What happens when a cemetery goes out of business?

We're supposed to be buried there forever, right? Right?? Answers this week from writer David Sloane, who grew up in a cemetery and spent his adult life studying them. The surprising history of the place we go where we die and an answer to what happens when it runs out of money. Is the Cemetery Dead? by David Charles Sloane https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo28082520.html Support the show at searchengine.show https://www.searchengine.show/join

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

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• 1:28PJ Vogt?

  Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. This week, a question one of our listeners has been wondering about for nearly 15 years. A question about the dead. Hi, Lucas. How's it going?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Doing well. How are you doing?

• 1:43PJ Vogt?

  I'm doing good. What does your hat say?

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Portland Buckaroos.

• 1:47PJ Vogt?

  Who are the Buckaroos?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  They're just like an old hockey team. And what I love about the logo is that like, it's a hockey-playing cowboy.

• 1:57PJ Vogt?

  Oh, yeah. Is he on a horse? But also the horse has ice skates?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then he has ice skates also.

• 2:04PJ Vogt?

  That seems like overkill.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Well, I love it. It's like he knows that his horse might die.

• 2:10PJ Vogt?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  And he'll need to have his ice skates.

• 2:12PJ Vogt?

  That's like your interpretation of your own hockey hat feels like a very morbid Rorschach test.

• 2:25PJ Vogt?

  Lucas, perhaps a fellow given to certain morbid wonderings, which was what had led him here today. His questions stretched all the way back to 2011, back when Lucas was studying advertising in Texas. In one of his classes, he was given an assignment. Find an existing company that might need some help with their brand and copy. And so in his search, he would find himself wandering the world, noticing businesses more. The ways they presented themselves, the choices they made.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  And one day, I was driving by the cemetery that was the Muslim Cemetery. And I was like, oh, that cemetery could be a cool thing to advertise for. So I went to their website. And it was like the most unhinged thing where they'd written the website in a first-person narrative.

• 3:08PJ Vogt?

  What do you mean?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Like, I've got the website. I could read it to you if you want.

• 3:13PJ Vogt?

  Sure, yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Okay. "Let me introduce myself. My name is Muslim Cemetery, and trust me, I'm your final destiny. I reside in Denton along Highway 380 West, about eight miles west of I-35 North. My size is 11.5 acres and I'm 20 years old. Being quite seasoned, you can imagine at present, I am home to about 460 permanent residents, with a heart to accommodate 2,500 more. See how I cultivate a culture..."

• 3:40PJ Vogt?

  So it starts out like that. An unusual piece of ad copy in that the business itself, the cemetery, is addressing you in the first person, but whatever. It's the next paragraph that marks the truly strange pivot. The cemetery, speaking to you on its website, begins to kind of berate you. The writing reads...

• 3:59Speaker 01

  "I have a complaint that you folks are not taking due care of me..."

• 4:02PJ Vogt?

  Whoa.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  "...because of that..." Yeah, and because of that, Denton County twice threatened to shut me down. Isn't it ironic and unfortunate? With so much community around me, I'm still being neglected? Until a few months ago, I did not have the funds even for my monthly maintenance. However, courtesy of a few law-fearing folks who took the lead, they jumped in and rescued me. I hope you understand that I'm the only stable and risk-free 401(k) investment option you have without fearing for any economic downturns."

• 4:32PJ Vogt?

  It's a kind of sales pitch that might be familiar to you if, like me, you're a devoted public radio listener. The product you're using, for some reason, constantly reminding you that it will die unless you give it more money. It works well enough when it's your local radio host. It's a little weird when the business that's threatening to go out of business is your cemetery. And while I am not an ad critic, the reason this copywriting seems to be not optimal is because the last thing you want to think about as a consumer, choosing your final resting place, is the idea that the cemetery itself would go out of business. Because then what would happen to you? To your body? But this vivid copywriting, ineffective as a sales pitch, was effective in that it lodged

• 5:16PJ Vogt?

  this question in Lucas's mind. So much so that he found himself wondering about it many years later and decided to email us.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  It's always been in the back of my head, this lonely, sad, desperate cemetery that was out there clawing for help, you know? So I was wondering, like, what happens if a cemetery goes out of business? You know, like, do they disappear?

• 5:40PJ Vogt?

  Like, if a cemetery goes out of business? Because like, if a television store goes out of business, we kind of know they like, the TVs are sold on discount, and then maybe they're sent back to the manufacturer. If a cemetery goes out of business, like, what happens?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Right, like, Spirit Halloween doesn't move in. Like, what happens to that land?

• 5:56PJ Vogt?

  Right. And, I mean, my question would be, what happens to the bodies in that land?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, when I was a kid, I watched Poltergeist, and they're like, building houses over graves, and, you know, that creates all kinds of problems. But, you know, that's a movie. Like, in real life, what happens to the bodies? Cemeteries are kind of a precious thing. It's a weird usage of land. So, you know, in Texas, I never thought about it, because there's land everywhere. And like, it's not unusual to run into like, an abandoned cemetery where a church used to be. And there's this, like, eight headstones there, you know? I never thought about it. But this cemetery got me thinking about that more and more, of like, well, what happens if a cemetery in a prime area goes out of business?

• 6:36PJ Vogt?

  I think we can go answer these questions for you.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Happy hunting.

• 6:41PJ Vogt?

  After some ads, questions answered. Where do we go when we die? Well, the cemetery, usually. But we'll learn the history of the places we go when we die, and we'll find out what happens when those places run out of cash. All that, after these ads.

• 7:38PJ Vogt?

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• 8:21PJ Vogt?

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• 8:45PJ Vogt?

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• 9:30PJ Vogt?

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• 9:58PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. How did you decide that you were going to spend many years of your life thinking about cemeteries?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  So, the simple explanation, and it's not that simple, but I grew up in a cemetery.

• 10:11PJ Vogt?

  What?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  My father was superintendent of a 200-acre cemetery in Syracuse, New York. It's a great place to play, as long as you're not doing anything too stupid. And your friends, as I say in the second book I wrote, we didn't have any sleepovers.

• 10:34PJ Vogt?

  This is David Sloan, professor at the University of Southern California and author of two books about cemeteries. He's been thinking about these places ever since the childhood he spent among the tombstones. How did you feel? Like, how did it shape your relationship to death as a kid?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  To me, it was just where I was. You know, I was there from the time I was six weeks old. So I actually worked in the cemetery, starting when I was 13 and all the way into my twenties. I buried babies. I was part of a crew that buried full bodies and cremations. I filled graves, you know, almost all the things that you would do in a cemetery. So I have a more intimate, personal relationship with it. And then I began to create a professional relationship with my dissertation.

• 11:25PJ Vogt?

  When you work in a cemetery, does it make you, when you're confronted with the fact of death, which is something that most of us want to avoid, how does it shape your relationship to death? Does it make you more anxious about dying? Does it make you more accepting? Like, does it have an effect?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  You know, I think it, in some sense, made me more aware of the practicalities of death. And so I didn't really feel the way that most Americans feel, where they felt a distance, an incredible distance from death. You know, I watched my father, or listened to my father, help grieving widows. You know, I met with families when I was going to bury their baby. I mean, I wasn't in a position where I could be so far away that I could live the American way of death. I was much more, you know, the death is part of life, it's part of how we live, and it's part of the natural cycle of this body of mine and yours.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Nobody's been able to figure out a way not to die. Even though tech bros are trying, they're in a long line of people who said, "Well, I'm gonna be the first," and we're still waiting for one to show up.

• 12:36PJ Vogt?

  So you feel more acceptance of it?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so.

• 12:43PJ Vogt?

  As humans, we bury our dead. We've done it for so long that it feels strange to ask why. We know it's not purely for health reasons. Burial predates our understanding of germs. The Cro-Magnons buried their dead, even the Neanderthals did. The practice feels human, except research suggests that chimpanzees, elephants, and even termites have their own versions of this. What does seem to be uniquely human about our burials is our ability to attach a meaning to them. Some of us believe in an afterlife or a soul, but even those of us who don't seem to agree that the body itself is sacred, maybe even more sacred after death. We just know this somehow. We know we have to do something with a dead body, and every culture solves the problem

• 13:27PJ Vogt?

  in its own way. In Tibet, there's a tradition of what the West calls "sky burials," the body left on a mountain or some other elevated place for vultures to feast on. There, they call it "giving alms to the birds." In ancient Egypt, instead of practicing non-attachment to the body, some pharaohs, we know, were entombed in pyramids, tens of thousands of living humans, working for years to mark the death of just one. The foray people of Papua New Guinea, once, in some circumstances, consumed their dead, but the practice, we know, seems to have died out. Americans, for the most part, we bury our dead underground, organized often in grids of tombstones that might remind us of the suburban and urban grids we spend our lives in.

• 14:11PJ Vogt?

  The cemetery itself, it might be attached to a house of worship, it might just be a pretty field. Like everything in America, it feels like it's always been like this, and like most things in America, it was all invented about 15 minutes ago in historical time.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  So in the 18th century, many small towns or larger towns in the United States had a civic cemetery, that's a government cemetery, a public cemetery, and then they had churchyards, and then they would actually have private, small, really small, family cemeteries. And so you would have this mixture. It was a simple, say, quarter acre, half acre, and you just... Buried people in rows all the way along. It was a very functional, practical space. There wasn't a lot of greenery. There wasn't a lot of nature. It was mostly gravestones. And then in the late 18th century,

• 15:05Speaker 02

  as the cities grow, that begins to put pressure on the churchyards and those older civic cemeteries.

• 15:13PJ Vogt?

  Got it.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  And so people begin to think about how can we slightly suburbanize the dead to create more permanent places? And so in 1796, James Hill House was a very popular guy, prominent guy in New Haven, says, he went to a friend's farm where there was a little family cemetery. It was sort of being taken over by nature. And he goes, that's not good.

• 15:43PJ Vogt?

  James Hill House, an American senator from Connecticut. In America, he was the person to notice this problem that other people were noticing in other countries across the industrializing world. Industrialization meant more cities, more density, land being developed and redeveloped, including farms, family farms, where traditionally many people had been buried.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Slowly, the city is expanding. The early farms, they might totally disrupt or take down all of the stones and the burials. So let's put everybody in one place where we can have a nonprofit organization that oversees the care of the dead.

• 16:23PJ Vogt?

  And so before him, the idea was for most Americans, you die, you're buried, you get a tombstone. But then the idea that years later, if you're buried on the family farm, the family farm might get sold and that spot might kind of just get overridden with someone else's new idea.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, they might keep it forever, but they also might have all sorts of different ways that they handle that family farm.

• 16:53PJ Vogt?

  So he's the one who says, like, the cemetery should be a discreet and dedicated place where you buy a plot and you know your body will be undisturbed for, if not eternity, at least a very, very, very long time.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Very, very long time.

• 17:13PJ Vogt?

  Hill House creates the first modern American cemetery, the model for many others to come. He calls it the New Haven burying ground, the first private, nonprofit cemetery in the world. You can still visit it today. These days, they call it Grove Street Cemetery. It's actually nestled in Yale's campus, which means being buried there is a great way to get into Yale if your SAT scores aren't otherwise good enough. David points out that these problems Hill House was solving, other countries which had industrialized earlier, France, England, had already begun to contend with them. And they were modernizing their cemeteries for the same reasons we were, not just urban displacement, but also public health reasons.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Remember, in the early 19th century, mid 19th century, we don't have bacteriology.

• 17:58PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  That's going to come at the end of the century. And so people were very worried about what was known as a miasma. And a miasma was a sort of atmosphere above the city. And there was a sense that a disease could get into a miasma and you could actually get that disease because you're in this miasma. And so how do you get that miasma? They thought it was from decomposing material. And so the dead are decomposing. So they became a threat, that they would say you died of smallpox or you died of cholera. Would you then decompose in a way that would allow cholera to go into this miasma and create a danger?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  So that's the first thing that happens.

• 18:45PJ Vogt?

  OK.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  The second thing that happens is Romanticism. And Romanticism emerges in Europe and then moves through Britain into the United States, that nature is beneficial. It's beneficial for health reasons, beneficial spiritual reasons, it's beneficial for all sorts of things. So if you put those two together, then the idea becomes if we suburbanize the dead in a larger place that we can protect and use for a very long time to bury the dead, we protect the living, we protect the dead. And we can use that space, remember, before 1860, there's very few public parks in any city in the United States.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  So we can use that as a recreational area.

• 19:37PJ Vogt?

  Interesting. So at that moment, like, the idea, there's very little green space in the city where you are, and there's green space in the cemetery. At that, like, if I told my friends, you know, I'm gonna go throw a baseball round on Saturday at the cemetery, there's something like a little bit, uh, it's okay, they're not gonna like worry about me, but there's something a little bit in there.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  A little bit creepy, yeah.

• 20:01PJ Vogt?

  Yes. Would that have been more normal then?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 20:05PJ Vogt?

  No. It would have still been weird.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  You wouldn't go jogging, you wouldn't throw baseballs. What they did is they got in their carriages and they rode around the cemetery. Flowers, trees, green grass, you know, they're like, this is great. And they might, they might, in some cemeteries, stop and have a picnic at the grave of someone they knew, or someone who was famous. And so you would have this sort of celebrity culture.

• 20:30PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  And lots and lots of people did this. Over the course of a year, tens of thousands of people would go visit Greenwood in Brooklyn, or Mount Auburn in Cambridge.

• 20:43PJ Vogt?

  Honestly, it sounds really nice. I feel like one of the things we don't have so much right now is a way to publicly grieve. You know, like, you can go to a funeral, but if you just wanna go to a place where everyone else might be grieving separate things together, I don't know. I mean, obviously, you can go to a cemetery, no one will stop you today, but you're describing a culture that is visiting death differently than the way we visit death now.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  So that really has to do with, the 19th century believed in a closer relationship between living and death. You know, all sorts of ways. I'll give you one very simple way. When a person died, often at home, they would snip pieces of locks of their hair, they would put them in these elaborate creations, and they would put them on the wall of their house. You know, you'd walk into a house, and in the living room, there'd be a little thing of the young daughter who had died.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  So, starting in the 1920th century, right? It happens as early as the latter part of the 19th century. It really takes off in the middle of the 20th century. Americans begin to really distance themselves from the dead and from death.

• 21:54PJ Vogt?

  Why?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Why? Well, cultural trends are one of the most difficult things to parse out.

• 22:02PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  So, part of it is, we know that the number of dead is actually declining. Everybody knew somebody who had died in 1900. It's just part of the parcel of life. By 1950, 1960, not so much. The infant mortality rate, for instance, in 1890s New York City is something like 130 per thousand. And by the 1960s, that's going to be in the low teens.

• 22:34PJ Vogt?

  Oh, it's very different. It's very different.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  So, it's a really different thing. So, it's easier to distance yourself.

• 22:41PJ Vogt?

  This is a totally unanswerable question, and it's not in favor of me to ask it, but my curiosity insists. Do you think that those people for whom death was more common, an experience and a shared experience, do you think that the way they felt grief or loss was different than the way we feel grief or loss?

• 23:00Speaker 02

  I think it was very intense.

• 23:02PJ Vogt?

  It wasn't less intense?

• 23:03Speaker 02

  No, it was very intense and very public.

• 23:06PJ Vogt?

  Tell me more about that.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  So, the classic thing, Victoria. Victoria's beloved husband dies. She never wears anything but black for the rest of her life. Right? And this is not unusual. In Italy, or in England, or in Italian neighborhoods in New York, it wasn't like you were a widow, so you were on the open market for marriage. You were grieving for at least a year or two years. There's whole etiquette books about how long you have to wear black and how you can then move to some parts of your, are black and some parts aren't. I mean, that's a really intimate relationship with death and with the dead.

• 23:47PJ Vogt?

  And why do you think it'd be? It seems a bit counterintuitive because you would think that in a, in a milieu where death were more common. People would sort of

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Hide.

• 23:58PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's exactly the opposite. Where death becomes less part of your life, you hide more.

• 24:05PJ Vogt?

  Huh.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  And where death is really in your life, you actually embrace the realities of death more.

• 24:12PJ Vogt?

  Interesting.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  A quick example, the gay and lesbian community of the 1980s.

• 24:19PJ Vogt?

  During the HIV AIDS crisis, yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Right. I know people close to me who went to 50 funerals. Right. It becomes a different reality when that's true. Your relationship to that idea of death changes. Whereas if you're somebody just going along, say, born in the 70s, both your grandparents alive, both your parents are alive, your siblings are alive. Your mom might have had a miscarriage, but basically everybody you know is alive. And they're alive for a really long time. Right. You know, there's lots of people who have grandparents today and they're in their 30s and 40s.

• 24:58PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  That's not going to be true as much in 1900.

• 25:02PJ Vogt?

  And with, for instance, say, in the 1980s, with the gay community with HIV AIDS, did you see people turning to sort of cultural ritual in a way that would remind you of, like, the 1920s or the 1910s in America, like, where?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  So they did different ones. They didn't do hair on the walls or anything like that. But we know of some of them, right? Uh, with somebody like Cleve Jones deciding that everyone should have a quilt as part of the AIDS memorial quilt. Uh, that seems very 19th century.

• 25:38PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Because if you really think about how we mourn the dead in that period, say, from 1950s and to quite recently, it's really the family's going to go to the funeral. People are going to come. Family's going to go to the cemetery by themselves. They might have a reception, they might not have a reception. And then you move on.

• 26:03PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Right. That's America's way of death.

• 26:06PJ Vogt?

  America's way of death is put it away, come back to work.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Go back to work. You know, get a new husband. You're going forward, you're moving forward. By its very nature, that denies the death.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  The death is supposed to play very little role in your life. So grieving is really hard, right? It's very hard to grieve in that situation because everybody's telling you, "Okay, we understand. Now, can we talk about you going back to work?"

• 26:34PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, grieving in American society, grieving death in particular, feels like you leave society. And you're culturally permitted to leave society with the expectation that you'll return. But like, I feel like that's the thing that anyone who has lost anybody relates to, is that feeling that you just leave the world and the world does not join you in that place. And it's very strange to imagine that that experience is not, that it's a cultural experience and that in a different culture, you might feel differently.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Totally different.

• 27:07PJ Vogt?

  Before our culture changed, back in the 1900s, the 1910s, if you walked through an American cemetery, you might have seen lots of mourners on any given day. They wouldn't necessarily have been mourning the same person. They wouldn't have necessarily known each other, but they might have felt a sense of connection, even without talking. They might have been reminded that the world is always losing people and leaving others behind. And they could have gotten to mourn without that feeling of exile, the modern grief carries, the discomfort we feel when we've left the funeral but are not yet ready to go back to the office. Of course, the nice part of our modern relationship to death is that when we lose someone we love, while we might feel pressured to return to normal, at least we don't feel pressured to stay in the grief.

• 27:52PJ Vogt?

  You don't have to wear black for the rest of your life. You can remarry. Time can move on, even if we're not always sure we want it to. Our modern death culture, move-on culture, it was already emerging by the 1930s. And David says today, the cemetery business is one where, if you run a cemetery, you can pretty much predict the few days of the year when visitors will show up.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Memorial Day, Easter, Christmas, somebody's birthday. Those are the big days where people will show up and fix the grave, put out flowers, do things.

• 28:25PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  The rest of the time, there's the regulars. People will come on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and they'll sit and talk to their loved ones. They're sort of out of that older culture. But that newer culture is, oh, let's take the grandkids and see grandmother at the cemetery because they met the grandmother, but now she's passed away and we'll go on her birthday.

• 28:48PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  And we won't go back for another year. Or we won't go back at all.

• 28:52PJ Vogt?

  So this sort of leads into one of the things that I was curious about is I was hoping you just sort of paint a picture for me. In our time, like now, the way you're describing it, like I have friends who have culture jobs where they like, I have a friend who has a roller skating rink. I have friends who like, who, who do things for a living where they're like, this time of the year is hot, this time of the year is cold, this is where we make all of our money, this is like where we kind of struggle through. Like the cemetery just as a business, not as a cultural space of grief?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:23PJ Vogt?

  What are the basic economics of running a cemetery as a business?

• 29:27Speaker 02

  So of course it's changed. I wrote a book in 2018, Is the Cemetery Dead?

• 29:32PJ Vogt?

  Good title, I have to say.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  It is a good title. And the reason that I wrote it with that title was there's all these pressures.

• 29:42PJ Vogt?

  The first pressure, David says, is the cremation trend. Your grandparents probably would have felt very uncomfortable with the idea of burning bodies up into ash instead of burying them in a casket. It just wasn't a cultural norm, partly because the Catholic Church had issued a formal ban on cremation, a ban that was only lifted in 1963. The lifting of that ban, very bad news for the professional person burial.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  In 1960, it's very different than today because very few people were cremated. And most people who died had a full body burial. And so there's a considerable amount of money at any period for a full body burial. And cremations are much less money. So it really changes the business side of the cemetery.

• 30:31PJ Vogt?

  Cremation is like Napster for cemeteries. It's just like a horrible new thing that's ruining everything.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  It is. I don't know if we go that far. But it causes a lot of disruptions in the business. You know, cremation rate in 1960 is less than 5%. By 2035, people are arguing it's going to be over 70%.

• 30:53PJ Vogt?

  And so in the pre cremation world, and I guess in the post cremation world, just for the cemetery's part of this business, essentially like what they're doing is they're selling very small plots of land, right? Like, that's the revenue.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  So in the old days, you would try to sell a very large plot of land. So in the 19th century, families would buy a plot of land that might have 30 graves on it because you're buying a plot of land for the generations that follow you.

• 31:19PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  By the middle of the 20th century, most of the time, people would buy four, two for them and two for a kid, unmarried kids. And so the way that the business worked changed from these very large lots to much more medium sized or small.

• 31:38PJ Vogt?

  And how did the business change?

• 31:39Speaker 02

  You don't get as much money. If you buy a 30 grave lot, they pay for all those 30 graves.

• 31:45PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  If you buy two, you get paid for two. Now, a big cemetery can react to that. They can put it in a scattering field, they can create walls where you can have your name on it, bury the cremains all as collectively, they can do all sorts of things. But if you're a small cemetery and you are largely dependent upon full bodies, quite quickly, you can either run out of land or your business can suffer.

• 32:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  One of the two.

• 32:17PJ Vogt?

  The second pressure on the American cemetery, the thing pushing them in the direction of going out of business, has to do with how many people feel these days about the idea of legacies.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Now, there's a whole bunch of people that don't believe in cemeteries anymore. They don't want to be remembered.

• 32:32PJ Vogt?

  I spoke to someone recently who was going on this whole thing about how he didn't want to be remembered. And when it was over, it was over. I didn't realize this was like a common feeling, that it was even-

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Common's too strong, but it's growing. I mean, this has two ways it goes. One, people say, I don't want anything. Throw them in the trash. Yeah, who cares? And then there's those who say, well, I want it to be natural.

• 32:51PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  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. And so both those are happening.

• 33:03PJ Vogt?

  And so do the cemeteries, like, are they pushing back? Are they on like a PR offensive to-

• 33:08Speaker 02

  So, most cemeteries have tried to become more natural.

• 33:12PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  And they remind people that until we started embalming, and even then, relatively few people were actually embalmed until the 20th century.

• 33:21PJ Vogt?

  Because if you don't embalm somebody, they will decompose. So that you can, you can just keep throwing bodies in the ground. It's fine. It's only when you embalm that you have this problem of the cemetery is permanently taking up irreplaceable land.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:50PJ Vogt?

  You-

• 33:50Speaker 02

  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 obisuit, and they resell it.

• 34:02PJ Vogt?

  Wait, so they just, in Germany, they're evicting their dead?

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's part of how they view the relationship of living and dead, and their idea of what is dead.

• 34:12PJ Vogt?

  It's weird because I feel like, um, that feels wrong to me, but I'm like, well, why does it feel wrong? What do you have to believe to believe that that's wrong? I'm not sure it's wrong. Like, it just, it feels wrong.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  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 US. And so in the US, almost all grave sites are permanent. You can't rent, that I know of, anywhere.

• 34:42PJ Vogt?

  So that's pressure two. Pressure number three afflicting the modern cemetery has to do with migration. Essentially, not enough of us live and die in the same small towns as our parents, the way we once did.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:14PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, I don't have anybody buried in New York.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  You know, 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 you have 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.

• 35:55PJ Vogt?

  David says that cemeteries that are thriving, a weird phrase, but let's go with it. Cemeteries that are thriving tend to be the innovators. In America, a lot of the innovation is about cultural programming. Hollywood Forever, a 62-acre cemetery in Los Angeles, has concerts. They show movies on the side of the mausoleum in the summer. Their business is in part about finding creative ways to get people who are still alive back into the cemetery more often. Which, if you want Americans to have a less arms-length distance to death, that sounds worth celebrating. There are also architectural innovations happening. Traditional cemeteries can only fit so many bodies. And so as cemeteries run out of space, some will start to stack caskets on top of each other.

• 36:40PJ Vogt?

  You can find double-depth burial plots all across the country, often smaller, older cemeteries or veteran cemeteries. More rarely, you can find triple or even quadruple-depth burials. But that's about the limit. You can't really stack more than four caskets underground. You start to run into issues with soil stability or the water table, depending on where you're buried. So these days, some cemeteries have begun to build up mausoleums that are somewhat high-rise inspired with multiple levels, a way of putting way more bodies into the same amount of land. It's like a Yimby movement, but for the dead. But despite innovations such as these, the bottom line is that the pressures that are pushing against cemeteries

• 37:23PJ Vogt?

  are real, and more cemeteries are facing down a hard business reality than back in the 1910s, when Americans hung out with their dead and cremation was still considered a bizarre practice. Which leads us to the question that has brought us here. When a modern cemetery dies, not a person in a cemetery, but the business of the place itself, what happens? The answer, after some ads.

• 38:24PJ Vogt?

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• 39:25PJ Vogt?

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• 40:07PJ Vogt?

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• 41:44PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. The thing that had led me to this conversation with you is that we had a listener to our show who found themselves wondering what happens when a cemetery goes out of business, which obviously has to happen some of the time and must be happening still with some of these smaller cemeteries. Like, what does it look like when a cemetery just runs out of money?

• 42:06Speaker 02

  So, there's really three things that can happen.

• 42:09PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:23PJ Vogt?

  Our listener also wanted to know if there's a market for, the phrase I think he uses, gently-used cemeteries. Like, there's not a world, like, in my dying industry, which is media, you have private equity companies just, like, buying up failing or not-quite-failing media organizations and just running them in a ruthless profit-driving way that's bad for the thing itself, but lets them kind of just take a little bit of extra money out of it. That doesn't happen in the cemetery business, I'm assuming.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 42:48PJ Vogt?

  Oh, it does?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Right. There are big corporations who have bought up dozens and dozens of funeral homes.

• 42:55PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  And now control much of the funeral market in the United States. And they started to buy cemeteries. But, you know, most cemeteries are not private enterprises. Most cemeteries are nonprofits.

• 43:08PJ Vogt?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Or they're public. And so, it didn't go as well. You know, it's not like they have as expansive a set of holdings.

• 43:16PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  They do have a considerable number of cemeteries, but what they bring to it is they bring, the mowers you're gonna use can be cheaper because you're gonna get them from them.

• 43:25PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  You know, the trimmers, 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. And so, they try to do cost cuts that are not negative to the business.

• 43:40PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. So, the first thing that can happen when a cemetery runs out of business is conglomeration. The big guy buys up the struggling, smaller guys.

• 43:50PJ Vogt?

  But the second outcome, it's almost the opposite of that. An outcome that's less corporate, more communitarian.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  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, uh, say in the eighties and nineties called Friends Organizations of Cemeteries.

• 44:20PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:55PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  So it becomes a word of the state.

• 44:58PJ Vogt?

  And so then the state will step in and just take it over to prevent calamity, basically?

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Yes, but the states are really bad at it.

• 45:07PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  So what happens typically is the state say, okay, we'll take it. We'll do what we can, but you know, 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 a blip 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.

• 45:42PJ Vogt?

  So the most like the worst case scenario for if you are a body and your cemetery goes out of business is that it goes out of business, the state takes it over and then the state is just maintaining the plot at the speed of outrage, which is slow and long.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  They do minimal amounts of work. Yeah.

• 46:04PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:14PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:25PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. I think it's funny, you know, we get all these wonderful questions from different people and we have to decide which ones to ask. And I think the thing that had appealed to me about wondering about cemetery, cemetery going out of business, one thing was just I'd never thought about it. But the other was that when I started to think about it, I thought, well, every cemetery goes out of business eventually.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 46:49PJ Vogt?

  No?

• 46:50Speaker 02

  So someplace like Mount Auburn Cemetery has an endowment in the, 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.

• 47:04PJ Vogt?

  Is it hard to get in?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:07PJ Vogt?

  Who do you have to know?

• 47:10Speaker 02

  You don't have to know, you have to buy a lot.

• 47:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  They don't have a huge number of lots, so it's quite expensive. They have a growing cremation niche business. They actually have built, they built a pretty bad mausoleum, but now they have a really nice mausoleum. And so they're been responding to their limits of their land. They still have a bunch of land. And so it's not like you can't get in, but you just have to pay.

• 47:36PJ Vogt?

  So if you want to be buried somewhere where you know that you won't be disturbed, I feel like this is like a consumer advice thing now, but like try to find an old cemetery with a good endowment.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, there's two answers to that. The first is an old cemetery with a good endowment. But the second one is if you live somewhere where there's a small cemetery, a village cemetery, a community cemetery, a public cemetery, a town cemetery. Those can be really quite lovely. I used to live in Hanover, New Hampshire. And Hanover, New Hampshire had a public cemetery, the Hanover Cemetery. And they had sufficient funds, because the town is actually pretty wealthy, had sufficient funds to keep it up. And it's in really gorgeous shape. And so being buried there is also a way to go.

• 48:26PJ Vogt?

  So the answer to our listener Lucas's question this week, what happens when a cemetery goes out of business? It can get taken over by a corporation. It can get taken over by volunteers or by the state. But in America, the cemetery remains a cemetery. The bodies stay in the ground. Because in America, graves are permanent, unlike much of the rest of the world. We're grave. It's just the last thing you rent.

• 48:55PJ Vogt?

  I think the last thing I'm curious about, and if this is too personal, obviously, don't answer it. But have you decided what you want to do?

• 49:04Speaker 02

  So, uh, yes and no. For a long time, I wanted to be cremated. My first wife is interred in a niche in Mount Auburn.

• 49:15PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Because she grew up in Boston and she loved going to Mount Auburn. She loved to take her nephews there. And they all live in Boston, so she really wanted to be part of that. And we actually have a double urn. But, uh, recently, someone else asked if they could, her sister asked if she could be interred there with her beloved sister when she dies. She's still alive.

• 49:40PJ Vogt?

  In that double urn?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:42PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  And I was touched by her emotion and her relationship to her sister, so I said yes. So that meant I was afloat and had to think about what I'm gonna do. And I made a trip to the first natural burying ground in America, in the west side of South Carolina. Beautiful place, and they run it gorgeously. They do a great job. And I was like, huh, how about that as an option? Now, natural burying grounds are slowly growing all over the country. And maybe I could do that. And then there's the part of me that says, David, just get cremated. Let your wife figure it out.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Let's see what happens.

• 50:29PJ Vogt?

  So you're still deciding?

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm undecided. What about you? What are you gonna do?

• 50:34PJ Vogt?

  Oh, right now, I was very sure that I knew and I was, I had decided that I wanted to be cremated and I wanted to be put in the water near where I used to go to the beaches as a kid.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:47PJ Vogt?

  And then my partner, we talked about it and she told me she wanted to be put in the water here where she used to go as a kid, which is very far away. And I realized we have a problem, which I have not figured out how to solve.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Well, I will suggest to you a way that you can do both. Right? And that is you could actually buy, in some cemeteries, it's not that typical, but you can actually buy a name, a place to put your name. In some cemeteries that do scattering.

• 51:18PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  And you just say, okay, I'm not gonna scatter, but I want to put my partner and Maya's name here so that if there's someone who wants to come visit us, they'll have a place to visit.

• 51:30PJ Vogt?

  Because that's really what you're doing, is you're trying to give the people who miss you a place to go.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  That's really what it is.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  I'll tell you one really quick story.

• 51:39PJ Vogt?

  Please, yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  I moved to California and I was going to Santa Barbara to see somebody. And I get talking to my father, he said, well, you can go visit your grandmother. Now, both of my grandmothers died before I was born, so I never knew a grandmother. And it turned out that she was buried in the Santa Barbara cemetery. So I, on the way up, my wife and I took a detour and I found the grave. And I just burst into tears. Because I never got to go to grandmother's house because I never had a grandmother.

• 52:15PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  And so it was a very emotionally effective moment for me.

• 52:19PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  And my wife has now drifted away. She comforted me at the beginning and said, okay, I'm going to go walk around. And she comes back and she's smiling. I'm like, hey, I'm having a moment here. Should you be serious?

• 52:32PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  She was like, if you walk to the edge of the cliff, below it is a nude beach.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Now, your grandmother wanted to be buried there because she wanted to look at the ocean, which you can do. She wanted to look at the mountains, which you could do. But, you know, maybe she wanted to look at the nude beach too.

• 52:53PJ Vogt?

  And you know what? You know what it makes me understand? And I didn't think that I would get to clarity on this. I didn't think I needed to too quickly, but you should be buried somewhere where when the people who miss you go there, they'll have an experience that you want them to have. And you got to have an experience of birth and grief, and that's perfect.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. And that's why the cemetery isn't dead.

• 53:17PJ Vogt?

  David, so nice to talk to you about this. Thank you.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  It's my pleasure. Really fun.

• 53:27PJ Vogt?

  David Sloan is a professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis with the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. His latest book is called, Is the Cemetery Dead? Go check it out.

• 54:21PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pimmineney, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Holly Patton. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Basarian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant and Kim Kupel. If you would like to support our show, keep it alive, stop it from going out of business, and get ad-free episodes, viewer reruns, and the occasional bonus audio, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Incognito mode subscribers get to stay in their graves forever undisturbed. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Parello, and

• 55:05PJ Vogt?

  John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schaff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

• 55:46PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by VistaPrint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing Search Engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. VistaPrint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, Vistaprint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.

• 56:31PJ Vogt?

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