No. Typically you only rent a plot in a graveyard for 10-30 years, and unless you or your heir(s) extend the lease, the graves will be dug up and used again. By that time most of the old casket and body have disintegrated to a pile of crumbling bones. Those will either be taken out and fully incinerated, or if the decay is progressed to a point where not much is left to begin with, a thin layer of soil covers the remnants and the new casket will simply be put on top.
It's also getting more and more "fashionable" to get incinerated right away, so that's really a non-issue.
Why do we even have graveyards? Embalming chemicals leach out and poison water tables, carbon footprint is horrendous, land is wasted for superstitious nonsense. Just cremate and scatter the ashes.
I want to be cremated, and then have my ashes condensed into a diamond. I want that diamond to be embedded in the hilt of a sword. I want everybody in my family for generations to be put in the same sword and then in the distant future when the zombies arise, my great great great great grandchild can break the glass and weild the blade honing the power of generations of ancestors in their hand and start lobbing off heads.
Or just bury people without embalming them first? As a non-American I find it super weird that it’s the norm in the US. Why would you still do that anyway?
I've been a Christian all my life; I'm really, really sure that Christ can not only "restore" a body from nothing but make it much better than it was before. At least, I hope He plans to make it much better 😃
As far as I know, it’s a US thing right? In the Netherlands embalming has been expressly prohibited up until 2009 I think. Granted, Dutch laws concerning what you can do with a dead body are pretty strict but embalming just seems weird to me.
Other than laws? Probably, to a degree, like an unfortunate number of things in the US, money. As of 2019, the death industry was >$20 Billion industry.
Over here in the US, we're stuck in a neoliberal hellscape where profit is more important than any human being and grief-stricken families are fair game for exploitation.
I actually don't think that is true. Caitlin Dougherty on YouTube has a video on it though. It's pushed by funeral directors because it's a big money maker for them.
There are other methods becoming more widely available In the US too such as Aquamation (alkaline hydrolysis) which yields similar remains like ashes you can spread and human composting (https://recompose.life/) which don’t emit fossil fuel emissions.
Not for everyone, sure, but I wanted to be composted. I liked that I would become a cubic yard of nutrient rich soil in about 30 days and will be utilized for forest restoration.
The mushroom shroud that breaks you down is also super cool but was pretty out of my price range.
We're going to the way of Toraja people, do some voodoo magic to make the corpse walk to their grave and then after they decompose just store the skull in a cave nearby.
I highly recommend checking out the catacombs in Paris. It gives you a very clear understanding about what humans do to graveyards when they want the space. There are literally millions of skeletons just thrown down there. Some are stacked in interesting ways, like walls of femurs and piles of skulls. But the vast, vast majority are just heaped into big ass piles of random bones.
Personally, visiting them sold me on the idea of cremation. Otherwise, it's only a matter of time before your graveyard is getting dug up and they're throwing your remains in a pile with some randos.
The concept is that you get a spot on a graveyard permanently as a muslim, but it is custom to give back the spot when noone is alive, who remembered the deceased relative, so usually in the third or fourth generation.
But why wouldnt a graveyard last "forever"? We have many church graveyards that can be tracked back to early medieval times, so easily a thousand years, in Germany.
But muslims don't embalm their deceased bodies, right? They also don't use coffins, so eventually the remains will decompose with nothing remains? How long it took for unpreserved buried bodies to completely decompose?
How long it took for unpreserved buried bodies to completely decompose?
That is very dependent on the temperature, soil, humidity etc. E.g. a regularly wet, huminose soil at moderate temperatures will decompose anything much quicker than dry desert sand.
No, because most people are cremated these days, and over time bones deteriorate. Plus, we can always make new graveyards.
But the big thing is that old graveyards are often “relocated” — the marked graves are dug up and the contents stacked/put closer together with any gravestones or markers stuck closer together above ground.
As many other have stated, grave spaces are often rented or leased. Then the remains are buried in an ossuary or given back to the family.
Quite a few western graveyards are semi-permanant. Only being dug up and moved if the space is to be reused for something else.
My city, for example, moved its early graveyard as the town expanded and now the area is a parking lot.
There is a cool fact as well with churches and graveyards that haven't moved. Generally the church building itself loses height because of the the bodies buried raises the ground levels by a few feet. This has been observed in the UK and America.
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