David Charles Sloane
speaker
96 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
David Charles Sloane’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now, can we talk about you going back to work?
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.
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.
And we won't go back for another year, or we won't go back at all.
So of course it's changed. I wrote a book in 2018, Is the Cemetery Dead?
It is a good title. And the reason that I wrote it with that title was there's all these pressures.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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...
Your business can suffer.
One of the two.
Now, there's a whole bunch of people who don't believe in cemeteries anymore. They don't want to be remembered.
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.
Showing 41–60 of 96 · page 3 of 5
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