The Gravekeeper’s Paradox: People want permanent tombstones that also show decay | Hacker News Reader

The Gravekeeper’s Paradox: People want permanent tombstones that also show decay

nautil.us

46 pointsdnetesn36 comments

Cemeteries are beyond ridiculous, and growing up, I thought there would be a cultural shift away from such non-sense, but maybe not?

My mother is into local history. She would often take me to cemeteries and show me several generations of family members. She told me many stories about them, even though they are long since dead. She knew where all sorts of notable people were buried, and told me stories about them. The graves of the first settlers, a soldier who received the medal of honor in the civil war in the locomotive chase, to a tombstone that was carved out of a meteorite.

We spent time planting flowers and keeping the graves nice. Cemeteries are not empty places, there is always someone showing up to visit and mourn for the dead.

It's also not wasted land. Every cemetery I've been to was built on land no one wanted. Usually sandy hills that weren't farmable.

If and when she dies there is no way I will have her cremated. I hope my great grandchildren tell stories about her in a hundred years.

48.2% of bodies in the US are cremated now, but it varies significantly by state. The NFDA predicts that it will be up to 70% by 2030.

http://nfda.org/about-funeral-service-/trends-and-statistics...

My grandparents were cremated, but then the ashes were buried in an old cemetery similar to the one in the article, with gravestones and all that. So "cremation" and "using land as a cemetery" aren't necessarily opposed.

There is a shift towards cremation in the US http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cremation_..., though seems to still be eschewed in the south. I don't know if there is any Baptist, or other religious teaching against cremation, or maybe it just has to do with cheaper land.

In Christian eschatology, one day Jesus will return and the dead will rise from their graves. For many people cremation seems incompatible with this, although one imagines a benevolent deity could just as easily reconstitute people from ashes, scattered or not. Then again a lot of religious people think this mass resurrection is going to be a pretty selective affair so that it's important to have the right address even after you're dead.

Cremation in general has been frowned upon by christianity as pagan.

At 2 square meters per grave in densely populated areas they're going to sooner or later have to bury people stacked if they don't want the dead to crowd out the living.

But then there are family crypts with 4, 6, 8, 12 bodies interred pulling the average down. Not to mention the number of people who have been interred and then the cemetary later moved because it was on land deemed desirable to the developer (and of course a standard trope of many horror movies). So I doubt the dead could "crowd out" the living but they could certainly end up stacked in a cave somewhere far away from their original burial.

How long are grave sites kept in the US? Here in Germany they are reused (25 years is a common period), and family graves are "people buried stacked".

As far as I know burial plots are not reused in the US. You generally buy the plot in perpetuity.

It varies. There are sometimes problems with private or small cemeteries that are run by an association running out of funds (or the association can end up with no members left).

A search for "cemetery disrepair" returns lots and lots of local news stories.

People buried stacked is not entirely uncommon in the US though.

Even as a simple matter of logistics, I've often wondered - why don't we bury people vertically? About the only downside to it would be in the extremely rare case that exhumation is needed, which would have to be a (literally?) one in a million event?

Hard to enjoy your eternal rest if you can't lie down.

I feel sorry for the gravedigger who has to dig vertical graves.

Augers.

http://www.aratri-trivelle.it/sito2009/eng/DettaglioProdotto...

That shouldn't matter, they can just name the local tradition something else, like "Christmas."

Cemeteries aren't ridiculous a priori, they just become less sensible as population density and community age (#of corpses) increases.

Setting aside land for the dead is ridiculous.

It's not for the dead. It's for the survivors. Many people want a place to gather, pay their respects, and create a tangible connection to their loved ones. There's no theoretic reason why it has to be an individual headstone (versus more dense monuments) or even an outdoor headstone setting (versus cremains in an urn or scattered in a meaningful place) but don't pretend that it has anything to do with the dead. It's a ritual for the living.

> don't pretend that it has anything to do with the dead

It is for the dead. No one is visiting graves of someone who died 200 years ago, yet everyone is up in arms if you mention moving an old cemetery. If you own farmland with a family cemetery (again, 2-300 years old), you have to farm around it, you can not move it.

It is for the dead.

Perhaps they're special cases, but I've visited cemeteries of people who died in the 1600s and 1700s in Boston, Plymouth and Salem, Massachusetts. You'll find two cemeteries almost across the street from each other in Boston, right in the center of the city. They're tourist attractions, both for the now-obsolete grave decorations, and for some of the famous people who are buried or at least commemorated there. For instance, you can see markers for people who died in the Boston Massacre in 1770 in the Old Granary Burying Ground; needless to say, it's named for a building which used to stand nearby. King's Chapel Burying Ground, just down the street, has a bonus historical feature - a ventilation shaft for the subway, which I think dates to roughly 1900.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granary_Burying_Ground http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Chapel_Burying_Ground

> Perhaps they're special cases

They are special cases. Very, very special. There is a 150 year old family cemetery a stones throw from my house. No one cares. A quarter mile from my last house there was another one. I drove past several on my way to work. NO ONE CARES. The number of old cemeteries that are of any interest is so minuscule compared to the number of cemeteries.

Cemeteries are a growth of the Christian idea that you're going to be resurrected one day and peoples general fear of dying and as long as someone knows where they are they're not really dead. They are a colossal waste of space.

Moving the bodies themselves seems to be an issue, and I expect there would be awkwardness about allowing farming where there had been a cemetery for perceived health reasons, but there have certainly been cases of repurposing cemeteries. Pioneer Park in San Diego, while having a scan few recent articles about how it was probably a bad idea, didn't seem to cause a huge controversy: the city took an old cemetery in disrepair, took out most of the markers, put up a little memorial in the corner, and turned the rest into parkland. The primary school right next to it, at least when I went there, even used it occasionally for classes, though I expect that has stopped for perceived security reasons.

There is a truly ludicrous amount of unused/underused land left in the US. The only problem is where we are burying people, not that we are burying people in the general case. Cemeteries in cities/suburbs get in the way, but otherwise it isn't a real concern.

Seriously, drive across Wyoming sometime and then try to say with a straight face that we are running out of land.

I like the idea of cemeteries.

When my grandma died, I had a blast not only looking at all the art (that is usually very interesting by itself), but also visiting my grandpa grave.

The grandpa died when my dad was 6 years old, so I never met him, he was historically important, not just to my family, but to his city, and visiting his grave was nice, people started to remember stuff and talk about him, and I could learn a lot, also could see how he looked like (his grave had a photo of him).

Despite never meeting him, I can now use him as a life example to follow.

And think of all the lost phosphorous, for Ford's sake.

It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people. - Chairman Yang, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri

I wonder if as 3D printing technology improves and spreads, will we see more plastic headstones by virtue of the fact they can be reasonably easily custom made? I could see people being attracted to the idea of a custom headstone at a lower price than the sculptor could provide.

I like the idea of an eternal gravestone. The base is a very slow 3D printer, constantly extruding a headstone. The material ablates at a predictable rate, so the oldest bit - the top of the headstone - slowly crumbles away, while the bottom looks new and fresh.

You'd have to scroll whatever message on it - your name, birth and death dates, etc. - like a very slow marquee.

You'd only need infinite energy. Easy peasy.

And entropy-proof electronics.

My mother designed a tombstone using AutoCAD for my dead brother some years ago. Its already possible.

If you just want a slab with an inscription, there's no need to 3D print it. Plastic (and metals!) are already easier to mill than stone.

If they can solve this problem with distressed jeans, they can solve it with tombstones.

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