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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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.
So most cemeteries have tried to become more natural.
And they remind people that until we started embalming, and even then, Relatively few people were actually embalmed until the 20th century.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No.
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.
Showing 61–80 of 96 · page 4 of 5
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