The weather was strange that March day I first visited my future grave. The morning was clear and balmy, but by afternoon the sky had turned steel gray, and, as we turned into the cemetery, large white flakes came spiraling down. Within minutes the ground turned white and the lichen-shrouded shoulders of the tombstones became alabaster.
My guide showed me to the portion of the cemetery reserved for my kind. He went over the details, and the cost: $800 ($500 for the grave and $300 for maintenance, even if I didn’t care about maintenance — and why would I?). My expenditure would buy me a 5-by-10-foot plot. That’s about 10 dollars per square foot (or would it be cubic feet?).
There is a half-acre parcel in town going for $1.7 million. By my calculation, that’s $78 per square foot. Of course, my grave would not be waterfront property (yet), and does the view really matter? There is a parking easement roughly the same size as my plot for sale in town for $45,000: that’s $900 per square foot. Madness, but a topic for another time.
You might ask why I have embarked on such a strange mission. Why not? I am statistically at an age when I should be thinking of such things. Many friends and acquaintances have left me this year, and Death itself has taken a swipe at me. (I evaded it.) It is not right to leave these details for survivors. I will take care of it.
You might also ask: why burial? Isn’t everybody getting cremated these days? Indeed, they are, but that does not make it the way to go (pun intended). Cremation has a very high carbon footprint, for those who care, taking about the equivalent of two tanks of gas to do its work and emitting about 535 pounds of CO2, and some other emissions, in the process.
So, I am opting for a green burial — no preservatives, no chemicals, no fancy casket to fight the ravages of decay. Ironic that I am going back to my religious roots. The righteous Jews of old dictated that the body be in the ground within at most 48 hours, wrapped in a sheet or shroud, placed in a plain pine box with wooden pegs. No nails. Do not fight the natural, unavoidable processes of decomposition. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. A further irony is that green burials need to be segregated from the more traditional ones. I don’t know why.
So, here I am in the cemetery. I remember long ago when a friend asked me how old I was. Fifty, I replied. “Jeez, Pard,” he laughed, “you best be shopping for a box!” Now, 25 years later, I am.
There is a finality about this. It is no joke. It is real. We all act as if we will be here forever, while the little worm in our brain knows it is not so. “Where you are now so once was I./ Where I am now so you shall be./ Prepare for death and follow me.”
All right then.
It is quiet here. In the distance are church bells, barking dogs, the hum of traffic, a plane overhead, crows calling to each other. The sounds of life. The section I’ll be in is on the edge; I like that. It borders scrub pine, bayberry, blueberries, and a sign that reads “Protected Habitat”; I like that, too. I look at the ground: nothing special — a bit scruffy — grass, moss, sedum, a few unidentified weeds.
Further over there are some very fancy tombstones and some more plain ones. Some have messages.
I am thinking of John Keats: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Or of W.C. Fields’s apocryphal epitaph: “On the whole, I would rather be in Philadelphia.”
I think I would have nothing but my name. Let others fill in the words, while I am still remembered.
