Here’s an example of going green in the death care industry in El Mirage Az.
SUN CITY — When Shiloh Garner of Maricopa began helping her mother with funeral preplanning, having a “green,” natural burial became an important consideration.
“We had heard about green burials and thought it was a great alternative,” Garner said. “We want to find a route that was more friendly to the earth, where there’s no embalming or casket that is made with material that isn’t biodegradable.”
“The whole idea of green burials is more natural, and returning a person to the earth like in the olden days,” Garner said.
She found that option at Sunwest Funeral Chapel and Cemetery in El Mirage, which is the first cemetery in Arizona to offer green burials as part of its services.
Those who opt for a green burial at Sunwest will forgo embalming, and will be buried in either a biodegradable shroud or casket made of wood or cardboard, with no concrete grave vault or grave liner.
There will be no headstones marking the grave, but native plants and low-water trees can be selected to be placed at the grave site.
The cemetery will even have a seminar on green burials and cremations May 23 on site.
“We’re a pretty progressive, family owned business,” said general manager Paul Gabriel. “And we saw the green burial movement coming to life, and had a few customers come in now and then asking for it.”
Gabriel said he researched green burial services offered through other companies in Washington state and New York and created a plan.
A section of the property, separate from the traditional burial sites, is dedicated for green burials, beginning with a 16-burial plot site that is prepped and ready. There is room for expansion up to 400 spots.
Green burial plots will be 4-feet deep, and dug by hand. A traditional grave site is 6- to 7-feet deep.
After the casket or shroud is placed in the grave and packed with dirt, it will be covered with an additional six inches of biodegradable material, such as leaf, palm or grass clippings, used to hasten the decomposition.
“It is meant to help (the body) return to earth as fast as we can,” Gabriel said.
Though each green grave is designated for one person, instead of double-stacking caskets which is an option for traditional burials, Sunwest also offers the option of making the original burial site available for recycling as a burial space in the future.
Gabriel said green burials would be fully integrated in the soil and surroundings in about 20 years.
Those opting for a green burial will be able to select a pine casket through Sunwest at a cost of about $700 to $995. Burial is $3,200, including the plants and tree.
By comparison, a direct cremation is $1,595 without services, and $3500 with services.
A traditional burial with a casket averages about $5,500, though caskets alone can cost from $995 to $8,000.
Customers may purchase their own biodegradable casket or shroud elsewhere.
“Some people aren’t comfortable with even a wood casket, so a biodegradable shroud is an option,” Gabriel said.
Green burials are part of an overall effort of greening the Sunwest Funeral Home and Cemetery services, Gabriel said, and making it more user-friendly.
The cemetery is in talks with the city of El Mirage to develop a community garden, which would be a way for the cemetery to use compost from its landscaping.
“We cut a ton of grass, and we have too much compost,” Gabriel said “We could give them the compost material that we don’t use to heal new graves.”
Sunwest also is purchasing a wind generator for a new well and pump.
And Sunwest is working with Arizona Game and Fish to introduce sparrow hawks and barn owls to the property to manage unwanted rabbits and gophers.
“It’s about sustainability and the life of the cemetery,” Gabriel said.
Funerals are usually the last place you’d expect to learn, let alone have fun and laugh, but that’s exactly what the deceased want to happen at this service.
Romeo Theatre Company students and their director will make a return during the Victorian Festival to make history come alive by holding a Victorian funeral re-enactment.
The performance will be held at noon at the First Congregational Church on Saturday, May 16. Pre-sale tickets are $8 and tickets at the door will be $10. Children’s tickets are $5.
Like last year’s mock wedding, entertainment and education will be used to inform the audience of the superstitions and etiquette of Victorian-era funerals, said Rebecca Couch, coordinator of the performance.
“Everyone from last year kept saying `we need to do a funeral,’ so I looked into it and another event with a lot of ceremony, etiquette and traditions is a funeral,” she said.
The same cast from the wedding re-enactment will revive their roles, including 2008 graduates Justin Kent and Catherine Raffa as the newlyweds, senior Ryan Hake as the minister and director and instructor Kendra Walls as Kent’s mother, Dixie. The service will be for Dixie, who at the couple’s wedding ironically wore black since she believed she was losing her southern son to a northern woman.
“A lot of the humor will come from the families interacting,” Couch said.
While the northern and southern families try to get along for the funeral, the disembodied spirit of Dixie will wander around, commenting on how her own funeral is going.
“Back then, the fear wasn’t of death, but to die and not be properly mourned,” Couch explained. “No costs were spared for funerals then<they even dyed horses black for the processions.”
Some curious traditions audiences members can keep an eye out for are covering mirrors so the deceased spirit doesn’t become trapped in the glass, or stopping clocks at the death hour.
Like modern funerals, a reception with tea and cake will be held following the performance. It won’t be as long as the traditional wake though, which Couch says lasted three to four days.
“The medical field wasn’t as advanced then, so if someone seemed dead they might’ve just been in a coma or unconscious,” she said. “So they held wakes to see if the person would wake up.”
Add more funerals to the list of expenses cities and towns may have to bear in the wake of state budget cuts.
Gov. John Lynch and House lawmakers have proposed eliminating money to pay for the funerals of old people who die broke. The state budgeted $25,000 for the services last year.
If the cut stands, municipalities will have to step in. They’re required to pay funeral expenses — burials or cremation — for those on public assistance. Most towns pay funeral homes between $500 and $750, according to Keith Bates, president of the New Hampshire Local Welfare Administrators Association. Homes have discretion over the bodies and usually choose cremation, which costs far less.
Burials for paying customers cost about $7,300 on average, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. It does not list cremation costs, but New Hampshire directors say those range from $1,000 to $2,800.
Bates said New Hampshire towns have paid indigent funeral expenses for two centuries. He’s the welfare director in Portsmouth, which has paid for 23 since 2001.
“For the most part we’re talking about people who die with no identifiable relatives in subsidized housing,” he said. “We’re talking about a real small sum of money.”
The state traditionally has paid for funerals for seniors enrolled in two public assistance programs, but the budget crunch has legislators and the governor proposing cuts that would have been unthinkable in other years.
“The budget savings that we offered up were in programs that had less egregious an impact on people we serve,” Terry Smith, director of the state Division of Family Assistance, said in an e-mail.
His office has paid for 53 funerals over the last two years.
Janet Poulin, human services director in Dover, said she can handle more cases.
“I usually do between two and four every year,” Poulin said. “It’s not a huge number.”
Local funeral homes also sacrifice.
“If they do it for $750 they definitely take a bit of a loss on that,” Bates said.
They might do better in New Jersey. Peter Morin, executive director of the New Hampshire Funeral Directors Association, said the government paid $2,400 for indigent funerals when he practiced there in the late 1990s.
But Daniel Stockbridge, a funeral director in Epping, doesn’t mind giving the occasional discount.
“We’re here to help in time of need,” he said.
So are the towns, when the time comes for a final resting place. Morin said many towns reserve cemetery space for indigents’ remains.
Cynthia Rogers, director of Emmons Funeral Home in Bristol, said the process is sometimes the only option.
“We’re in a service industry,” she said. “It would be the same as a doctor refusing treatment to a patient who needed it.”
