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Sat 24 Apr, 2004 10:12 pm
Hopefully this has not already been addressed and I missed it. I drove by a cemetery and began to wander about the finite cemetery space available. People have been buried for hundreds of years. If the plots are all unaltered indefinitely after someone is buried, wouldn't there be cemeteries EVERYWHERE? Think of how large a football stadium has to be for everyone there to fit in, then think of how many people must have been buried over the last couple of hundred years. Maybe I have just lived a sheltered life, but now that I think about it, I would expect to see many more cemeteries.
Buffalo, When my wife and I visited Japan recently, we were amazed to see one of the largest cemeteries in Japan with over 200,000 plots - some had two small buildings for one individual (the second son of Ieyasu Tokunaga, the shogun that ruled Japan for over 250 years). If you understand the value of land in Japan, you would appreciate how the Japanese are able to justify grandiose grave plots for their dead. One even had a rocket; I think he was a rocket scientist.
You bring up a subject I've never given much thought to Buffalo. I've worked at a cemetery that was opened in 1959. As of last year, there were almost 37,000 people either buried, interred in a mausoleum, lawn crypts, niches or in the cremation garden. Just multiply these numbers by the thousands upon thousands of cemeteries in the country!
The cemetery I am familiar with holds approximately 600-700 burial/interment services per year. That's a lot of people!
Don't forget, too, that many people are cremated and residing on the mantles of their loved ones home, or whose ashes have been scattered here or there. Many people donate their bodies to science and are later cremated.
I'm gonna be cremated, and my ashes spread into the Pacific Ocean. That's my wish. My father was cremated too, but his ashes were taken to Japan by our uncle to be buried in the family plot in Hiroshima, even though our father was born in the states.
Many graveyards dig up remains and rebury them lower and reuse gravesites. Not so much in N.America but in europe.
When you finish a great bottle of scotch do you keep the bottle and have a ceremony for it and encase it in a sarcophagus? No, that would be ridiculous. It was the scotch that had value, not the bottle it came in.
We are no different. When I depart, all that's left is an old container, and once they get anything out of it they may be able to use, they can hang it on a hook and a med student can practice on it, and then they can throw the rest in the furnace. I will be gone to wherever it is Saintly Bears go........ :wink:
That is a very interesting chart. If you subtract the 676,890 cremations from the 2,436,467 total 2002 deaths, you still get 1,759,577 remaining deaths for one year in U. S. alone. Multiply that by 200 years and you get 351,915,400 (mostly burials?). If the average cemetery has 2000 plots, that would be 175,958 cemeteries needed just in the U. S..
But Bi-Polar...your 'remains' have meaning to those who love you. Of course YOU don't care what happens to your body after your dead...you'll be dead! But a family needs a place to grieve and be with you. Just because a person dies doesn't mean love, care and concern stops. Sure your soul is gone...it's off to wherever. But the body (capsule) people knew, touched, kissed...etc still remains and is very special.
Why do you think families of murdered loved ones feel releif when the body is discovered...even if there isn't much of it left? It's because they have something of their loved one back.
Please don't be so quick to brush off the value of your remains. When YOU are gone, your body is all that your loved ones have left.
<I will step down off my soapbox now>
There will be my volume of recorded work, print articles, pictures, memories, and of course my large collection of amateur porn...oops I've said too much.
doglover wrote:
Why do you think families of murdered loved ones feel releif when the body is discovered...even if there isn't much of it left? It's because they have something of their loved one back.
Sometimes it's the final convincing proof that they're not coming back after all. Now we're able to move on. Anyway, that may be part of it.
My plan is to be cremated, some of my ashes sprinkled on the beach out front, on our land and in the woods out back, and then bury the rest of me out back with a plaque marking where I am, so my son just has to go out back to visit me :-D
No funeral for this gal.
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture - that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
Edward Abbey
truth
Wonderful idea, Montana.
Cicerone, my parents were also cremated and deposited off the Santa Monica pier into the Pacific Ocean (illegal acts, I suspect). That's what I want. I saw my father's ashes float down into the Pacific as I emptied his urn; I want my ashes to follow after his.
By the way, one could easily project a political meaning onto your father's "ashes in Hiroshima."
I like the empty bottle analogy; it says it all for me.
Just a thought: If all the land locked up for burials all over the world was to be used instead for farming or housing or some other commercial purposes it would perhaps be more useful for more living people (who might end up making use of whatever is done with the burial lands) than the number of deads buried then. If the almost 6 billion plus inhabitants of this world all chose to be buried, that'd take away a lot of land from the living.
After one dies, all that is left is memories and those are always in our hearts and minds anyway, (besides what might be left in the will lol). So I dont see why one needs a burial place. No offence to anymore.
crash, We may be in the memories of some people, but by the next generation, most of us will be gone forever.
truth
Crashlanded, would you apply this principle to golf courses as well? Pardon the thought, Frank Apiso.
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