Search Engine - What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

We're supposed to be buried there forever, right? Right?? Answers this week from writer David Sloane, who grew up in a cemetery and spent his adult life studying them. The surprising history of the place we go where we die and an answer to what happens when it runs out of money. Is the Cemetery Dead? by David Charles Sloane Support the show at searchengine.show To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to search engine. I'm PJ Vote. 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 is your hat say? Portland Buccaroos. Who are the Buccaroos? They're just like an old hockey team. And what I love about the logo is, Is it 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.

She's like overkill. Well, I love it. It's like he knows that his horse might die. Oh, 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 roar shock test. Lucas, perhaps a fellow given.

to certain morbid wanderings, 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 cemetery could be a cool thing to advertise for. So 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 can 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 Denton 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. So 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, didn't 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. However, courtesy of a few a 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. And 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's 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, like, lonely, sad, desperate cemetery that was out there clawing for help, you know? So I was wondering, like, 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 and, you know, that creates all kinds of problems. But, you know, that's a movie. Like, in real life, what happens to the bodies?

Cemetery is 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.

Happy 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 camp. All that after these ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Instacart.

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And for every item you buy, Bombas donates one to someone facing housing insecurity, which makes it even better. Head over to bombus.com slash engine and use CodeEngine for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S-com slash engine, code engine at checkout. Welcome 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. This is David Sloan, professor at the University of Southern California, an 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. So 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? Like, 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. You know, I watched my father, or listen to my father, help grieving widows. You know, I 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. So you feel more acceptance of it? Yeah, I think so.

As 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 crow magnets 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. We 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 vultuous 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 four-A people of Papua New Guinea once, in some circumstances, consumed their dead, but 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, and then they had churchyards, and then they would actually have private, 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.

And so in 1796, James Hillhouse 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. The 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. So he's the one who says, like, 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. Hillhouse 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 Hillhouse 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, not 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 a smallpox or you died of cholera. Would 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, spiritual reasons, is 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. And we can use that space. Remember it, before. 1860, there's very few public parks in any city in the United States. So we can use that as a recreational area. Interesting. So at that moment, like, the idea, 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, it's okay. They're not going to 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. They're like, well, this is great. And they might in some cemetery stop and have a picnic at the great.

with 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 know, like you can go to a funeral, but if you just want to go to a place where everyone else may be grieving separate things together. I don't know. I 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, they'd walk into a house, and in the living room there'd be a little thing of the young daughter who had died. So starting in the 1920s century, right, it happens as early as the latter part of the 19th century

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. Oh, 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 of 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 for us? 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. She 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 of your are black and some parts aren't. I mean, that's a really intimate relationship with death and with the dead. And why do you think it seems a bit counterintuitive because you would think that in a milieu where death were more common, people would sort of... 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. Interesting. 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. And 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 and the 20s? 1910s in America. 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.

That 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. Families are 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. That's America's Way of Death. America's Way of Death is put it away and come back to work. Yeah. Go back to work. You know, 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. So grieving is really hard. 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,

it feels like you leave society. And you're culturally permitted to leave society. society with the expectation that you'll return. But, like, 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.

Totally different. Huh. Before 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. Of course, the nice part of our modern relationship to death is that when we lose someone we love, well, 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. Those are the big days where people will show up and fix the gray, put out flowers, do things. The rest of the time, there's the regulars. People will come on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, and they'll sit and talk to their loved ones. They're sort of out of that older culture. But 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 it 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. I 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's 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. Like 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. Your 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. So 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.

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. So in the 19th century, families would buy a pot of land that might have 30 great. on it because you're buying a plot of land for the generations that follow you.

Yeah. 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 size or small. And how did the business change? You don't get as much money. If you buy a 30-grave 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. They can put it in a scattering field.

They can create walls where you can have your name on it. You bury that remains all as 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. The 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. 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 just like a common feeling. The common's too strong, but it's growing. I mean, this has two ways it goes. One, people say, I don't want anything. Throw 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. So 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 ushery, and they resell it. Wait, so they just, 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. Like, it just 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.

So 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. And my connection to those cemeteries, obviously, is greater than most people's because 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. Hollywood 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. More 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 more. 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. Which leads us to the question that has brought us here.

When a modern cemetery dies, not a person in the world. a cemetery. With the business of the place itself, what happens? The answer? After some ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors out there whose job is to help your clients keep more of what they earn, Vanguard is here to help you with that. Vanguard is slashing fees again, this time for more than 50 of its funds. That's on top of big fee cuts they gave last year to investors in 87 of their funds. In an increasingly high-priced world, Vanguard is staying true to excellence without expect. With Vanguard, your clients get access to sophisticated, active, and index bond funds at industry-leading low costs,

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Most plans range between $499 to $11.99 a month your first year. Terms apply on covered repairs. Welcome back to the show. The thing that had led me to this conversation with you is that we had listened 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 these smaller cemeteries. Like, what does it look like when a cemetery just really?

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, etc. Our 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 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 and now control much of the funeral market

in the United States and they started to buy cemeteries. But most cemeteries are not private enterprises. Most cemeteries are nonprofits or they're public. And so it didn't go as well. It's not like they have as an expansive set of holdings. 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. And 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 Cemetery.

Yeah. And they will often, in smaller cities or smaller cemeteries, they'll become really the maintenance group. They'll bring their own mobile. 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. Yeah. So it becomes a word of the state. And so then the state will step in and just, just take it over to prevent calamity, basically? Yes, but the states are really bad at it. Oh.

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 a leap blower, 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 most, like, 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. They 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 that's not being taken care of. Yeah.

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 seminary is going on a 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. No. No? So someplace like Mount Auburn Cemetery has an endowment in, I don't know, somewhere about $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 a lot, 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. So 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 like 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 Hannah in 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. And 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.

We're grave. It's just the last thing you rent. I think the last thing I'm curious about, and if this is too personal, 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 urn. But recently, someone else asked if they could, her sister asked if she could be interred there with her beloved sister when she dies. She 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 barrier 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. Let'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 near 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. Yeah. 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. It'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 got 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's house. because I never had a grandmother. Yeah. And so it was a very emotionally effective moment for me. Yeah. And my wife has now drifted away.

She comforted me at the beginning that 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. 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, what you can do. She wanted to look at the mountains, which you can do. But, you know, maybe she wanted to look at the nude beach, too. You know what it 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 birth and grief. perfect. Yeah, it is. And that's why the cemetery isn't dead. David, so nice to talk to you about this. Thank you. That's my pleasure. Really fun. David 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. Surge Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthie Pynum and it's produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking by Holly Patton.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Pizarian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant and Kim Kubal. 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 search engine. dot show. Incognito mode subscribers get to stay in their graves forever undisturbed. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Borrello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, Jady Crowley, Rob Morandi,

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