Ed Peck is in no hurry to get there, but when the time comes for him to go to eternity, he wants his last earthly stop to be consistent with his social station.So Mr. Peck, a real estate developer who made his fortune in Florida condominiums in the 1970's, not long ago joined a small but growing number of Americans who have erected that most pharaonic of monuments to life-in-death, the private family mausoleum.
A Greek-pillared neo-Classical style structure of white granite, Mr. Peck's mausoleum has a granite patio, a meditation room, doors of hand-cast bronze and a chandelier. The family name is carved and gilded above a lintel that in the original sales model carried the legend "Your Name."
Developed just over two years ago to accommodate a growing demand for mausoleums like the one Mr. Peck bought, which including its lot has a retail cost of $400,000, the Private Estate Section at the century-old Daytona Memorial Park here has 15 lake-view lots. Six have been sold.
"The mausoleum says, 'I'm really significant in this world, I think I'm really significant to my family,' and this is one way to communicate that to the community," said Nancy Lohman, an owner along with her husband, Lowell, of this and several dozen other Florida cemeteries and funeral homes.
Mr. Peck, 87, an Atlanta native with a sonorous voice and a laconic manner, framed a similar thought more modestly. "It began to occur to me that I did not want to be in the ground covered with weeds and whatnot and totally forgotten," he said. "I don't like the idea of dirt being dumped on me."
Six feet up and not six feet under is increasingly the direction in which people want their remains stored when they die, representatives of the funeral industry say. In addition to custom single-family mausoleums, community mausoleums for both coffins and cremated remains are also gaining popularity; in classical or contemporary styles, these often have room to hold hundreds of niches for coffins or urns.
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The development is perhaps logically to be expected of those at the leading edge of the baby boom generation, which forms the bulk of the market. The progression seems natural for the folks who gave the world blocklong, gas-hogging sport utility vehicles and lot-hogging 40,000-square-foot suburban homes.
"It's in keeping with the McMansion mentality of boomers," said Thomas Lynch, an author and funeral director in Michigan. "Real estate is an extension of personhood."
The market for the custom structures is greatest on the coasts, although exclusive estate sections have recently been set aside for private mausoleums at cemeteries in Atlanta, Cleveland and Minneapolis.
Some mausoleums echo the temple of the goddess Fortuna Virilis in Rome. Some are hefty, rusticated stone barns. Some have more square footage than a good-size Manhattan studio apartment, their interiors fitted out with hand-knotted carpets, upholstered benches and nooks for the display of memorabilia. In late 2004, a Southern California family ordered a mausoleum with room for 12 coffins, 20 cremation niches and a patterned marble vestibule.
My question is - who will visit these things? Or maybe the people who are spending all this money for their oversized grave markers don't care. But having a big mausoleum isn't quite the same as having a big expensive car, home, boat, etc. Other people see all of these things, which I assume is part of the appeal of having them. But who is going to see the big granite building in middle of a cemetary. Not very many people, I would imagine, and not even family and friends very often.
When I was a youth, I visited a cemetary once a year for Memorial Day, and then to attend the burials of my grandparents. I have visited the burial plots of a number of my relatives, and have spent plenty of time in cemetaries as a pastor. But I live a 1000 miles from where my family members are buried and I have no reason to visit cemetaries where I live, apart from my work. I have to believe my experience is not unusual.As Adventus notes, there was a time in our country's history when burial grounds were more a part of life. Many churches had cemetaries around the church, and the church was often in the center of town. Our family and friends were there; we visited them more. One of the things I learned in Rome as I visited the catacombs and early Christian meeting places was that burial grounds were important social gathering places. Families went to the burial grounds for picnics and shared meals with their deceased loved ones. When Constantine was converted to Christianity he didn't build new Christian churches. He built Christian mausoleums so Christians would have nice places to visit and eat with their dead relatives. Knowing how important this was in that culture gives you a different perspective on the origins of Christian communion. Early Christians simply adapted a common practice and made it their own. But the point is they, like our American ancestors, spent more time in burial grounds.
And when I die, and when I'm dead and gone, I want to be cremated. What I don't want is to be buried in some expensive sealed vault that will keep my remains intact for centuries and take up space. I am open, however, to the idea of a "green" burial of my body in a way that allows my remains to decompose quickly.
The question is, and it is one I haven't given much thought to before, do I care whether or not there is a place where someone can come and see my marker? How important is it to have a place where someone can find you? It is very interesting to me to occasionally visit the graveyards of my long-deceased relatives and see headstones from centuries gone by? But is it important to me? Would it be important to anyone else? I don't know.
In terms of my faith, I am very much an ashes to ashes, dust to dust, person. I like gardening, getting my hands in the dirt, I understand the importance of death and decay of once-living things for the health of the land, it is what makes possible new life. I want my body to do its part. I don't believe in a bodily resurrection of the dead, but even if I did I think a God who is powerful enough to raise the dead would be powerful enough to reconstitute a body. But bodily resurrection is not a central component of my faith so I don't worry about losing my body to cremation or decay. The realm of God is here on earth in every place, animal, and plant. Resurrection happens spiritually as we give our lives to things that matter and make possible new hope, new love, and new life. In that way we live on forever in the realm of God. Resurrection happens physically as we give our spent bodies to the earth and they become the humus that nourishes new living things. Being buried in a sealed chamber, big or small, gets in the way of this wonderful process.
I still don't know what to think about the importance of a marker, though.
2 comments:
Since my father died in 1990 and my last grandparent in 1999, I have visited the graves of my ancestors almost every time I'm in the town of my birth (where most of my relatives and many of my grandparents' and parents' friends are buried) and the town of my college years (where one set of my grandparents are buried). I have spent so much time over the past 15 years in the Oak Hill cemetary that some people might think I'm morbid. However, I do find some comfort in finding this tangable way of connecting with the past. Ironically, last summer when visiting there for the first time in a decade I didn't go visit Oak Hill and upon returning to Minnesota, I found that my dad's cousin and his wife were there burying the cremains of my beloved Great Aunt Mary Jane next to my Great Uncle Charles alone with the cemetary sextant. They hadn't told any of us they were doing this so we couldn't be there with them to honor her memory. I visited this site when I was there this past January for my Uncle Bill's funeral and spent an hour with my mother driving around Oak Hill again.
I had to deal with this directly in 1995 when our son was born prematurely and died. Our decision was much like my Grandfather Nevin Stauffer's. We had Charlie's body creamated and we buried his cremains in a wooden urn that my husband made with his own hands. Charlie's cremains are buried in the same plot as his maternal Grandfather Jim. There is a small marker that marks his ancestoral place in this world so that those who trace family ancestory (like I'm starting to do along with my dad's cousin) have something tangable they can look at when looking back and trying to reconstruct families.
Is there something selfish about this in the long run? Perhaps. Assuming global warming doesn't undo us first, there will come a time when the land will be littered with gravestones at some point. However, I figure that the gas station owners and the housing and retail and parking lot developers will all fight that out with the municipalities and relatives of the cemetaries that will be effected. What Apple Valley, MN did at Johnny Cake Road was very nice when development forced the "refurbishment" of that old, but still used, cemetary a few years ago.
Welcome back, progressivechurchlady. Nice post.
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