What if the cemetery goes out of business? (classic)

0:00Hello. This week we are running one of our very favorite classic search engine episodes. It concerns the topic that I think is always humming underneath the thoughts in our minds that we spend a lot of energy not thinking about. Maybe we is just me, but I think it's probably you too. It's a conversation that started with an intriguing question and then gently went a lot of places that surprised me. after these ads what if the cemetery goes out of business

0:56Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. This week, a question one of our listeners has been wondering about for nearly 15 years. A question about the dead. Hi, Lucas. How's it going? Doing well. How are you doing? I'm doing good. What does your hat say? Portland Buckaroos. Who are the Buckaroos? They're just like an old hockey team. And what I love about the logo is that, like, it's a hockey-playing cowboy. Oh, yeah. Is he on a horse, but also the horse has ice skates? Yeah, and then he has ice skates also. That seems like overkill. Well, I love it. It's like he knows that his horse might die.

1:39Oh, yeah. And he'll need to have his ice skates. That's like your interpretation of your own hockey hat feels like a very morbid Rorschach test.

1:53Lucas, perhaps a fellow given to certain morbid wonderings, which was what had led him here today. His question stretched all the way back to 2011, back when Lucas was studying advertising in Texas. In one of his classes, he was given an assignment. Find an existing company that might need some help with their brand and copy. And so in his search, he would find himself wandering the world, noticing businesses more. The ways they presented themselves, the choices they made. And one day I was driving by the cemetery that was the Muslim cemetery. And I was like, oh, that, you know, cemetery could be a cool thing to advertise for.

2:29So I went to their website and it was like the most unhinged thing where they'd written the website in a first-person narrative. What do you mean? Like, I've got the website. I could read it to you if you want. Sure, yeah. Okay. Let me introduce myself. My name is Muslim Cemetery, and trust me, I'm your final destiny. I reside in Dedan along Highway 380 West, about eight miles west of I-35 North. My size is 11.5 acres, and I'm 20 years old. Being quite seasoned, you can imagine at present I am home to about 460 permanent residents, with a heart to accommodate 2 ,500 more. See how I cultivate a culture of...

3:08So it starts out like that, an unusual piece of ad copy, in that the business itself, the cemetery, is addressing you in the first person, but whatever. It's the next paragraph that marks the truly strange pivot. The cemetery, speaking to you on its website, begins to kind of berate you. The writing reads, I have a complaint that you folks are not taking due care of me. Whoa. Because of that, yeah, and because of that, Denton County twice threatened to shut me down. Isn't it ironic and unfortunate with so much community around me, I'm still being neglected? Until a few months ago, I did not have the funds even for my monthly maintenance.

3:45However, courtesy of a few law-fearing folks who took the lead, they jumped in and rescued me. I hope you understand that I'm the only stable and risk-free 401k investment option you have without fearing for any economic downturns. It's a kind of sales pitch that might be familiar to you if, like me, you're a devoted public radio listener. the product you're using, for some reason, constantly reminding you that it will die unless you give it more money? It works well enough when it's your local radio host. It's a little weird when the business that's threatening to go out of business is your cemetery.

4:21And while I am not an ad critic, the reason this copywriting seems to be not optimal is because the last thing you want to think about as a consumer choosing your final resting place is the idea that the cemetery itself would go out of business. Because then what would happen to you? To your body? But this vivid copywriting, ineffective as a sales pitch, was effective in that it lodged this question in Lucas' mind. So much so that he found himself wondering about it many years later and decided to email us. It's always been in the back of my head, this lonely, sad, desperate cemetery that was out there clawing for help.

4:59So I was wondering, what happens if a cemetery goes out of business? You know, like, do they disappear? Like, if a cemetery goes out of business, because, like, if a television store goes out of business, we kind of know they, like, the TVs are sold on discount, and then maybe they're sent back to the manufacturer. If a cemetery goes out of business, like, what happens? Right. Like, Spirit Halloween doesn't move in. Like, what happens to that land? Right. And, I mean, my question would be, what happens to the bodies in that land? Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, when I was a kid, I watched Poltergeist and they're like building houses over graves.

5:34And, you know, that creates all kinds of problems. But, you know, that's a movie. Like in real life, what happens to the bodies? Cemeteries are kind of a precious thing. It's a weird usage of land. So, you know, in Texas, I never thought about it because there's land everywhere. And like, it's not unusual to run into like an abandoned cemetery where a church used to be. And there's just like eight headstones there. You know, I never thought about it. But this cemetery got me thinking about that more and more of like, well, what happens if a cemetery in a prime area goes out of business? I think we can go answer these questions for you.

6:07Happy hunting. After some ads, questions answered. Where do we go when we die? Well, the cemetery, usually. But we'll learn the history of the places we go when we die. And we'll find out what happens when those places run out of cash. All that after these ads.

6:28Thank you.

7:17Welcome back to the show. How did you decide that you were going to spend many years of your life thinking about cemeteries? So the simple explanation, and it's not that simple, but I grew up in a cemetery. What? My father was superintendent of a 200-acre cemetery in Syracuse, New York. It's a great place to play, as long as you're not doing anything too stupid. And your friends, as I say in the second book I wrote, we didn't have any sleepovers.

7:53This is David Sloan, professor at the University of Southern California and author of two books about cemeteries. He's been thinking about these places ever since the childhood he spent among the tombstones. How did you feel? How did it shape your relationship to death as a kid? To me, it was just where I was. I was there from the time I was six weeks old. So I actually worked in the cemetery starting when I was 13 and all the way into my 20s. I buried babies. I was part of a crew that buried full bodies and cremations. I filled graves, you know, almost all the things that you would do in a cemetery.

8:33So I have a more intimate personal relationship with it. And then I began to create a professional relationship with my dissertation. When you work in a cemetery, does it make you, when you're confronted with the fact of death, which is something that most of us want to avoid, how does it shape your relationship to death? Does it make you more anxious about dying? Does it make you more accepting? Does it have an effect? You know, I think it, in some sense, made me more aware of the practicalities of death. And so I didn't really feel the way that most Americans feel, where they felt a distance, an incredible distance from death.

9:18You know, I watched my father or listened to my father help grieving widows. You know, I've met with families when I was going to bury their baby. I mean, I wasn't in a position where I could be so far away that I could live the American way of death. I was much more, you know, the death is part of life. It's part of how we live. And it's part of the natural cycle of this body of mine and yours. Nobody's been able to figure out a way not to die. Even though tech bros are trying, they're in a long line of people who said, well, I'm going to be the first, and we're still waiting for one to show up.

9:55So you feel more acceptance of it? Yeah, I think so.

10:02As humans, we bury our dead. We've done it for so long that it feels strange to ask why. We know it's not purely for health reasons. Burial predates our understanding of germs. The Cro-Magnons buried their dead, even the Neanderthals did. The practice feels human, except research suggests that chimpanzees, elephants, and even termites have their own versions of this. What does seem to be uniquely human about our burials is our ability to attach meaning to them. Some of us believe in an afterlife or a soul, but even those of us who don't seem to agree that the body itself is sacred. Maybe even more sacred after death.

10:39We just know this somehow. We know we have to do something with a dead body. And every culture solves the problem in its own way. In Tibet, there's a tradition of what the West calls sky burials, the body left on a mountain or some other elevated place for vultures to feast on. There, they call it giving alms to the birds. In ancient Egypt, instead of practicing non-attachment to the body, some pharaohs we know were entombed in pyramids, tens of thousands of living humans working for years to mark the death of just one. The 4A people of Papua New Guinea once, in some circumstances, consumed their dead.

11:15But the practice, we know, seems to have died out. Americans, for the most part, we bury our dead underground, organized often in grids of tombstones that might remind us of the suburban and urban grids we spend our lives in. The cemetery itself, it might be attached to a house of worship. It might just be a pretty field. Like everything in America, it feels like it's always been like this. And like most things in America, it was all invented about 15 minutes ago in historical time. So in the 18th century, many small towns or larger towns in the United States had a civic cemetery, a government cemetery, a public cemetery.

11:54And then they had churchyards. And then they would actually have private, small, really small family cemeteries. And so you would have this mixture. It was a simple, say, quarter acre, half acre, and you just buried people in rows all the way along. It was a very functional, practical space. There wasn't a lot of greenery. There wasn't a lot of nature. It was mostly gravestones. And then in the late 18th century, as the cities grow, that begins to put pressure on the churchyards and those older civic cemeteries. Got it. And so people begin to think about how can we slightly suburbanize the dead to create more permanent places.

12:42And so in 1796, James Hill House was a very popular guy, prominent guy in New Haven, says he went to a friend's farm where there was a little family cemetery. It was sort of being taken over by nature. And he goes, that's not good. James Hillhouse, an American senator from Connecticut. In America, he was the person to notice this problem that other people were noticing in other countries across the industrializing world. Industrialization meant more cities, more density, land being developed and redeveloped, including farms, family farms, where traditionally many people had been buried. Slowly the city is expanding.

13:26the early farms, they might totally disrupt or take down all of the stones and the burials. So let's put everybody in one place where we can have a nonprofit organization that oversees the care of the dead. And so before him, the idea was, for most Americans, you die, you're buried, you get a tombstone. But then the idea that years later, if you're buried on the family farm, the family farm might get sold and that spot might kind of just get overridden with someone else's new idea. Yeah. They might keep it forever, but they also might have all sorts of different ways that they handle that family farm.

14:12So he's the one who says the cemetery should be a discreet and dedicated place where you buy a plot and you know your body will be undisturbed for, if not eternity, at least a very, very, very long time. Very, very long time.

14:32Hill House creates the first modern American cemetery, the model for many others to come. He calls it the New Haven Burying Ground, the first private, non-profit cemetery in the world. You can still visit it today. These days, they call it Grove Street Cemetery. It's actually sort of nestled in Yale's campus, which means being buried there is a great way to get into Yale if your SAT scores aren't otherwise good enough. David points out that these problems Hill House was solving, other countries which had industrialized earlier, France, England, had already begun to contend with them. And they were modernizing their cemeteries for the same reasons we were.

15:08Not just urban displacement, but also public health reasons. Remember in the early 19th century, mid-19th century, we don't have bacteriology. Right. That's going to come at the end of the century. And so people were very worried about what was known as a miasma. And a miasma was a sort of atmosphere above the city. And there was a sense that a disease could get into a miasma and you could actually get that disease because you're in this miasma. And so how do you get that miasma? They thought it was from decomposing material. And so the dead are decomposing. So they became a threat that they would say you died of smallpox or you died of cholera.

15:55Would you then decompose in a way that would allow cholera to go into this miasma and create a danger? So that's the first thing that happens. Okay. The second thing that happens is romanticism. and romanticism emerges in Europe and then moves through Britain into the United States, that nature is beneficial. It's beneficial for health reasons, beneficial for spiritual reasons, it's beneficial for all sorts of things. So if you put those two together, then the idea becomes if we suburbanize the dead in a larger place that we can protect and use for a very long time to bury the dead, we protect the living, we protect the dead.

16:38And we can use that space, remember before 1860, there's very few public parks in any city in the United States. So we can use that as a recreational area.

16:56Interesting. So at that moment, like the idea that there's very little green space in the city where you are and there's green space in the cemetery at that, like if I told my friends, you know, I'm going to go throw a baseball around on Saturday at the cemetery, there's something like a little bit, uh, it's okay. They're not gonna like worry about me, but there's something a little bit in there. A little bit creepy. Yeah. Yes. Would that have been more normal then? No, no, it would have still been weird. You wouldn't go jogging. You wouldn't throw baseballs. What they did is they got in their carriages and they rode around the cemetery, flowers, trees, green grass.

17:36You know, they're like, this is great. And they might in some cemetery stop and have a picnic at the grave of someone they knew or someone who was famous. And so you would have this sort of celebrity culture. Oh, wow. And lots and lots of people did this. Over the course of a year, tens of thousands of people would go visit Greenwood in Brooklyn or Mount Auburn in Cambridge. Honestly, it sounds really nice. I feel like one of the things we don't have so much right now is a way to publicly grieve. You can go to a funeral, but if you just want to go to a place where everyone else might be grieving separate things together, I don't know.

18:17I mean, obviously you can go to a cemetery, no one will stop you today, but you're describing a culture that is visiting death differently than the way we visit death now. So that really has to do with the 19th century believed in a closer relationship between living and dead. You know, all sorts of ways. I'll give you one very simple way. When a person died, often hit home, they would snip pieces of locks of their hair. They would put them in these elaborate creations, and they would put them on the wall of their house. You know, you'd walk into a house, and in the living room, there'd be a little thing of the young daughter who had died.

18:56So starting in the 1920th century, it happens as early as the latter part of the 19th century. It really takes off in the middle of the 20th century. Americans begin to really distance themselves from the dead and from death. Why? Why? Well, cultural trends are one of the most difficult things to parse out. Yes. So part of it is we know that the number of dead is actually declining. Everybody knew somebody who had died in 1900. It's just part of the parcel of life. By 1950, 1960, not so much. The infant mortality rate, for instance, in 1890s New York City is something like 130 per thousand. And by the 1960s, that's going to be in the low teens.

19:53Oh, it's very different. It's very different. So it's a really different thing. So it's easier to distance yourself. This is a totally unanswerable question, and it's not fair for me to ask it, but my curiosity insists. Do you think that those people for whom death was more common, an experience and a shared experience, do you think that the way they felt grief or loss was different than the way we feel grief rose? I think it was very intense. It wasn't less intense. No, it was very intense and very public. Tell me more about that. So the classic thing, Victoria. Victoria's beloved husband dies.

20:31She never wears anything but black for the rest of her life. Right? And this is not unusual. In Italy or in England or in Italian neighborhoods in New York, it wasn't like you were a widow so you were on the open market for marriage. You were grieving for at least a year or two years. There's whole etiquette books about how long you have to wear black and how you can then move to some parts are black and some parts aren't. I mean, there's a really intimate relationship with death and with the dead. And why do you think it would be—it seems a bit counterintuitive because you would think that in a milieu where death were more common, people would sort of— High.

21:17Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's exactly the opposite. Where death becomes less part of your life, you hide more. And where death is really in your life, you actually embrace the realities of death more. A quick example, the gay and lesbian community of the 1980s. During the HIV AIDS crisis, yeah. Right. I know people close to me who went to 50 funerals. Right. It becomes a different reality when that's true. Your relationship to that idea of death changes. Whereas if you're somebody just going along, say, born in the 70s, both your grandparents are alive, both your parents are alive, your siblings are alive, your mom might have had a miscarriage, but basically everybody you know is alive.

22:07And they're alive for a really long time. right you know there's lots of people who have grandparents today and they're in their 30s and 40s yeah that's not going to be true as much in 1900 and with for instance say in the 1980s with the gay community with hiv aids did you see people turning to sort of cultural ritual in a way that would remind you of like the 1920s or the 1910s in america like we're so they did different ones They didn't do hair on the walls or anything like that. But we know of some of them, right? With somebody like Cleve Jones deciding that everyone should have a quilt as part of the AIDS Memorial quilt.

22:54That seems very 19th century. Yeah. Because if you really think about how we mourned the dead in that period, say, from 1950s to quite recently, it's really the family's going to go to the funeral. People are going to come. Family's going to go to the cemetery by themselves. They might have a reception. They might not have a reception. And then you move on. Right. Right? That's America's way of death. America's way of death is put it away, come back to work. Yeah. Go back to work, get a new husband. You're going forward, you're moving forward. By its very nature, that denies the death. The death is supposed to play very little role in your life.

23:43So 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. 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.

24:20Totally different. Huh.

24:26Before 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.