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.
There are places in the world with a standard practice of forever plots.
For example, I don’t think it’s common in NZ for plots to be a time period before disinterment.
Does this apply to military cemeteries as well?
No idea, tbh. I know next to nothing about military stuff.
Utterly deranged way of dealing with the dead imo; stick em in the ground for a little bit like they’re kimchi? Just skip ahead to the incineration part for me, thanks
Im going to lean to no. The world is incredibly empty, and we are squishy and biodegradable.
Graveyards (well, cemeteries) aren’t permanent - permanent compared to human lifetime, but not permanent.
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.
Yeah fuck randos. They smell.
Being part of a big pile of bones that can freak out tourists is actually convincing me that being buried is better than being cremated.
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.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/10/cemeteries-drinking-tap-water-pollution-aquifers-dead-bodies.html , among others.
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.
Uhh… Is it too late to change my answer?
Well, at least you’ve got dreams
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 think the idea is so that the empty meat vessel looks tasty and fresh for the funeral.
It can look fresh enough without embalming if kept cool right? Maybe a little makeup?
It’s a legal requirement.
I know, but other than manmade laws, why?
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.
It has to do with Christianity. Many Christians believe that Christ will come back raising the dead and restoring their bodies
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 😃
Prove it.
I’m pretty sure most denominations of Christianity bury their dead without embalming them first and have done so for most of history.
Nah don’t cremate. Bury the body with no box and no preservation. Get those nutrients right back into the soil as fast as possible.
Yes please. This is how I want to be buried. Back to the earth asap.
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.
Fucking bullshit that I can’t have my relatives eat my corpse when I’m dead. Land of the free my (glazed and roasted) ass
If you amputate a bit beforehand you can enjoy some with them.
Here in the Netherlands, you(r family) often lease(s) a spot on a graveyard. When people stop paying, your corpse gets dug up and whatever remains is disposed of (often cremated). If there’s plenty of space, the graveyard will probably leave the existing graves be, but if they fill up, there’s not much you can do. City graveyards in particular run into this.
According to various faiths, you’re not going to heaven if your body doesn’t get buried properly or if your body isn’t there when the end times come. Muslim communities have come together to form a forever-graveyard where their loved ones will supposedly be buried forever because existing graveyards couldn’t make any promises like that. I doubt those graveyards will last more than a hundred years, but at least the intent is there. Other communities will try to make sure people are buried in other countries where exhuming corpses isn’t standard practice.
So it depends on the space available to your community. Don’t expect to be buried forever in the middle of the city unless you have some special status, but if you live out in the middle of nowhere your body could lay there for hundreds of years. Lots of people get cremated too, so that helps a lot.
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.
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and hell even a hundred years ago graveyards in cities started becoming problematically full, that’s literally why cremations was invented.
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Just bury them together with nuclear waste. Two birds sealed under one stone and the radiation might give them superpowers in the afterlife
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?
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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.
Yes, one day the whole world is going to be a big graveyard.
I’ve got a bunch of bones out in the yard right now
I’m doing my part!
Kinda already is a big graveyard
Eventually even bones decay, unless fossilized, and fossilized bones are just, well, fancy rocks. So it’s not like human remains stick around forever.
It’s not even THAT long. 30-100 years, depending on the environment
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.
There was a panic here in Vancouver (known for it’s out of control real estate market) this year and burial plots were going for like $90,000 IIRC.
Don’t be too poor to die.
Well now I’m gonna die with $89,000 just to see what’d happen
You’re just gonna have to rent.
rocks break. humans biodegrade. so no.
So my rock hard abs won’t save me from Time?
Your best bet is to challenge Death to a crunch-off and then win.
Unfortunately Death is the crunch king. Dude is shredded.
We’ll just go 12 feet under
The Jewish Cemetery of Prague has up to a dozen layers because of the tight Jewish Quarter.
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.
Even if we fill every bit of earth with dead bodies, we still have other planets and the empty vacuum of space itself to put them. So no.
