Endless Thread - In Memoriam

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

Death: It comes for all of us, eventually. This week we bring you two tales from Reddit about the Grim Reaper himself. One involves gravestones; the other, a "natural" way to think about burial.

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Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. Armory Silverson. John Benson. I think the name that people call you when they get your name wrong is probably cooler than the name people call me when they really want to get my name wrong. I completely agree, John. Stop.

You brought that one on yourself, Ben, but fine. Okay, I've got a quick story for you about names and Unsolved Mysteries. Did you ever watch that TV show Unsolved Mysteries, Amory? I didn't, but I bet I can guess what it's about. It was a classic show for me, a kid who was trying to watch lots of TV in the 80s and 90s. Tonight on Unsolved Mysteries, ordinary people who claim they've seen extraordinary things. That is the host Robert Stack, and this is Amy. I do blame Robert Stack for most of this.

Amy is a big fan of unsolved mysteries. She had an unsolved mystery that eventually got her into a pastime that is kind of weird. We know this because she answered a question posted in the Ask Reddit community. The question was, what's a thing you do for fun that 99% of people would consider boring? Are we really going to kick this off with Amy's hobby that 99% of people think is boring? Wait, wait for it. It's not boring. it's weird.

You know, I might be driving and see a cemetery and think, oh, I can stop and, you know, take a photo quick of all the graves in there. It's not that large. So the problem is I think it's not that large, but it's actually about 250 graves. So it takes about an hour and a half to do. She stops at graveyards and takes photos of every single grave in the graveyard. That is a little weird. Yeah, but she's got a good reason for doing this. It started when she was a teenager.

I'm originally from a little town in Wisconsin. It's in between Dodgeville and Platville. It's called Mineral Point. One day, Amy's dad sat her down and told her he was adopted, which meant that she had this whole part of her family that she didn't really know about. Were you immediately interested in sort of finding out more about the biological family that you and your dad hadn't really known? I was. I was always a huge fan of unsolved mysteries.

So here was my own mystery to solve. Because Amy's dad's adoptive parents were old school and didn't talk about this, she didn't have a lot to go on. It was a sensitive topic in her family. But her dad did know some of the names of biological family members, which he gave to her. This was, you know, mid to late 90s, so there wasn't really anything online, like a database that I could search.

So every once in a while I'd try to go through the sensitive. records and things like that. And it wasn't until maybe mid-2000s or a little later that I finally hit on Find a Grave and found my grandparents on there, my biological grandparents. Findagrave.com. I honestly had no idea there was such a thing as a massive online database of gravestone photos and information. Right?

Let alone one that's searchable. At first, Amy didn't have much luck because some of the last names in her family are pretty common, like Anderson. Remember, Mr. Anderson. Oh, Mr. Anderson. But first names, though, different story. My grandmother was named Stella, and apparently that's not a very common name,

so I was able to find her fairly easily within Wisconsin. Ah, interesting. Okay, I'm really resisting the Stella scream right now. Stella led Amy and her dad to the larger family, who they have reconnected with in the last few years. One day, someone called to tell Amy's dad that one of his brothers had passed away. He went to the funeral.

All the remaining brothers and sisters and some uncles and cousins were there to pay respects and meet Amy's dad. One person said they hadn't seen him in almost 60 years. So I am glad that he got to meet everybody before, you know, anybody else passes. It was not the best place to do it, I don't think, since it was my uncle's funeral. But it was good that they were at least able to get together and, you know, have a reunion. Which is why for the past four years on weekends, Amy has been a volunteer. for Find a Grave. She stops at random graveyards, takes photos of every single gravestone with her phone, and then uploads those photos to be organized. She's found about 500 graves that weren't already in the

system. Yeah, I just like to help people. So if I can walk around a grave site and take some pictures and upload them and put them on, then, you know, I actually like doing that. So, Ben, I actually really like graveyards, but I feel like I would get a little spooked spending that much time in them. Yeah, I asked Amy about this like three different times. I've also never had any supernatural occurrences happen. I think about the worst thing that's ever happened is I fell in a gopher hole one time. Gotta watch out for those grave robbing gophers. Always.

And today, since it's close to Memorial Day, we're going to be talking about monuments and naming this one after the Alfred Lord Tennyson poem, the Latin phrase. You know the one? Yep. In Memorium. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you are listening to you are listening to you. listening to Endless Thread, a show featuring stories from the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my producer and co-host, Amory Sieverts, and we are coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station.

Okay, so we were just hearing from Amy, a redditor whose quest to find her biological family led her to findagrave.com, where she's now a volunteer. Interesting because find a grave is now owned by Ancestry.com, which is part of this whole industry of services that, help people find their biological relatives, but a lot of people still don't know about it. Yeah, like when Amy posted about what she does, she got a huge response on Reddit. I had so many comments come in talking about how they had found their father. They had found their grandmother. People were able to find relatives that they didn't have any idea where they had been buried or where they were or anything like that. Are you going to have a gravestone?

I am not. I am actually going to donate my body to the University of Knoxville. For science. Yes. It's a.k.a. the body farm down there. So they will bury your body out in the elements and then do research based on how you decompose and things like that. They then use the information to solve, you know, unsolved crimes, murder cases, things like that. The fact that Amy isn't going to have a gravestone is interesting because it connects to another story we found on Reddit. We were heading to Austin, Texas, and we asked Redditors from the Austin community what we should report on and about

places to visit while we were there. And one of them got back to us to say that we should check out this forest area called Eloise Woods. Which, to be honest, Amory, now that you're saying it out loud, sounds a little bit like a trap, like, oh, go check out the woods. I'll totally be there to meet you. And it is how you got to the point where you were convincing an Uber driver to drop you off somewhere that looks a little bit sketchy.

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. So we recently headed down to Austin, Texas to do some reporting. And this redditor from the area suggested we check out this area of woods called Eloise Woods. So being a very chivalrous person, I sent Amory just in case it was a trap. Thank you so much. All right. Take care. Bye-bye. I'm somewhere in the woods in Cedar Creek, Texas, about 10 miles east of the Austin airport.

My driver back there, my Uber driver. Didn't want to drop me off because I'm just walking into the woods by myself. But seconds later, there she is. Hello. You're Melissa. Hi. Who are you? Kermit the dog. Hi. Me too. I'm free up a hand here.

Melissa Unfrick, aka the modern mortician on Reddit, and Kermit is not just any dog. Wow. He's the first certified therapy dog in funeral care in all of Texas. In funeral care. which means that Kermit goes with Melissa, who's an actual mortician, just about anywhere the job takes her, including where we are now, Eloise Woods. Melissa invited me here to meet Ellen MacDonald, who owns this land. Hi, Ellen. Or, as the Eloise Woods website calls her, the owner-slash-queen,

which we've got to give her, because Ellen does everything here. I run this place all by myself. There's no staff or employees, and so it's just me working diligently up here every day to try to carve out trails, and I try to make trail signs. So all the gardens and the trails have engraved stone markers, so you can always kind of tell where you are. And looking around in all directions, that's all you see. Woods and trails, some gardens, it's lovely, peaceful, unassuming.

You wouldn't know that under our feet, scattered across the 9.4 acres that make up Eloise Woods are the remains of 178 people and 198 pets. Eloise Woods is a burial ground, specifically a natural burial ground. A natural burial ground, as opposed to a conventional cemetery, is a place where we don't introduce any toxic chemicals into the ground. And bodies are not involved. We don't use any metal or plastic caskets, and we don't use a concrete graveliner. so bodies are just allowed to decompose naturally the way nature intended.

Ellen first heard of natural burials, also called Green Burials, in 2007. I think I was watching an episode of Six Feet Under, which is a very funny, quirky show on HBO about the funeral industry, and after five or six seasons of this show, one of the main characters dies and has a green burial. There's no coffin? It's more natural this way. That's the first time I'd ever seen that type of a burial portrayed.

Before that, I thought your only options upon death, neither of which appealed to me was cremation or burial in a conventional cemetery and chemicals and concrete and plastic flowers. And I didn't like either of those options. So when I saw this family lovingly wrapping this family member in a shroud and just lowering them into the ground, and covering them up in the middle of this beautiful woodland,

I thought I could get behind that. I think I could get behind that, too. Same, but Ellen went further than getting behind it. After she saw that episode of 6 Feet Under, she couldn't stop thinking about it. So in 2010, she bought the land that would become Eloise Woods. And I just started foraging roads and trails and marking out gardens. And this was, in 2011, we had our first human burial.

Back then, Ellen says Eloise Woods was one of maybe 11 natural burial grounds in the country that she knew about. Now she's running a pretty full-fledged operation. There's an area for veterans, an area for the Jewish community, people of all ages. So we're here at Joe Allen Brooks. It says July 29, 1988 to March 12, 2013. And as you see, he has a flat natural stone. And in a natural burial park, we don't have upright headstones. or crosses or any sort of plastic decorations.

The idea is that you're standing in the middle of the woods and you look around and you can't tell that people are buried here because it looks like a cemetery, things don't catch your eye. It just looks like a natural woodland. And here we've built a Zen garden that actually the father of young Joe Brooks' father and I made this together as a tribute to his son because his son was very much into Zen. And so we just made this quiet garden with benches

as a place where anybody can just come and sit quietly and reflect. I'm into quiet reflection too, but isn't it dangerous to not embalm the person and just wrap them up in a skimpy shroud and put them in a hole in the ground? Well, this actually gets at something Ellen says is a relatively recent development. A lot of people just have a lot of problem being around dead people,

mostly just the fear factor. We're so removed from our dead. after the last 150 years of, you know, when the funeral industry basically took this over. I want you to remember the phrase funeral industry. In the meantime, little history pop quiz for you, Ben? Rout row. Do you know what was happening about 150 years ago in the U.S.? Well, let's just say four-scoring 70 years ago, am I right?

Well, if by that you mean the Civil War, then yes, you are right. Yes. So the families of fallen soldiers, particularly families in the north, wanted the bodies of their loved ones to be sent back home. So embalming started as a way to preserve them during the trip. And remember, we're talking hundreds of thousands of bodies that they were dealing with. So this was actually also the start of repairing and disguising wounds on a corpse to spare the families of having to see the physical scars of war.

And it stuck. So because we never see death, it's not a part of our lives, it's very unfamiliar to us, and it's very frightening. So the people that have asked my advice about this, I tell them that, you know, you really have to have everybody on board at your home, your family, your friends, who are going to help you with this. Because you yourself might like the idea of having a home funeral for yourself, but you're not the one who's going to be there to take care of you. Right, right. It's interesting to think about having to get your family on board with a green burial. Like it's this new age progressive method when really basically all burials before the Civil War were green burial.

green burials, right? Yeah. So the green burial movement is like the funeral process just getting back to its roots in a way. And it's gaining momentum in the U.S. A survey released earlier this year by the National Funeral Directors Association says that about half of Americans are now considering a green burial. And almost three quarters of cemeteries are reporting an increased demand for them. And one of the reasons for this is that, as the name suggests, green burials are way more eco-friendly

than a conventional burial. I'm going to bust out a few more statistics for it. you. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay, so here's what the traditional burial industry in America puts in the ground every year, at least according to the Green Burial Council. 20 million feet of wood, 1.6 million tons of concrete, and 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluids. Green burials eliminate almost all of this. All right, so let's talk about embalming for a minute. I mean, the practice I know has basically been around since the Egyptians, right? But what does embalming people in modern times look like.

So I'm going to circle back to Melissa Unfrid for this, the so-called modern mortician. She's a funeral director and consultant who now focuses on green burials. She showed up in a shirt, by the way, that read, It's OK to decay. But she knows a lot about embalmment

because she used to do it. And she described it to me in the car on the way to meet with the family. And Ben, are you squeamish? As long as there's like no bugs going into or coming out of anyone's ears, I'm okay. Okay. Well, there's none of that, but heads up, the details here are pretty intense.

So you've got this body on the table. You cut about an inch or an inch and a half long, incision along the right clavicle bone. And then they fish in there and they pull out the jugular vein and the carotid artery. And they nick the jugular vein a little bit, and then they nick the carotid artery and insert a cannula, which is a tube, a metal tube, which is attached to a rubber hose, which is a attached to an embalming machine where they pour all the formaldehyde and chemicals that are going to go into the body with water. And they turn this machine on, and as they're pumping the embalming fluid into the artery, it goes through the arterial system all the way down to the toes and all the way back up,

and it drains out the jugular vein. The blood is fully drained from the body. A pink dye is injected to make it look more lifelike. The fluid from the organs is drained. And then cavity fluid, this toxic high-level chemical, is injected into the body. body to kind of firm everything up. Gallons of formaldehyde is put into each body that is embalmed. And to close the eyes in the mouth, sometimes they will sew up through the nasal cavity

and through the muscles in the jaw. They don't actually sew your t-shut or anything or your lips. For eyes, they use these little plastic caps with spikes on them to keep your eyes shut. And for good measure, they'll usually put a line of super glue along your eyelids. to make sure that they don't open as your body starts to dry a little bit. Isn't that lovely? Wow. Let me tell you the big thing.

They've come out with scented embalming fluid. Why are you encouraging people to smell your toxic chemical? I mean, they've got a baby powdered scented to embalm babies with. They've got cucumbers scented. They came out with hot cinnamon for Valentine's Day. I was like, I'm waiting for the pumpkin spice at Halloween, you guys. What's going on? And really, it comes down to, oh, what can we sell?

What can we sell? In other words, the conventional burial industry is always finding new ways to separate the aggrieved from their money. And Ellen McDonald from Eloise Woods, she gave me a sense of just how much we're talking. Right now, I think the average price that an American has to pay for a funeral is between $7,000 and $10,000. And that's not even including your cemetery plot or your marker. That's just usually the funeral directors' fees. So the funeral industry has sort of based a lot of its profits on things like embalming and caskets. And now a lot of people are realizing that you don't need either of those.

It's really important. Compare that to a plot at Eloise Woods, which is $2,250 for an adult grave. And the whole package comes in under $3,000. That is like half as expensive. Yeah. But Melissa says that a lot of people go the traditional route and have their loved ones' bodies embalmed because they assume they have to. embalming is not required by law.

In Texas or anywhere? Anywhere in the United States. It is not required by law. It's usually a funeral home's rule in order for safety of the public. Really, it comes down to their reputation. You know, if grandma doesn't look good, then grandma's best friend isn't going to choose that funeral home when it's her turn to die. That's what it comes down to. Why you don't have to embalm is because we have this great invention called refrigeration.

and you can put a body in refrigeration and they are not going to turn into a skeleton overnight or some kind of grotesque figure. What about cremation, though? That's like the thing I always thought of as the greenest among regular options, I guess because maybe you take up less real estate and fluids and makeup, etc.

It's definitely greener than traditional burial, but it still involves fossil fuels and the burning process And something I didn't know is that bodies are usually wrapped in plastic before they're burned to keep fluids from leaking out. And cremation reportedly uses an equivalent amount of energy to a 500-mile car trip. Also, Ben, do you have any fillings? Never heard of fillings. Also, I have patient confidentiality with my dentist to whom I've given a lot of my money.

Okay, so all of those fillings in your mouth have mercury in them. And when they're burned, that mercury is just really... leased into the air. So not great. But even though cremation isn't considered a green or natural burial, you can get a plot for cremains at Eloise Woods. Or Ellen says you can just scatter them there for free. Ellen MacDonald isn't just the caretaker of Eloise Woods. She's got her own area picked out. Yeah, so I divided the land into different sections or gardens and they all have descriptive names. For instance, this is Quiet Time Garden. This is where my point, plots are and just last August I buried my mom right over here in this meadow. I'm sorry for your

loss by the way. Oh, that's okay. I got to use all of my experience that I've honed over the last 10 years learning about home funerals to be able to take care of my mom on my own, which was actually a very peaceful and beautiful experience. You know, when she died, I got to bring her home and She was basically on my dining room table for three days, and I sewed a shroud for her. And then my family put her in the back of my husband's car, and we drove her up to the woods, and walked her down the trail, and we lowered her in with a quilt from my bed. And it was just all very peaceful and beautiful. I felt like I had control over the entire arrangement.

I wasn't relying on other people to tell me what to do and when I could do it. control, one of several reasons why people turn to green burial. When Ellen's father-in-law passed away, everything happened quickly, maybe a little too quickly. And then the moment that he died, you know, my sister-in-law is like calling the funeral home, come and get him. And then these people that you don't even know, these strangers, they're very somber and professional. They come, zip them up in a black plastic bag and take him away. You don't really get to come terms with anything that's happened, where it's.

with my mom, I didn't have any real trauma or panic going on because no one was taking her away from me. And I think it's enormously aiding in the grieving process. Because I felt after three days I was really ready to let her go and put her in the ground. Even though Ellen hopes it'll be a while before she takes up permanent residence here, she feels good about calling Eloise Woods her final resting place. I'm very proud of the park when I walk around and I, and I can see how beautiful it is. And mostly I feel proud because every single family that has been here

have hugged me and they're so happy about what they've been able to do here that they wouldn't be able to do in other places. Mostly it's the involvement that they can have here because here we've had families come up and dig the grave themselves. And then when they bring the body up here, they can be as involved as they want in the lowering down of the body. and they have found that to be enormously useful and helpful in their grieving process. I always have a really good feeling when I'm hearing.

It could be because, you know, I love nature, I love the woods. And right now, you can hear all the birds chirping and just normal nature sounds. I love that. I'm always just happy, happy out here. Amory, I just found out that my parents are planning to have a green burial in Western Massachusetts. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Although I think it's like my dad's final practical joke against me

because it's going to make me have him lying on my dining room table in my house for like three days. Yeah. But I do think it's a good way to go. I was going to ask you if you were going to do it too, but I know you actually want a totally different funeral, and you and I actually want the same kind of funeral. I learned this this week. Yeah, a Viking funeral.

Damn Skippy, where they like take you and put you on top of a funeral. funeral pyre and then put that on top of a raft or like on a boat and push it out into the ocean. And then some guy who's like amazing at shooting burning arrows shoots one perfectly into the boat. And then you just kind of flame out into the sunset. That is exactly what I want. Though I'm not sure burning all that wood and fuel is very green. True. What if it's like a Tesla floating off into the sunset though?

No, not getting any better. Back to the funeral drawing board. Yep. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she says, W-T-F. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of... Mildly interesting.

Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vicus, who, whenever we go to record in the field with them, they remind us... Nature is... ...flip lit. Our web producer is Megan Kavanaugh. Ellie who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and goes, Aw. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we try to have a serious meeting with him, he's all...

You, I'm a toddler. Our theme music is by Squelcher. This week's episode, Art is called Life After Death. It's really cool. It's from Reddit user I Am Art B, or I think their name in real life is Mart B. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did.

today, hit us up. This show was produced by Josh Swartz, also my producer and co-host, Amory Sievertson. I am senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.