Cemeteries are Dying: A Bold Response

CEMETERIES ARE DYING: A BOLD RESPONSE

7/14/2021

CEMETERIES ARE DYING: A BOLD RESPONSE
Posted By Dr. C. Lynn Gibson, Wednesday, July 14, 2021
Updated: Wednesday, July 14, 2021
Cemeteries are Dying: A Bold Response

There are several key trends that have contributed to the rise of cremation in North America. Along with my colleague and friend Dr. Jason Troyer, we presented a seminar at the 2019 CANA Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, entitled “Cemeteries are Dying: A Bold Response.” In this educational seminar, we suggested that there are several emerging patterns evident in how we approach death today in the United States.

Today’s emerging ethos represents the broad changes in the way people think. To be sure, a growing number of people are

less formally religious;
not tied to traditional rituals;
geographically distant from where they were born;
more economically committed to short-term priorities; and
open to new ideas and alternative ceremonies.

Our cemetery recently designed the Grandview Legacy Trail & Pavilion specifically to address the emerging trends in deathcare. Our hope is to meet the changing preferences of our community while at the same time, providing a quality of care that meets the universal needs of the bereaved. The big idea we want to communicate to our community is that cemeteries are not only sacred places where the deceased are remembered, but also where people can regularly engage in healing and meaningful experiences. Here are a few examples.

LESS RELIGIOUS & TRADITIONAL
As people are becoming less formally religious, we designed our Legacy Trail to include nonreligious yet meaningful features—such as our Reflection Booth, where a Christian, a Buddhist, or an agnostic can take a quiet moment for themselves and reflect on life—even write a letter to their loved one to express their grief, should they choose.

GEOGRAPHICALLY DISTANT
Because of the growing geographic mobility of families, we are creating opportunities for meaningful connections at our cemetery through virtual experiences, too. Since people no longer live in the same town where their relatives are buried, we have recognized the need to foster meaningful connections by bringing the cemetery to them virtually, such as providing online visibility of grave memorials and driving directions to the exact GPS location of a gravesite. In the future, we want to add the ability to share one’s history and story online through pictures and videos and even provide remote flower orders and delivery straight to a loved one’s grave. Through our Cremation By Grandview funeral home, families can arrange and even prearrange online, including completing all of their required forms, identification, and payment.

ECONOMIC PRIORITIES & NEW IDEAS
Given the economic constraints many families face, we want our cemetery’s new Legacy Trail to provide affordable options for disposition, such as our Cremation Ossuary and Legacy Wall and our semi-private niche options. Other appealing features of our Legacy Trail include in-ground niches that provide room for five (5) full-size urns, making efficient and cost-effective use of space for families not wanting traditional burial.

We intentionally placed our Legacy Trail next to our Grandview Pavilion—a modern, yet comfortable event facility design with picturesque views of the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. This outdoor facility is perfect for all types of celebrations of life, including traditional committals as well as private cremation memorials and community events, such as death cafes, yoga, and concerts featuring local artists.

What is important is that there are many creative options affordable for families today, and plenty of excellent designers out there to assist cemeterians who desire an upgrade or new initiative idea for their cemetery. For example, Gerardo Garcia and his amazing team from Columbium By Design worked with us at Grandview every step of the way, from initial concept design to turn-key completion, helping us bring our Legacy Trail development to full fruition. When launching a new creative project, professional collaboration is a must.

ONGOING GRIEF SUPPORT
My professional focus in recent years has been adopting and implementing a Nurturing Care paradigm across all of our deathcare divisions, including Cremation By Grandview. We retooled our emphasis in recent years to promote a more flexible framework for service offerings to client-families, meeting them where they are in their deathcare needs. By applying universal principles of bereavement caregiving, our Nurturing Care approach emphasizes a funeral director’s comforting presence and professional guidance that solidifies support and healing.

Cremation By Grandview provides opportunities for families who choose a cremation without ceremonies to utilize our cemetery for a final place of rest. Even without formal funeral services, families still benefit from having a place to go to remember and reframe their lives without their loved ones. Though we have been told repeatedly by grief researchers that human beings are surprisingly resilient when it comes to death and grief, we also understand that there remains a qualitative value of having a place to go and return again and again to not only honor the deceased’s life, but also to honor how our own stories have been forever changed. Cemeteries are indeed still vital to a healthy community. Providing a “cremation without ceremonies” through Cremation By Grandview also means educating families about the importance of a permanent place where they can find comfort and search for meaning.

Our Grandview Legacy Trail & Pavilion was also designed to create meaningful connections with our community by offering ongoing grief support. Partnering with the Center for Hope & Wellbeing, we are thrilled to offer our community the Healing Path®—a first of its kind. The Healing Path® is a self-guided and interactive series of stations situated along the Legacy Trail that is designed to help people who still need more support through their grief journey. After people enter our beautiful threshold entrance to the Legacy Trail, they can pick up a copy of our Healing Path® Field Guide to make use of the numerous grief resources and activities we have provided that will help them explore their thoughts and feelings and find the support and healing they may need while walking along the trail’s pathway.

ONGOING GRIEF SUPPORT

My professional focus in recent years has been adopting and implementing a Nurturing Care paradigm across all of our deathcare divisions, including Cremation By Grandview. We retooled our emphasis in recent years to promote a more flexible framework for service offerings to client-families, meeting them where they are in their deathcare needs. By applying universal principles of bereavement caregiving, our Nurturing Care approach emphasizes a funeral director’s comforting presence and professional guidance that solidifies support and healing.

Cremation By Grandview provides opportunities for families who choose a cremation without ceremonies to utilize our cemetery for a final place of rest. Even without formal funeral services, families still benefit from having a place to go to remember and reframe their lives without their loved ones. Though we have been told repeatedly by grief researchers that human beings are surprisingly resilient when it comes to death and grief, we also understand that there remains a qualitative value of having a place to go and return again and again to not only honor the deceased’s life, but also to honor how our own stories have been forever changed. Cemeteries are indeed still vital to a healthy community. Providing a “cremation without ceremonies” through Cremation By Grandview also means educating families about the importance of a permanent place where they can find comfort and search for meaning.

Our Grandview Legacy Trail & Pavilion was also designed to create meaningful connections with our community by offering ongoing grief support. Partnering with the Center for Hope & Wellbeing, we are thrilled to offer our community the Healing Path®—a first of its kind. The Healing Path® is a self-guided and interactive series of stations situated along the Legacy Trail that is designed to help people who still need more support through their grief journey. After people enter our beautiful threshold entrance to the Legacy Trail, they can pick up a copy of our Healing Path® Field Guide to make use of the numerous grief resources and activities we have provided that will help them explore their thoughts and feelings and find the support and healing they may need while walking along the trail’s pathway.

THE FUTURE OF FUNERALS AND CEMETERIES

I am one part concerned and one part encouraged about the future in deathcare. As cremation rates continue to steadily rise, so is the growing awareness that cemeteries are not necessary. The reason for this, I truly believe, is that we are now in an unprecedented era of deritualization – the growing trend in the United States of a public openness to revise, replace, minimize the significance of, and even eliminate or avoid long-held traditional funerary rituals to assist in the adaptation of loss. I have written extensively about deritualization in my research with Stellenbosch University. In short, deritualization is a significant interdisciplinary concern for all types of deathcare practitioners.

There has never been a time in human history where we have not disposed of our dead without pausing for some form of ritualization to help us find meaning, comfort, and healing. We actually do not know the collective effect on our society (and on us as individuals) if we gradually continue the course of choosing cremation (or burial) without any memorialization or rituals of support. Cremation is, of course, not the problem. Instead, my concern is providing quality support and care for families who experience a loss. This is why we at Cremation By Grandview work hard to educate families that cremation is not a final mode of disposition, but a means to prepare a deceased loved one’s body for final disposition. In short, cemeteries still matter.

Though it is doubtful we will ever return to the traditional rituals of old in how we care for our dead and each other, we can, however, create new ritual forms of support, hope, and healing. The good news is that now may be the best time ever to be involved in deathcare—it has never been more challenging or more fulfilling to assist one another in finding meaning and hope in the realm of human loss. The future for funeral service and end-of-life caregivers is indeed wonderfully promising.

The great irony we’ve discovered is that the key to our shared future lies buried, like some ancient treasure, in what is being too often ignored, if not forgotten altogether . . . the intrinsic value of cemeteries. As funeral professionals searching everywhere for any insights that may help us in our important work with bereaved families, we have found that true timeless wisdom abounds in perhaps one of the most surprising places of all—the old cemetery.

These dedicated spaces and sacred grounds are available in all our communities and are ripe with possibilities for new ritual forms that can be packed with new meaning. The response to pervasive deritualization is creative reritualization, embedded right in our community cemeteries from long ago. It seems that the key to our future has been with us all along. And thankfully, with the help of CANA and its international reach, deathcare practitioners continue getting better at making the connection between cremation and meaningful memorialization.

This post excerpted from the Member Spotlight in The Cremationist, Vol 57, Issue 2 featuring Cremation By Grandview by Dr. C. Lynn Gibson. Members can find the full profile in the most recent issue. Not a member? Consider joining to access the magazine archives and other resources to help you find solutions for all aspects of your business – only $495.

Members also receive discounts on many CANA education programs including CANA's upcoming Convention! With a wide range of valuable networking and educational opportunities, the CANA Convention features sessions from presenters carefully chosen to make the most of your time away from the office and ensure you leave with practical takeaways.

We can’t wait to welcome Dr. Gibson to the CANA stage in Seattle this August to share ideas on revitalizing cemeteries with cremation memorialization options. See what else CANA has planned for our 103rd Cremation Innovation Convention: goCANA.org/CANA21.

Dr. C. Lynn Gibson is a Managing Partner of Smith Life & Legacy, located in Maryville, Tennessee. Lynn is a Licensed Funeral Director, a Certified Funeral Service Practitioner, and a Certified Crematory Operator. He holds two doctorates in social research and pastoral care. As a writer and speaker, Lynn contributes to several international organizations, including the Cremation Association of North America, the National Funeral Directors Association, and the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association. Lynn currently serves as a Research Associate for Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is also the Co-Founder of the Center for Hope and Well-Being.