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 Support the show at searchengine.show To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What question does the listener have about cemeteries?
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? Doing well. How are you doing? I'm doing good. What does your hat say?
Portland Buckaroos. Who are the Buckaroos? They're just like an old hockey team. And what I love about the logo is that like...
It's a hockey-playing cowboy. Oh, yeah. Is he on a horse, but also the horse has ice skates?
Yeah, and then he has ice skates also. It seems like overkill. Well, I love it. It's like he knows that his horse might die. Oh, yeah. And he'll need to have his ice skates.
That's like your interpretation of your own hockey hat feels like a very morbid Rorschach test. Lucas, perhaps a fellow given to certain morbid wonderings, which was what had led him here today. His question 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.
And one day I was driving by the cemetery that was the Muslim cemetery. And I was like, oh, that, you know, 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. What do you mean? Like, I've got the website. I could read it to you if you want. Sure, yeah. Okay.
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Chapter 2: What unusual advertisement did Lucas find?
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 8 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 the heart to accommodate 2,500 more.
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, I have a complaint that you folks are not taking due care of me. Whoa. 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 Allah-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 401k investment option you have without fearing for any economic downturns.
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 this question in Lucas's mind. So much so that he found himself wondering about it many years later and decided to email us.
It's always been in the back of my head, this like 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?
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 is out of business, like what happens?
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Chapter 3: What happens to a cemetery when it goes out of business?
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? How did it shape your relationship to death as a kid?
To me, it was just where I was. 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 20s. I buried babies. I was part of a crew that buried full-bodied babies. 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.
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? Does it have an effect?
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've 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. Nobody has 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 have said, well, I'm going to be the first, and we're still waiting for one to show up.
So you feel more acceptance of it?
Yeah, I think so.
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Chapter 4: How did David Sloane's childhood influence his view on death?
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.
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.
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. Yeah, they might keep it forever.
But they also might have all sorts of different ways that they handle that family farm.
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.
Very, very long time.
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 sort of 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.
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Chapter 5: What historical changes have affected burial practices?
Well, cultural trends are one of the most difficult things to parse out.
Yes.
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.
Oh, it's very different. It's very different.
So it's a really different thing. So it's easier to distance yourself. Yeah.
This is a totally unanswerable question, and it's not fair for 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? I think it was very intense. It wasn't less intense?
No, it was very intense and very public.
Tell me more about that.
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.
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Chapter 6: How does modern culture impact grief and mourning?
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.
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So there's really three things that can happen. Yeah.
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.,
Our listener also wanted to know if there's a market for, the phrase I think he used was 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.
Oh, it does? Right.
There are big corporations who have bought up dozens and dozens of funeral homes and now control much of the funeral market in the United States. And they started to buy cemeteries. But most cemeteries are not private enterprises. Most cemeteries are nonprofits or they're public. It didn't go as well. It's not like they have as expansive a set of holdings.
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