Every year in the US ninety thousand tons of steel, almost two million tons of concrete, and thirty million board feet of hardwoods like walnut, mahogany, and cherry—not to mention eight hundred thousand gallons of embalming fluid—are buried underground. It’s all part of the $20 billion death-care industry, which fills our deceased with chemicals, places them in satin-lined caskets, encases those vessels inside steel vaults, and inters them in cemeteries alongside hundreds, sometimes thousands, of others who are buried the same way. Cremation is always an alternative, but it pollutes the air with mercury and carbon dioxide, and the energy expenditure of cremating one body is roughly equivalent to a drive from Savannah, Georgia, to Washington, DC. In either case, everything is handled by industry professionals. The bereaved might not see the body at all.
It’s a far cry from how we buried our dead as recently as 150 years ago. Scholar, farmer, and cemetery administrator Suzanne Kelly has studied the grassroots movement to reclaim sustainable burial practices and rediscover rites and rituals that once connected us to—and personalized—the process of death. It’s a movement often referred to as green burial, and it encompasses everything from using cloth shrouds instead of caskets to composting human remains. In the 2019 essay “A Way Back to the Wildness of Death” Kelly writes that the simple rituals of accompanying the body to the grave site, lowering it into the ground, and covering it with soil have the power to “yoke us back, not only to the earth and to each other, but to the bare-bones fact that death is an integral—and meaningful—part of life.”
Kelly grew up on an animal farm in Upstate New York and left home to earn her bachelor’s at Bradford College in Massachusetts. She later received her master’s at The New School for Social Research in New York, and her PhD at Florida Atlantic University. In 2003 she returned to the Hudson Valley and taught women’s studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz. In 2014 she helped to establish a green burial ground in Rhinebeck—only the second such municipal burial ground in New York State. She’s the author of Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth, which explores the ideas around the rituals we once embraced and the ones deemed more socially acceptable now. She now serves as the administrator of the Town of Rhinebeck Cemetery in New York and owns and runs Green Owl Farm, a small-scale, no-till organic vegetable farm. She is an energetic conversationalist, drawing on both her academic background and the day-to-day experience of farmwork that ties her to the soil.
After we spoke at her home, Kelly gave me a tour of the ten-acre green burial ground for which she is responsible, just a two-minute drive away. The spring air was cold, and the trees were still many weeks away from leafing out, but the grounds were beautiful. As she guided me along the walking path, past piles of fresh dirt heaped over new graves, she told me some people choose their spots by lying down where their mortal remains will spend eternity, limbs outstretched and eyes toward the heavens. [Not all conversations are as linear and succinct as they appear. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.—Ed.]
SUZANNE KELLY
Askey: I saw my first Nightmare on Elm Street movie when I was about six years old. Gore does not affect me, truly, but as I was doing research for this interview, I looked at all these macabre pictures of different burial practices and corpses in various states of decay. It affected me more than I thought it was going to.
Kelly: In what way?
Askey: I think it made me more cognizant of my own eventual death.
Kelly: That’s what the death-awareness movement is all about: addressing the elephant in the room, the basic but too-often-avoided fact that we are all going to die.
Askey: Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the decaying body?
Kelly: I suppose I do. But do I spend time looking at images of the decaying body? No, I do not. In fact, I was thinking the other day that I should probably get off Instagram after I scrolled past a photo of a child’s rotting head in Gaza. The disjointed nature of Instagram can end up rendering such images incomprehensible, even inconsequential, despite the attempt to raise awareness—especially when they’re followed by a celebrity’s vapid post about a decadent meal enjoyed the night before.
As much as I try not to look at decaying bodies, the fact of decay is something I do spend a lot of time thinking about at the burial ground. It’s on display there in a way it’s not in a conventional cemetery where the body is placed inside a modern casket that’s lowered into a vault, and then some of the soil is put back into the hole, and it’s leveled off and reseeded with grass, and with a monument set at the head of the grave. Eventually the lawn mower will run over it, and you’ll never really have to think about the fact that there’s a body under there. But in a green burial ground you can see by the way the mounds are settling that the bodies are in different states of decay. As one funeral director said to me, in a somewhat disapproving way, the whole process is “in your face.” Which is kind of the point. How swiftly the body is going to decay is of concern to us. We don’t want to bury the body too deep, because it slows down decomposition. We also don’t want to have a lot of stuff in the grave, which is one of the reason shrouds have become a popular choice, because it means swifter decomposition and a quicker return to the land.
Askey: It seems most of us in the US have two different experiences with death. On the one hand there’s Six Feet Under and zombie movies: death as entertainment. On the other hand few people have a funeral at home anymore, and funeral-home viewings are in decline. How do you interpret these different trends?
Kelly: I don’t think they’re two different trends. I think they’re the same trend showing up in different ways. We’ve done our best to avoid and repress death, to push it to the margins. One manifestation is, as you say, the disappearance of the home funeral and families caring for their own dead. But we’ve also really repressed the decomposition part. I see these aspects of pop culture as perfect examples of that repression. It’s the unconscious trying to get these ideas into the public, because they are essential aspects of a human life.
That’s why green burial is so promising: because it pushes back against the way we shun not just death but actual bodily decay. It helps us to see ourselves as part of the natural world, through to the journey to the grave.
Askey: Your father died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-two, and his body was embalmed. What was that experience like for you?
Kelly: Death wasn’t new to me. The Irish Catholic side of my family was fairly large, and there was a stretch of time during my childhood when it seemed like there was a wake every month. I did not feel uncomfortable around those dead bodies in the funeral home, all of which were embalmed.
But I was an adult when my father died, and I was also immersed in my PhD studies at the time, focused on feminist and environmental theories of the body and the land as real and symbolic places where we dump many of our cultural fears. This caused me to wonder why his body needed to be embalmed at all. The decision to embalm was out of my hands, but the experience catapulted me into the work that I’ve been doing ever since, one of the central goals of which is to get us to think about what happens to the body after we die and how our conventional death practices are rooted in a fear of the dead body that ultimately contributes to thwarting decay. It’s as though our conventional death practices are saying the decay of the dead body is of no significance at all.
Askey: How do you explain that shift in how we view the dead body?
Kelly: Mind/body dualism is very much at the roots of Christian and some Greek thought, so in philosophical terms we’ve been on this road for a long time. The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries furthered this split, viewing matter as lower and other and something to be controlled. Then came the Industrial Revolution, which gave rise to urban populations. This is where things began to radically shift. Most people point to the Civil War as the moment when our death practices changed, with the use of embalming, but it began earlier than that, around the 1830s, when the rise in population in urban areas collided with newfound fears around sanitation. Cholera and yellow-fever epidemics raised the concern that dead bodies would further the spread of disease. This was also before we understood how germs worked on the body. We believed then that if something smelled bad, it could automatically do us harm. It’s true that some diseases do stay with the body after death and can pose a threat to the living, and cholera is one of them, but most pathogens die when the body dies.
All cultures draw lines between the pure and the impure, symbolically and literally. Human waste is considered dirty, so we don’t use the toilet while also having a meal, right? We also do not want to be living with rotting corpses. But these lines between what’s dirty and clean in terms of the dead began to take on a different shape with sanitation reforms. The dead body had suddenly gone from something that needed to be put in its rightful place—the ground—to something we feared could literally infect us. Reformers set out to essentially cleanse the nation of the dead. Church graveyards were often unkempt spaces at this time, overcrowded and sometimes with the smell of decay in the air, and so villages and towns all over the US started to ban burials within city limits. This even happened here in Rhinebeck: the cemetery you drove by, which is now connected to the green burial ground, formed because all the churches in town were no longer permitted to bury parishioners on the church grounds.
By the 1850s this fear of the contaminated corpse gave rise to the Rural Cemetery Movement. There are many beautiful examples of rural cemeteries in the US, like Greenwood in Brooklyn and Mount Auburn in Cambridge—bucolic spaces sited on the outskirts of town, away from the majority of the population. These were natural spaces the living spent time in, even celebrating marriages and births alongside the dead. These were our first parks. Rural cemeteries gave rise to the parks movement in the US. But the origin of these cemeteries, what put them into being, was the idea that the dead body was something we needed to protect ourselves from.
The Civil War followed. Soldiers from the North were suddenly dying far from home. For families who could afford it, there were new anatomists called onto the battlefield to temporarily preserve bodies for transport. Although embalming had existed throughout the world in other places and other times, it was not practiced in the US before the nineteenth century. It wasn’t part of the colonial legacy and not a part of any North American Indigenous practices. Up until that time Americans had viewed what embalming required as a fate worse than death.
You might think embalming would have been a temporary solution to bringing war casualties home, but the practice did not disappear after the war. Anatomists instead saw this as a business opportunity, setting up workshops to train folks in this new “scientific” process of corpse preservation. And the mortician was born. Initially selling their services as a preservation technique, embalmers eventually began to tie their trade to sanitation arguments, claiming embalming could cleanse the body of its filth. Ironically, embalming is not a cleansing agent but actually creates a polluted body by pumping it full of chemicals.
When Abraham Lincoln died, his body was embalmed and traveled by railcar for public viewing for three weeks. His body came right through Rhinecliff, just a couple of miles from here, so people from the community could come and pay their respects. Some historians talk about the public exhibition of his body as an important step in overcoming this war that had parted the nation. But gazing on his embalmed body was also the beginning of another overcoming: an overcoming of nature as it was tied to our death practices.
Once we had mortuary schools hitching their wagons to embalming as a sanitation measure, we got other things, like the sealed casket and vault. But cemeteries require vaults not to improve sanitation but for ease of maintenance: it prevents settling of the grave. If you go to the website of a vault company today, you’ll likely find promises of protection for your loved one for eternity, assuring an impermeable layer between the body and the land around it. So there are two stories here: on the one hand the dead body shouldn’t return to the earth without sanitation measures because it is polluted; and on the other hand the dead body shouldn’t return to the earth because human beings are the exception to the rule that all life ends with the body’s disintegration. Yet both ideas point to the same belief: that we don’t belong to the earth.
The fact is, “green” is the way we buried our dead over 150 years ago in the US. It’s the way many Indigenous peoples in North America have cared for their dead. This other, more recent, method is the anomaly.
Askey: You’ve described the conventional burial process. What’s the process for green burial?
Kelly: When we describe something by comparing it to the norm, we other it. I want green burial to be its own narrative, as opposed to one that is in response to what we conventionally do. The fact is, “green” is the way we buried our dead over 150 years ago in the US. It’s the way many Indigenous peoples in North America have cared for their dead. This other, more recent, method is the anomaly both throughout history and throughout the world. There aren’t many places that bury their dead with chemical embalming, the modern casket, and the burial vault.
With green burial, one of the first things to know is that the hole is not typically six feet deep. It’s not always six feet in conventional burial, either. It’s typically around five feet, though some cemeteries do go double-deep, or even triple-deep.
Askey: I’m envisioning an advertisement: “We’ll bury your loved ones twice as deep as the other cemeteries!”
Kelly: No, no, it’s to bury other people on top! So double-deep means somebody’s going on top of you. In the boroughs surrounding Manhattan, for instance, many conventional cemeteries bury people like that so they can get as many bodies in as possible. But for a single-person grave you don’t need to go six feet down, even when a vault’s being used.
For green burial three and a half to four feet is optimal. It’s enough to block the smell and prevent animals from digging up the grave, and it’s also at the right depth for good microbial activity. In our burial ground the grave can either be hand dug or machine dug.
Askey: Does which method you use depend on whether the ground is frozen hard?
Kelly: That can be a consideration. But the larger concern is that we don’t want heavy machines driving over burial plots, because there are no vaults and the ground might collapse. Also we want to be sensitive to the forest floor. Our green burial ground is mostly in a young hardwood forest, and we’ve been working actively over the last ten years to improve the health of the woods. If there are sensitive plants in the area, or if the grave is in a location where machine digging might harm trees, we always hand dig. We’d like to move toward hand digging in all situations, but we also want to take care of our workers. We’re trying to find a balance.
Once the hole is dug, the body is not driven into the woods by car. In our burial ground the body arrives by a hand-drawn cart, and the families participate in that process. Prior to this, the body will have been placed in some kind of plant-based, biodegradable container, and that container is then placed in the hole. All the soil that was taken out of the hole is put back in and mounded on top. We don’t remove any of the soil, as they do in a conventional burial. And the mound is left to settle over time.
Many so-called hybrid cemeteries that offer green-burial plots don’t necessarily leave a mound. They just refill as needed. In fact, when someone wants a vaultless burial in the conventional part of our cemetery, that’s what we do.
There can be a kind of a comfort to viewing the body—even an embalmed one. I know this is not true for everyone, but for me any initial fear is replaced by some solace that death is in the room. And not just the fleshy fact of death, as I’ve been talking about, but the mystery of death.
Askey: Where I grew up, there was a local funeral home whose sign out front listed who was on display inside. When they didn’t have anybody there, the sign just read, “Dignity. Sympathy. For a service that satisfies.” What struck me about that sign, even as a kid, was how dignity is tied up with death. I believe a lot of my family members might see a green burial as undignified, because the body is decomposing in this natural way. How has our idea of propriety around death shifted? What are the cultural forces that caused that shift to happen?
Kelly: Obviously one aspect of this has to do with capitalism. All cultures have ways of celebrating and honoring their dead, and in the US the stuff we buy, or don’t buy, for the funeral is often an expression of this. That’s one reason why we’re seeing all these products on the market for green burials: Buy a biodegradable, papier-mâché pod that’s got a seed in it that will sprout a tree. This is America: once there’s a market for something, you’ve got to make a product to fit it.
But there are cultural and spiritual reasons, too. For some it’s important to spend a lot of money on a casket and vault in the same way it’s important to rent a pricey wedding venue and purchase an expensive gown. It doesn’t matter what it costs, we’re going all out. To put somebody in a hole without anything extra would be seen as not giving them a good send-off.
Green burial might give some people the impression you’ve died impoverished or that no one cared enough to do better by you. For others it could evoke thoughts of war and unclaimed bodies placed unceremoniously in the ground. I’ve had people ask me if we’re just dumping bodies in the woods. And some people also have negative associations with being buried in the woods. We had a situation where I had to file a police report on a separate cemetery matter, and when the local policeman came to the green burial ground, he asked, “What are you guys doing back here? You’re putting people in the ground?” I told him to look around. That’s the same thing we’re doing in the conventional cemetery! [Laughs.]
Askey: The Toradja people of Indonesia—who, I should note, have largely converted to Christianity—perform a ceremony every three years or so where they exhume their deceased, clean their bodies, take off their clothes, and place them in the sun. They even pose for pictures with them and put cigarettes in their mouths. Then they rebury them. This is another practice that most Westerners would deem “undignified,” but it also signifies a closeness to, and comfort with, death that we don’t have in our culture. What do you make of practices such as these?
Kelly: The way we care for and revere our dead is culturally specific. So is what we regard as dignified. We try to treat even the worst criminals with dignity once they’re dead. When that doesn’t happen, we’re outraged. Barack Obama made a point of saying that Osama bin Laden was given a dignified burial by the US government. Dead bodies and how we treat them matter, whether we bury them naturally in a forest, embalm them with toxic chemicals, or dig them up every so often and put cigarettes in their mouths. These are all ways to provide someone with a dignified end. The dead body matters to us. But the dead body also matters to nature.
I’ve been to many wakes where I’ve heard someone say, “Oh, he looks so great. They did a great job.” And there are times when bodies that have been destroyed through violence are made to look whole for the well-being of the family. That’s important, but it still skirts this question of whether the decomposition of the dead body is of any inherent significance. It skirts the question of how a dead body reminds us that we, too, are matter. We have created practices that allow us to believe dead bodies have no value to the land. This has reinforced the stark separation between the dead body and the earth, between living humans and the natural world, and between life and death.
Askey: What was so interesting to me about the Toradja people is how much closer to death they are than we are, because they have this ritual in which they’re revisiting the dead every one to three years.
Kelly: And who are we to say what burial rituals should look like? Human composting is now legal in seven states. When that offering first became available, some people said to me they couldn’t believe you could take home your composted dead loved one with the idea of putting them in your yard. That was seen as undignified by some people, even more so than green burial. Because it’s still burial, green burial is perhaps more palatable, at least right now, to some folks than putting your loved one in a container to decompose and bringing them home as food for your garden.
Askey: We’ve managed to reclaim many rites and rituals that have been historically outsourced to others. My wife and I, for instance, wrote our own wedding vows when we got married, as a lot of people do these days. Why is it so much harder to do this with death?
Kelly: I think this comes back to what we talked about earlier: how the thought of death is repressed on every level. Most especially the material facts of it. We’ve pushed the body out of sight by handing it over to the funeral industry, and now that industry has a grip on the care of our dead. New York is one of ten states that require you to hire a licensed funeral director to dispose of a dead body. In most parts of the US you can care for your dead at every point in the process: you can transport the body, file the burial permit, and fully participate in the burial itself. But even in the states where you can do these things, most people don’t. So that tells us something. And when somebody dies, you might think, Can I actually have a funeral in my own house? Is that legal? Most people don’t even ask these questions, because the industry comes in and says, We’ll usher you through this. Here’s the menu, and we’re going to tell you exactly what you can order.
Askey: It wasn’t until I saw the gangster movie Road to Perdition—which is set in the 1930s—that I even realized it was possible to have a funeral in someone’s house.
Kelly: My spouse is a bit older than me, and his mother’s funeral was the first that he and his family had in a funeral home. Up until the 1960s it was not uncommon for people to have a funeral in their own home. The funeral industry had a hold on caring for the dead before then, but something else had to change for them to take over funerals entirely. Modern life and modern conveniences increasingly separate us from the natural processes of life, causing us to forget what we’re missing in every area of our lives, death included.
Askey: You’ve said it was common for you to see a dead body growing up.
Kelly: Yes, and I don’t remember ever being afraid. I was introduced to the sight at a young age and in a manner that didn’t manifest as fearful. In my experience there can be a kind of a comfort to viewing the body—even an embalmed one. I know this is not true for everyone, but for me any initial fear is replaced by some solace that death is in the room. And not just the fleshy fact of death, as I’ve been talking about, but the mystery of death, which, as far I can tell, is located as much in the dead body as anywhere else we might find it in our mourning and grief.
When somebody close to you dies, you think you’re not going to be able to bear it. You don’t think you’re going to be able to live through it. And then it hits you: I’m alive. The funeral industry talks about how the presence of the body offers families closure, acceptance. This rings true, but it’s also just a knowledge that comes from that juxtaposition, that encounter: This is deadness. This is death.
Askey: The Egyptians mummified bodies to carry the dead forward into the future. Has the digital age, where our online footprint lives forever, made it less important that our body carry forward into the future?
Kelly: Well, embalming isn’t like mummifying. Embalming dissipates pretty quickly. It’s a temporary preservation method. That’s why Abraham Lincoln’s body started to show signs of decay on his journey even though his embalmer said his techniques worked so well his body would never show it. Different chemicals are used today, but even modern embalming doesn’t last forever. So embalming isn’t a thing that carries us into the future. But your question is an interesting one. I don’t really have a great answer, except that the digital world is not an embodied world, and our online footprint is likely exacerbating our obsession with our own immortality, which moves us further away from the most promising aspects of green burial: it gets us to see that we, too, are part of nature, and that human life is finite.
Askey: I’ve been to museum exhibits that display corpses “plastinated” for medical education, as well as cadavers preserved in peat bogs. I couldn’t help but think about what the deceased might make of someone in the twenty-first century paying to look at their bodies. What moral concerns arise with these exhibits? Is there a statute of limitations, so to speak, for treating a body with dignity?
Kelly: The same question has been posed regarding many disrupted Native American burial grounds—and not only in the past. In Hawaii, for example, rampant development continues to unearth burials. We have the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires that remains be returned to their people. So I think there’s a recognition that putting them on display in a museum is inherently problematic. Perhaps this person died without any rituals, in an accident on a mountain somewhere—I don’t know—but ultimately a dead body is meant to be cared for by the living in some way. It’s not there for our education or pleasure.
I remember outrage over reports that the Body Worlds exhibit [a traveling display of dissected, plastinated human and animal bodies—Ed.] used the bodies of prisoners without consent. But there seems to be no outrage around the fact that they put these bodies on public display for us to look at.
Askey: Does that seem in poor taste to you?
Kelly: I guess that’s one way of saying it. I think it’s disrespectful to the dead and to the communities from which those people came. Who were they? Did they consent to this? If they did, then maybe it’s not that different from donating your body to science, or to the Body Farm in Tennessee [where corpses are left outdoors for forensics researchers to study decomposition—Ed.], or donating your organs.
Askey: We haven’t really talked about cremation. Many people think it’s a more environmentally sound option, but it’s not without its problems.
Kelly: Early historical arguments for cremation in the US were about purification. That’s initially how they sold it. So while it’s true that burning the body has long been practiced for religious reasons—among Hindus, for instance—the crematory in the US was built upon the same notions as embalming: Just annihilate the body, incinerate it down to ashes. Then you don’t have to worry about the problem of decay.
The most environmentally sound way to dispose of the dead, out of all the options available in the US right now, is either whole-body earth burial—green burial—or human composting. I would say human composting is probably less environmentally sound because you still need to have a facility that requires energy to run it.
Cremation has its problems because anytime you burn something, you’re polluting the soil, water, and air. Dioxins and mercury emissions from dental amalgam fillings are released. Some countries have better filters on crematory smokestacks than we do. Some run crematories on renewable energy. The US has a long way to go to bring our crematories up to speed in terms of lessening environmental impact. Most green burial grounds accept cremated remains, and for the most part I see greening up our crematories as part of the green-burial movement, because burning the dead body still appeals to people.
But green burial is also about bringing the living closer to the after-death experience. After Jessica Mitford’s 1963 book The American Way of Death, arguments for cremation gave way to considerations of cost, which ultimately gave way to disconnection. Now the body most often goes unseen from the morgue to the crematory. It’s typically never handled by the family in any way. Sometimes they don’t even get the ashes back. Most funeral homes have ashes in the basement that nobody ever picked up.
When my spouse’s brother died, he asked to go to the crematory, and the funeral director said, “You want to do what?” We did end up going and participating in the process of loading his body into the retort and pressing the button. I had a similar meaningful crematory experience with my dog, Auggie, who died three years ago. There’s a pet crematory outside of Hudson where you can actively engage in the process: you can place the animal inside the chamber with other mementos and press the button and go away for a few hours and come back and collect the cremated remains. If I’d left Auggie with my vet, I would have waited for them to call me several weeks later to pick up his box of ashes. Cremations do offer active engagement with the ritual of scattering or burying ashes. And our green burial ground has facilitated many cremation burials. Sometimes families place ashes directly into the ground without a container, sometimes mixed in with compost.
When Katrina Spade first came up with the concept of human composting, it was crucial for her to incorporate ritual into the process. She emphasized the importance of having the deceased’s inner circle be able to participate in this ritual of rendering the body into compost, rather than having a funeral director drop it off at the facility in the style of cremation. But in New York State human composting facilities will only be permitted to be located off the back of a cemetery, like crematories, which I worry will limit ritual and family involvement.
Askey: What are some of the earliest examples of ritualized death practices?
Kelly: I don’t know specifically, but I do know that care for the dead has always been ritualized across cultures. As far as I know, every culture and spiritual tradition has a way of giving meaning to the end of life, to usher the dead off in some way—some more elaborate than others. That all cultures and traditions do this I think demonstrates how much we need ritual to help us make meaning out of this very central aspect of human existence. Abandoning rituals or engaging in ones that don’t have significance for us only deepens our distance from death and the sense that death is to be feared or, worse yet, that death has no meaning at all. Engaging in death rituals that speak to us draws death, and ultimately life, closer.
Askey: How do we make that more the norm?
Kelly: I think we’re seeing it happen—it’s just very slow. I was a hospice volunteer for a time, and I do believe we have hospice to thank for opening a conversation around end-of-life matters that for a long time no one wanted to have. Decades later, hospice is much more accepted by hospitals, families, and the general public. Death Café and the death-awareness movement have been growing exponentially in the US. The first green burial ground opened in the US more than twenty-five years ago. Nine years ago there were about 109 green-burial cemeteries. Now there are over 400. We still have a long way to go. But there’s a hunger for more green-burial sites. And it’s growing.
