Not-so-final resting place
by RT
Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis
From AP: Blacks lament cemetery scandal’s affect (sic) on history
CHICAGO — Harold Lucas was raised with the stories about his grandparents, who rode segregated railroad cars from Missouri to Chicago in the 1930s and worked tirelessly to raise their family into the middle class.
Jeff and Ida Lucas were buried in Burr Oak Cemetery, alongside thousands of black Americans who made up the Great Migration — a movement north during the first half of the 20th century.
Burr Oak, once one of the only burial places for blacks, holds a sacred spot in African-American history — making all the worse allegations that workers there dug up bodies and dumped them to resell the burial plots.
It’s interesting how different cultures treat their dead. I was horrified when I first heard that here in Switzerland, it’s legal for bodies to be dug up from their graves for the plots to be resold.
From what I understand, the family gets a notice from…hmmm…I guess the cemetery…telling them that they’re about to dig up Oma. I have no idea what happens to the bodies. Jeder…kannst Du mir sagen?
So when you purchase a plot here, you’re actually just renting it.
But you know something? The Swiss way makes sense (not just because space is limited), or it would if we Americans didn’t fall into the emotional trap of embalming our dead, putting them in $4000 caskets (ask me about that one), sealing them in a vault and THEN burying them.
That’s the one major promise I wish I had fulfilled for my dad. That man drilled into me that when you put all of that money into a burial, you’re just tossing dough down the drain.
“Wrap me in a sheet and put me in a pine box,” he would tell me. And he wasn’t being modest. He was being sensible.
“These funeral homes will get you right when you have your guard down. Be smart.
“And the body is supposed to go back to the dirt anyway.”
But alas, it didn’t work out that way.
Still, I’m not condoning what happened in Illinois at all. It just got me to thinking.
If you recall reading Shakespeare in high school, when in Hamlet the Prince of Denmark is addressing ‘Poor Yorick’ – he is supposed to be addressing a skull. At that time the Danes recycled burial plots after 25 years – more than adequate for soft tissues to decompose completely.