David Charles Sloane
Appearances
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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, this is great. And they might, in some cemeteries, stop and have a picnic at the grave of someone they knew or someone who was famous.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
So that really has to do with the 19th century believed in a closer relationship between living and death. you know, all sorts of ways. I'll give you one very simple way. When a person died, often at 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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. 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 could read it to you if you want. Sure, yeah. Okay.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 1920th 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?
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Well, cultural trends are one of the most difficult things to parse out.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
So it's a really different thing. So it's easier to distance yourself. Yeah.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
No, it was very intense and very public.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
There's lots of people who have grandparents today, and they're in their 30s and 40s. That's not going to be true as much in 1900.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 8 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 the heart to accommodate 2,500 more.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
So they did different ones. They didn't do hair on the walls or anything like that. But we know 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Because if you really think about how we mourn the dead in that period, say from 1950s and 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. That's America's way of death.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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. So grieving is really hard, right? It's very hard to grieve in that situation because everybody's telling you, okay, we understand.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Now, can we talk about you going back to work?
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Memorial Day, Easter, Christmas, somebody's birthday. Those are the big days where people will show up and fix the grave, put out flowers, do things. The rest of the time, there's the regulars. People will come on a weekly or biweekly basis, and they'll sit and talk to their loved ones. They're sort of out of that older culture.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
And we won't go back for another year, or we won't go back at all.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
So of course it's changed. I wrote a book in 2018, Is the Cemetery Dead?
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
It is a good title. And the reason that I wrote it with that title was there's all these pressures.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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. Cremations are much less money. So it really changes the business side of the cemetery.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
It is. I don't know if we go that far. But it causes a lot of disruptions in the business. You know, the cremation rate in 1960 is less than 5%. By 2035, people are arguing it's going to be over 70%.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 plot of land that might have 30 graves on it. because you're buying a plot of land for the generations that follow you. By the middle of the 20th century, most of the time people would buy four, two for them and two for a kid, unmarried kids.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
And so the way that the business worked changed from these very large lots to much more medium-sized or small. And how did the business change? You don't get as much money. If you buy a 30-grave lot, they pay for all those 30 graves.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 the cremains, all this 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...
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
The writing reads, I have a complaint that you folks are not taking due care of me. Whoa. 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Now, there's a whole bunch of people who don't believe in cemeteries anymore. They don't want to be remembered.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
So most cemeteries have tried to become more natural.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
And they remind people that until we started embalming, and even then, Relatively few people were actually embalmed until the 20th century.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
And after 25 years, if you don't pay, the body comes up, goes in an ossuary, 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 it's my family. But I can imagine how it's quite easy to say, oh, we can't go to Grandpa's grave site because it's in Ohio. And so it's not connecting. We don't connect in the same way to the cemetery.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
However, courtesy of a few Allah-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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.,
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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. It didn't go as well. It's not like they have as expansive a set of holdings.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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. They try to do cost cuts that are not negative to the business.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Second is that the people who own the cemetery or manage the cemetery reach out to the people who have people buried there. And they say, we need your help because we no longer have the funds to maintain the cemetery. And so there's groups that started to be created, say, in the 80s and 90s called Friends Organizations of Cemeteries.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
And they will often, in smaller cities or smaller cemeteries, they'll become really the maintenance crew. They'll bring their own mowers. They'll tend the graves. They'll make everything happen. And so that happens. And that's happened quite a lot.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
But the most prominent is that the state is told the cemetery is no longer functioning and that the certificate by which they are a commercial business or a nonprofit should no longer be held up because they have no money. So it becomes a word of the state.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 we're busy, we don't have that much money, and so we'll get to it when we can get to it. And so people will complain every three months or six months or nine months, And the state will send in a set of mowers and leaf blowers and et cetera. They'll clean it up.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
They do minimal amounts of work, yes. And this is a big problem because once a cemetery has grass that's three feet tall and it has clear signs it's not being taken care of. That's when the kids show up and start knocking monuments over and doing things. Now, that can happen in any cemetery, but in a cemetery that is derelict, it's more open.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
So someplace like Mount Auburn Cemetery has an endowment in, I don't know, somewhere above $50 million. And I don't know the number. And so it's not going to go out of business.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
You don't have to know if you have to buy a lot. They don't have a huge number of lots, so it's quite expensive. They have a growing cremation niche business. They actually have built a pretty bad mausoleum, but now they have a really nice mausoleum. And so they've been responding to their limits of their land. They still have a bunch of land.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
And so it's not like you can't get in, but you just have to pay.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Yes. I mean, there's two answers to that. The first is an old cemetery with a good endowment. But the second one is if you live somewhere where there's a small cemetery, a village cemetery, a community cemetery, a public cemetery, a town cemetery, Those can be really quite lovely. I used to live in Hanover, New Hampshire. And Hanover, New Hampshire had a public cemetery, the Hanover Cemetery.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
So, uh, yes and no. For a long time, I wanted to be cremated. My first wife is interred in a niche in Mount Auburn.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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?
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 arm, but, uh, recently, someone else asked if they could, her sister asked if she could be interred there with her beloved sister when she dies.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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?
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Now, natural burial 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Yeah, I'm undecided. What about you? What are you going to do?
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
and i realize we have a problem which i have not figured out how to solve well i will suggest to you uh 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 uh in some cemeteries that do scattering yeah and you just say okay i'm not going to scatter but i want to
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
put my partner and Maya's name here so that if there's someone who wants to come visit us, they'll have a place to visit.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 get 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
So on the way up, my wife and I took a detour, and I found the grave, and I just burst into tears. Because I never got to go to grandmother's house because I never had a grandmother. And so it was a very emotionally effective moment for me. And my wife has now drifted away. She comforted me at the beginning and said, okay, I'm going to go walk around. And she comes back and she's smiling.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
I'm like, hey, I'm having a moment here. Should you be serious? If you walk to the edge of the cliff, below it is a nude beach. Now, your grandmother wanted to be buried there because she wanted to look at the ocean, which you can do. She wanted to look at the mountains, which you can do. But, you know, maybe she wanted to look at the nude beach, too.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Yeah, it is. And that's why the cemetery isn't dead.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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? 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?
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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?
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
So, the simple explanation, and it's not that simple, but I grew up in a cemetery.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Portland Buckaroos. Who are the Buckaroos? They're just like an old hockey team. And what I love about the logo is that like...
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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-bodied babies. 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
And then I began to create a professional relationship with my dissertation.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 listened to my father help grieving widows. You know, I've met with families when I was going to bury their baby.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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 has been able to figure out a way not to die.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Even though tech bros are trying, they're in a long line of people who have said, well, I'm going to be the first, and we're still waiting for one to show up.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
Yeah, and then he has ice skates also. It seems 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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, 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
And so people begin to think about how can we slightly suburbanize the dead to create more permanent places. Yeah. And 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
But they also might have all sorts of different ways that they handle that family farm.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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, 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.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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. Beneficial for health reasons, beneficial spiritual reasons, it's beneficial for all sorts of things.
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What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?
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.