running a cemetery as a business? So, of course, it's changed. I wrote a book in 2018, Is the Cemetery Dead? Good title, I have to say. It is a good title. And the reason that I wrote it with that title was there's all these pressures. The first pressure, David says, is the cremation trend.

28:46Your grandparents probably would have felt very uncomfortable with the idea of burning bodies up into ash instead of burying them in a casket. It just wasn't a cultural norm, partly because the Catholic Church had issued a formal ban on cremation, a ban that was only lifted in 1963. The lifting of that ban, very bad news for the professional person barrier. In 1960, it's very different than today because very few people were cremated. And most people who died had a full-body burial. And so there's a considerable amount of money at any period for a full-body burial. And cremations are much less money.

29:29So it really changes the business side of the cemetery. Cremation is like Napster for cemeteries. It's just like a horrible new thing that's ruining everything. It is. I don't know if we go that far. But it causes a lot of disruptions in the business. You know, cremation rate in 1960 is less than 5%. By 2035, people are arguing it's going to be over 70%. And so in the pre-cremation world, and I guess in the post-cremation world, just for the cemeteries part of this business, essentially what they're doing is they're selling very small plots of land, right? Like that's the revenue. So in the old days, you would try to sell a very large plot of land.

30:11So in the 19th century, families would buy a pot of land that might have 30 graves on it because you're buying a pot of land for the generations that follow you. By the middle of the 20th century, most of the time people would buy four, two for them and two for a kid, unmarried kids. And so the way that the business worked changed from these very large lots to much more medium-sized or small. And how did the business change? You don't get as much money. If you buy a 30-grade lot, they pay for all those 30 grades. Yeah. If you buy two, you get paid for two. Now, a big cemetery can react to that.

30:53They can put it in a scattering field. They can create walls where you can have your name on it. Your body that remains all is collectively. They can do all sorts of things. But if you're a small cemetery and you are largely dependent upon full bodies, quite quickly you can either run out of land or your business can suffer. Yeah. One of the two.

31:18The second pressure on the American cemetery, the thing pushing them in the direction of going out of business, has to do with how many people feel these days about the idea of legacies. Now there's a whole bunch of people who don't believe in cemeteries anymore. where they don't want to be remembered. I spoke to someone recently who was going on this whole thing about how he didn't want to be remembered and when it was over, it was over. I didn't realize this was like a common feeling, that it was even - Common's too strong, but it's growing. I mean, this has two ways it goes. One, people say, I don't want anything.

31:48Throw them in the trash. Yeah, who cares? And then there's those who say, well, I want it to be natural. Yeah. And I don't think the modern cemetery is natural, so I'm going to get buried in a natural burying ground, in a green burial ground. And so both those are happening. And so do the cemeteries, like, are they pushing back? Are they on like a PR offensive to? So most cemeteries have tried to become more natural. Right. And they remind people that until we started embalming, and even then, relatively few people were actually embalmed until the 20th century. Because if you don't embalm somebody, they will decompose.

32:26So that you can just keep throwing bodies in the ground. It's fine. It's only when you embalm that you have this problem of the cemetery is permanently taking up irreplaceable land. Well, it's not that simple because those old cemeteries, even if they weren't embalming, they dedicated that space to that person. Americans are not Europeans. So if you're in Germany, when you have someone die, you put that person in the grave space, you rent it. You can rent it for 25 years or you can rent it for 99 years, but you rent it. And after 25 years, if you don't pay, the body comes up, goes in an ossuary, and they resell it.

33:03Wait, so in Germany, they're evicting their dead? Yeah. That's part of how they view the relationship of living and dead and their idea of what is dead. It's weird because I feel like that feels wrong to me, but I'm like, well, why does it feel wrong? What do you have to believe to believe that that's wrong? I'm not sure it's wrong. It feels wrong. Well, most European countries do it. It's only England that stood out. So England began to do permanent grave sites. And that is the policy that came to the U.S. And so in the U.S., almost all grave sites are permanent. You can't rent that I know of anywhere.

33:43So that's pressure two. Pressure number three afflicting the modern cemetery has to do with migration. Essentially, not enough of us live and die in the same small towns as our parents, the way we once did. It's a really big issue. If you lived in Syracuse, New York, or Los Angeles for a long time, you can actually go to the cemeteries where your parents, your siblings, your grandparents, your great-grandparents are buried. You and I, I don't have anybody buried in Los Angeles. Yeah, I don't have anybody buried in New York. You know, my great-grandparents were buried in Ironton, Ohio, then Youngstown, Ohio, then Syracuse.

34:24And my connection to those cemeteries, obviously, is greater than most people's because it's my family. But I can imagine how it's quite easy to say, oh, we can't go to Grandpa's grave site because it's in Ohio. And so it's not connecting. We don't connect in the same way to the cemetery. And this is what Greenwood and Mount Auburn and places in the Midwest have tried to do, is to give you a new way to connect. David says that cemeteries that are thriving, a weird phrase, but let's go with it, cemeteries that are thriving tend to be the innovators. In America, a lot of the innovation is about cultural programming.

35:08Hollywood Forever, a 62-acre cemetery in Los Angeles, has concerts. They show movies on the side of the mausoleum in the summer. Their business is in part about finding creative ways to get people who are still alive back into the cemetery more often. Which, if you want Americans to have a less arm's length distance to death, that sounds worth celebrating. There are also architectural innovations happening. Traditional cemeteries can only fit so many bodies. And so as cemeteries run out of space, some will start to stack caskets on top of each other. You can find double-depth burial plots all across the country, often smaller, older cemeteries or veteran cemeteries.

35:49More rarely, you can find triple or even quadruple depth burials. But that's about the limit. You can't really stack more than four caskets underground. You start to run into issues with soil stability or the water table, depending on where you're buried. So these days, some cemeteries have begun to build up. Mausoleums that are somewhat high-rise inspired, with multiple levels, a way of putting way more bodies into the same amount of land. It's like a Yimby movement, but for the dead. But despite innovations such as these, the bottom line is that the pressures that are pushing against cemeteries are real, and more cemeteries are facing down a hard business reality than back in the 1910s, when Americans hung out with their dead, and cremation was still considered a bizarre practice.

36:35Which leads us to the question that has brought us here. When a modern cemetery dies, not a person in a cemetery, but the business of the place itself, what happens? The answer, after some ads.

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40:54Welcome back to the show. The thing that had led me to this conversation with you is that we had a listener to our show who found themselves wondering what happens when a cemetery goes out of business, which obviously has to happen some of the time and must be happening still with some of these smaller cemeteries. What does it look like when a cemetery just runs out of money? So there's really three things that can happen. Yeah. One, they can either get bought up by somebody who wants the cemetery for some reason, and they can become part of a larger enterprise and they'll build a mausoleum on land that they didn't think they could use, et cetera.

41:34Our listener also wanted to know if there's a market for, the phrase I think he used was gently used cemeteries. Like there's not a world, like in my dying industry, which is media, you have private equity companies just like buying up failing or not quite failing media organizations and just running them in a ruthless profit driving way that's bad for the thing itself, but lets them kind of just take a little bit of extra money out of it. That doesn't happen in the cemetery business, I'm assuming. Sure. Oh, it does? There are big corporations who have bought up dozens and dozens of funeral homes.

42:05Yeah. And now control much of the funeral market in the United States. And they started to buy cemeteries. But, you know, most cemeteries are not private enterprises. Most cemeteries are nonprofits. Mm-hmm. Or they're public. And so it didn't go as well. You know, it's not like they have as expansive a set of holdings. Yeah. They do have a considerable number of cemeteries, but what they bring to it is they bring the mowers you're going to use can be cheaper because you're going to get them from them. The trimmer is the same thing. If they own three cemeteries, they can have one gang of mowers that go from one to the other to the other.

42:44And so they try to do cost cuts that are not negative to the business. Yeah. So the first thing that can happen when a cemetery runs out of business is conglomeration. The big guy buys up the struggling smaller guys. But the second outcome, it's almost the opposite of that. An outcome that's less corporate, more communitarian. Second is that the people who own the cemetery or manage the cemetery reach out to the people who have people buried there. And they say, we need your help because we no longer have the funds to maintain the cemetery. And so there's groups that started to be created, say, in the 80s and 90s, called friends organizations of cemeteries.

43:31And they will often, in smaller cities or smaller cemeteries, they'll become really the maintenance crew. They'll bring their own mowers. They'll tend the graves. They'll make everything happen. And so that happens. And that's happened quite a lot. But the most prominent is that the state is told the cemetery is no longer functioning and that the certificate by which they are a commercial business or a nonprofit should no longer be held up because they have no money. So it becomes a word of the state. And so then the state will step in and just take it over to prevent calamity, basically? Yes, but the states are really bad at it.

44:17Oh. So what happens typically is the states say, okay, we'll take it. We'll do what we can. But, you know, we're busy. We don't have that much money. And so we'll get to it when we can get to it. And so people will complain every three months or six months or nine months. And the state will send in a set of mowers and leaf blowers and et cetera. They'll clean it up. Then they'll come back nine months later or six months later. I mean, there's some places that are very good about it. And they're very careful with the ones that they take over, but many are derelict. So the worst case scenario for if you are a body and your cemetery goes out of business is that it goes out of business, the state takes it over, and then the state is just maintaining the plot at the speed of outrage, which is slow and long.

45:12They do minimal amounts of work, yes. Yeah. And this is a big problem because once a cemetery has grass that's three feet tall and it has clear signs it's not being taken care of, that's when the kids show up and start knocking monuments over and doing things. Now, that can happen in any cemetery. But in a cemetery that is derelict, it's more open. Yeah. I think it's funny. You know, we get all these wonderful questions from different people and we have to decide which ones to ask. And I think the thing that had appealed to me about wondering about cemeteries going out of business, one thing was just I'd never thought about it, but the other was that when I started to think about it, I thought, well, every cemetery goes out of business eventually.

45:59No. No? So someplace like Mount Auburn Cemetery has an endowment in the, I don't know, somewhere above$50 million. And I don't know the number. And so it's not going to go out of business. Is it hard to get in? Yeah. Who do you have to know? You don't have to know. You have to buy a lot. They don't have a huge number of lots, so it's quite expensive. They have a growing cremation niche business. They actually have built a pretty bad mausoleum, but now they have a really nice mausoleum. And so they've been responding to their limits of their land. They still have a bunch of land. And so it's not like you can't get in, but you just have to pay.

46:46So if you want to be buried somewhere where you know that you won't be disturbed, I feel like this is like a consumer advice thing now, but try to find an old cemetery with a good endowment. Yes. I mean, there's two answers to that. The first is an old cemetery with a good endowment. But the second one is if you live somewhere where there's a small cemetery, a village cemetery, a community cemetery, a public cemetery, a town cemetery, those can be really quite lovely. I used to live in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Hanover, New Hampshire had a public cemetery, the Hanover Cemetery. And they had sufficient funds because the town is actually pretty wealthy, had sufficient funds to keep it up, and it's in really gorgeous shape.

47:31And so being buried there is also a way to go. So the answer to our listener Lucas's question this week, What happens when a cemetery goes out of business? It can get taken over by a corporation. It can get taken over by volunteers or by the state. But in America, the cemetery remains a cemetery. The bodies stay in the ground. Because in America, graves are permanent, unlike much of the rest of the world. Where a grave is just the last thing you rent.

48:05I think the last thing I'm curious about, and if this is too personal, Well, obviously, don't answer it. But have you decided what you want to do? So yes and no. For a long time, I wanted to be cremated. My first wife is interred in a niche in Mount Auburn. Yeah. Because she grew up in Boston, and she loved going to Mount Auburn. She loved to take her nephews there. And they all live in Boston. So she really wanted to be part of that. And we actually have a double horn. but recently someone else asked if they could her sister asked if she could be interred there with her beloved sister when she dies.

48:50She's still alive. In that double urn? Yeah. Oh. And I was touched by her emotion and her relationship to her sister so I said yes. So that meant I was afloat and have to think about what I'm going to do and I made a trip to the first natural burying ground in America, in the west side of South Carolina. Beautiful place, and they run it gorgeously. They do a great job. And I was like, huh, how about that as an option? Now, natural burying grounds are slowly growing all over the country, and maybe I could do that. And then there's the part of me that says, David, just get cremated. Let your wife figure it out.

49:37Let's see what happens. So you're still deciding? Yeah, I'm undecided. What about you? What are you going to do? Oh, right now, I was very sure that I knew and I had decided that I wanted to be cremated and I wanted to be put in the water near where I used to go to the beach as a kid. Yeah. And then my partner, we talked about it and she told me she wanted to be put in the water where she used to go as a kid, which is very far away. And I realize we have a problem, but I have not figured out how to solve. Well, I will suggest to you a way that you can do both, right? And that is you could actually buy, in some cemeteries, it's not that typical, but you can actually buy a name, a place to put your name in some cemeteries that do scattering.

50:28Yeah. And you just say, okay, I'm not going to scatter, but I want to put my partner in Maya's name here so that if there's someone who wants to come visit us, they'll have a place to visit. Because that's really what you're doing, is you're trying to give the people who miss you a place to go. That's really what it is. I'll tell you one really quick story. Please, yeah. I moved to California, and I was going to Santa Barbara to see somebody. And I was talking to my father. He said, well, you can go visit your grandmother. Both of my grandmothers died before I was born So I never knew a grandmother And it turned out that she was buried in the Santa Barbara cemetery So on the way up, my wife and I took a detour And I found the grave And I just burst into tears Because I never got to go to grandmother's house Because I never had a grandmother And so it was a very emotionally effective moment for me Yeah.

51:30And my wife has now drifted away. She had comforted me at the beginning and said, okay, I'm going to go walk around. And she comes back and she's smiling. I'm like, hey, I'm having a moment here. Should you be serious? Yeah. She looks at it. If you walk to the edge of the cliff, below it is a nude beach. Now your grandmother wanted to be buried there because she wanted to look at the ocean, which you can do. She wanted to look at the mountains, which you could do. But, you know, maybe she wanted to look at the nude beach too.

52:04You know what makes me understand? And I didn't think that I would get to clarity on this. I didn't think I needed to too quickly, but you should be buried somewhere where when the people who miss you go there, they'll have an experience that you want them to have. And you got to have an experience of mirth and grief, and that's perfect. Yeah, it is. And that's why the cemetery isn't dead. David, so nice to talk to you about this. Thank you. It's my pleasure. Really fun.

52:37David Sloan is a professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis with the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. His latest book is called, Is the Cemetery Dead? Go check it out.

52:57Thank you.

53:31Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, BJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinnamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking by Holly Patton. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant and Kim Kupal. If you'd like to support our show, keep it alive, stop it from going out of business and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus audio, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Incognito Mode subscribers get to stay in their graves forever undisturbed.

54:09Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Porello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Nora Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

54:54Thank you.