Winter 2018 Newsletter
IN THIS ISSUE:
- Thank you! We Met Our Fundraising Goal
- Subscribe to the FCA of MN Newsletter
- St. Paul MN In Latest Funeral Price Study
- Can You Become A Tree After You Die?
- A New Way to Bury Ashes: But You Still Won't Become a Tree
- Links
- What Do Our Ashes Mean To Us?
Thank you! We met our fundraising goal!
As we noted in the Fall 2017 Newsletter, in September, FCA of MN received a generous donation of $1,000 from two long-time supporters.
We asked your help in raising a matching $1,000 so we could hire a web designer to make much needed improvements to our website. The $2,000 total would also cover our expenses for 2018.
Thanks to our generous donors, we raised $1,170. We plan to hire a web designer by the end of this month.
As we noted in the Fall 2017 Newsletter, in September, FCA of MN received a generous donation of $1,000 from two long-time supporters.
We asked your help in raising a matching $1,000 so we could hire a web designer to make much needed improvements to our website. The $2,000 total would also cover our expenses for 2018.
Thanks to our generous donors, we raised $1,170. We plan to hire a web designer by the end of this month.
St. Paul, MN part of funeral pricing study
In an ongoing effort to keep the issue of funeral home price transparency on the public's radar, our parent organization, Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA), has released a new study demonstrating how few funeral homes post price information on their websites.
The Federal Trade Commission Funeral Rule requires funeral homes to provide a copy of the General Price List (GPL) to anyone who asks in person for it, and to provide price information over the phone. The GPL provides consumers with itemized price information for each service the funeral home offers, such as embalming or cremation.
Can you become a tree after you die?
"Myself, I like the idea of becoming a tree. Always loved trees."
In nearly every FCA of MN presentation on after death choices and planning, someone in attendance asks whether its possible to grow into a tree after death. "I would love to have my corpse feed a growing tree," as one person graphically put it.
Thanks to widespread press coverage of new and proposed burial products (like the hugely impractical and not-ready-for-prime-time "burial pod"), it's not surprising that a lot of people find the prospect of turning into a stately oak appealing.
Throw in growing press coverage of natural (green) burial, and its availability locally, and people simply assume that when their unembalmed and shrouded body is buried in a shallow grave, a seedling or sapling they've selected before death can be planted on top. It all sounds lovely except for one problem: no green cemetery in the U.S allows a tree to be planted on a grave. Wildflowers and grasses native to the area? Yes. A tree? No.
Why Not?
Many green cemeteries are committed to restoring native flora, and so permit either the planting of grasses and wildflowers directly on the grave site, or the planting of native flora, including a tree, in some other area of the burial grounds. Bodies are buried in a fairly uniform fashion in plots the cemetery has laid out, side by side and row by row, to maximize the number of burials. While a green cemetery normally allows for more space between graves than a conventional cemetery, it simply wouldn't work to plant a Black Willow two or three feet next to an Eastern White Pine and expect them both to thrive.
An example of a green cemetery that allows memorial plantings is Penn Forest Natural Burial Park near Pittsburgh. See their Memorialization webpage. A family can purchase plantings for the grave, or purchase a tree as part of the cemetery's overall restoration plan:
People who want to memorialize or honor a loved one
purchase and plant trees in our current forest restoration areas,
following the plan developed by our landscape designer.
In an ongoing effort to keep the issue of funeral home price transparency on the public's radar, our parent organization, Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA), has released a new study demonstrating how few funeral homes post price information on their websites.
The Federal Trade Commission Funeral Rule requires funeral homes to provide a copy of the General Price List (GPL) to anyone who asks in person for it, and to provide price information over the phone. The GPL provides consumers with itemized price information for each service the funeral home offers, such as embalming or cremation.
Can you become a tree after you die?
"Myself, I like the idea of becoming a tree. Always loved trees."
In nearly every FCA of MN presentation on after death choices and planning, someone in attendance asks whether its possible to grow into a tree after death. "I would love to have my corpse feed a growing tree," as one person graphically put it.
Thanks to widespread press coverage of new and proposed burial products (like the hugely impractical and not-ready-for-prime-time "burial pod"), it's not surprising that a lot of people find the prospect of turning into a stately oak appealing.
Throw in growing press coverage of natural (green) burial, and its availability locally, and people simply assume that when their unembalmed and shrouded body is buried in a shallow grave, a seedling or sapling they've selected before death can be planted on top. It all sounds lovely except for one problem: no green cemetery in the U.S allows a tree to be planted on a grave. Wildflowers and grasses native to the area? Yes. A tree? No.
Why Not?
Many green cemeteries are committed to restoring native flora, and so permit either the planting of grasses and wildflowers directly on the grave site, or the planting of native flora, including a tree, in some other area of the burial grounds. Bodies are buried in a fairly uniform fashion in plots the cemetery has laid out, side by side and row by row, to maximize the number of burials. While a green cemetery normally allows for more space between graves than a conventional cemetery, it simply wouldn't work to plant a Black Willow two or three feet next to an Eastern White Pine and expect them both to thrive.
An example of a green cemetery that allows memorial plantings is Penn Forest Natural Burial Park near Pittsburgh. See their Memorialization webpage. A family can purchase plantings for the grave, or purchase a tree as part of the cemetery's overall restoration plan:
People who want to memorialize or honor a loved one
purchase and plant trees in our current forest restoration areas,
following the plan developed by our landscape designer.
Penn Forest Natural Burial Ground
Pete McQuillan of Penn Forest described the tree planting process this way:
The cemetery is divided into several groves. Each grove is divided in half. One half of a grove is for full body burials. The other half is for planting trees according to their landscape plan.
"Once the burial half of a Grove is full (that hasn't happened yet), we will start doing burials in the other half, and we will start planting trees in what was previously the burial half. In that way, after a long time we will end up planting some trees on some old graves as required to complete our forest landscaping."
So "after a long time," trees will be planted "on some old graves." No guarantee it will be on or near your grave, or that your descendants 50 or more years on will know about it.
With natural burial, your bodily remains will in a very short time begin contributing nutrients to the surrounding ground and what's growing in it. You won't become a tree, but your bodily remains will have contributed to the support of whatever is eventually planted where your body was buried many years ago. And though there's no guarantee a tree will grow out of the exact spot where your remains were once planted, rest assured you will have already become part of the forest.
Pete McQuillan of Penn Forest described the tree planting process this way:
The cemetery is divided into several groves. Each grove is divided in half. One half of a grove is for full body burials. The other half is for planting trees according to their landscape plan.
"Once the burial half of a Grove is full (that hasn't happened yet), we will start doing burials in the other half, and we will start planting trees in what was previously the burial half. In that way, after a long time we will end up planting some trees on some old graves as required to complete our forest landscaping."
So "after a long time," trees will be planted "on some old graves." No guarantee it will be on or near your grave, or that your descendants 50 or more years on will know about it.
With natural burial, your bodily remains will in a very short time begin contributing nutrients to the surrounding ground and what's growing in it. You won't become a tree, but your bodily remains will have contributed to the support of whatever is eventually planted where your body was buried many years ago. And though there's no guarantee a tree will grow out of the exact spot where your remains were once planted, rest assured you will have already become part of the forest.
New way to bury ashes -- you still won't become a tree
An article in the Summer 2016 Newsletter featured a product called the Bios Urn, a tree planting system containing your cremated remains. The cylindrical urn has two parts – a top capsule with a soil mix to allow germination of a tree seed, and a bottom cone where the ashes are placed.
The Bios Urn is marketed as the world's "first biodegradable urn designed to convert you into a tree after life."
"Imagine you could become a tree," the Bios Urn promotional video states.
Product Claims
What about these claims? It depends on what is meant by "you." Because there is no "you" left after you die. “You” are no more. That's the definition of death. Your cremated remains are not “you” either. They are the bone matter that remains after a dead human body is cremated.
But will your cremated remains - your ashes - become a tree? That seems to be what Bios Urn is claiming. However, there are a couple of problems. In the first place, cremated remains don’t decompose – they are not biodegradable. They are not a growing medium for plant life, as anyone who has poured a few cups of ashes around the base of a rose bush soon finds out. Cremated remains have a very high pH level, and an extremely high amount of salt, which is why that rose bush died. Secondly, while there are some nutrients in cremated remains, they lack other essential nutrients, thus inhibiting plant growth.
So any planting system for cremated remains must shield what is growing above them from their toxic effect on plant growth. And the Bios Urn does this: the upper part of the urn is sealed off from the lower part to ensure the seed sprouts. The lower part of the urn, according to the website, is for storing the ashes. This lower part of the urn will eventually decompose, and Bios Urn claims this will help the growth of the tree. No explanation is given as to how this happens.
It seems to us that a product claiming your cremated remains can play a vital – essential? – role in the growth of a tree – indeed, can become a tree – needs to explain on its website how this growth happens because of your ashes and not in spite of them.
OK, But Where Do You Bury/Plant it?
If you decide to buy the Bios Urn, you then need to find a suitable place to bury it and tend the seedling (if the seed germinates) until it can fend for itself. The back yard? Uncle Clem's farm near Owatonna? Tree seeds can do OK on their own - those pesky maple seedlings come to mind - but there's no guarantee. So wouldn't it be nice if there was a permanent, communal space where you could plant the ashes with its seed or seedling, pay your respects from time to time while checking on the tree's progress, and rest assured that someone else is taking care of that little oak?
Enter the Competition
A competing tree planting system for ashes - The Living Urn - has come up with a solution: Memory Forests™, with the goal of "Replacing tombstones with trees, cemeteries with forests."
But before we visit the Memory Forests, a few words about The Living Urn, which for about the same price, appears to build on the Bios Urn concept. The Living Urn uses a "proprietary formula" called Root Protect which is an additive placed on top of the ashes to neutralize the high pH and sodium levels of cremated remains.
While the Bios Urn comes with a seed, the Living Urn comes with a seedling, which gives your tree a head start. But the challenge remains: where do you plant it?
Enter Memory Forests
Memory Forest is the offshoot (a fitting arboreal term) of the company that sells The Living Urn. According to the Memory Forest website, "We plant a memory tree with your loved ones cremated remains and The Living Urn to grow a beautiful, enduring living memorial that will be cared for and endure for generations to come!" Memory Forest has (to date) partnered with 29 U.S. cemeteries where a Memory Forest has been or is being established.
There's One In Minnesota
According to a press release, Memory Forest has recently expanded into Minnesota by partnering with Prairie Oaks Memorial Eco-Gardens, Minnesota's first green cemetery, located in Inver Grove Heights. The Products page of the Prairie Oaks website has added a notice about the Memory Forest development. We expect detailed information will soon be posted about how the process works, what it costs, and how seedlings will be cared for.
FCA of MN will follow up on Memory Forests in a future issue of the Newsletter.