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- [00:00]
Marshall Po
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast. Do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
- [00:59]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
So good, so good, so good.
- [01:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [01:34]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, pessimists.
- [01:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
For long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for.
- [01:48]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
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- [01:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [01:58]
Marshall Po
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to have with me today Dr. Alison C. Meyer to tell us all about her book titled Grave. This is part of Bloomsbury's Object Lesson series just come out in 2023 and as you might expect from the title, Alison is going to take us through in the book and in this inter you a ground level view and sometimes a below ground level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. This is a really fascinating book that takes something that, at least in England, we walk past graveyards all the time. They're everywhere, but we don't always think about them and certainly not to the level that this book investigates them. So Alison, I'm very pleased to welcome you to the podcast to tell us all about it.
- [02:50]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
- [02:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Before we get into all things grave, though, could you maybe introduce yourself a bit and explain why you decided to write this book?
- [02:59]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
No problem. And I want to say I'm not actually a doctor. I've not yet gotten my advanced degree in tapophilia. I wish maybe someday. Yeah, didn't want to have any stolen valor for my academia. Other shout out to the University of Oklahoma where I got my bachelor's degree and that's it. But yeah, I'm mainly a writer about art culture in history and I live in Brooklyn and I started leading cemetery tours here about 10 years ago, I believe, and or actually might have been longer because I think it was 2011. Time has passed me by, but I have been thinking about the grave for a long time and like what, what is the idea of a good grave? Like what should the grave look like? Especially in a city like New York where land so limited and so while a lot of my writing has mainly been about art, like culture, history books like nothing really grave focused, I have often written about the intersections between cemeteries and art or cemeteries and culture, cemeteries and history. And the Object Lessons book series is just a great series for kind of doing they do something kind of unique. I feel like in nonfiction publishing where it's like each book's a different object, so there's been like bread or you know, things as big as earth or hood and people writing a little bit more free flowing nonfiction than you would find in something that's like either an academic book or something aimed at being a New York Times bestseller. And I felt like that was a perfect way to write about the grave in a concise, interesting way that drew on my experience as a cemetery tour guide in New York.
- [04:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I must admit I've been lucky enough to do some interviews of some of the other Object Lessons books, the Word okay and Trenchcoat, all of which were absolutely fascinating and a very fun collection to add grave to. I think. Before we move on to talking a bit about the book, I do kind of feel like I have to ask because I think people might be wondering how and why does someone become a cemetery tour guide in New York?
- [05:19]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, 100% a good question. Because it doesn't happen to everybody. So I am not one of those kids that grew up, you know, frequenting the graveyards and taking spooky goth photos. It was something that kind of like, when I moved to New York, which was in 2009, you know, it was a city I didn't know anyone in. I didn't really know that well. And I just happened to rent an apartment near Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn and was just kind of astounded by the place. Like, for anyone that hasn't been there or seen a photo of it, which I had not, it's like this very grand Victorian cemetery with this huge gothic entrance. And I was like, what is this? I've never seen this before. And it just was found to be. I just found it to be a very fascinating place to walk around. And as a writer, I just was like, there's so many untold stories here. And I've always valued any experience as a writer where, like, while writing words down onto my computer is my main way of writing, I feel like there's a lot of great storytelling you can do, like, in person. And so I started doing walking tours there. I used to work for a site called Atlas Obscura, and I believe I did it for the first Obscura Day, which was this global event of weird happenings in 2011. And I thought it was just interesting how many people showed up and had lived in New York their whole lives and had never been there. And that was kind of when I started to think about how invisible cemeteries are to a lot of us, especially in the United States, where we don't have the same kind of grave visiting traditions of a country like Mexico. And it just continued from there. And I've tried to always think about, like, how could I complement things I'm writing about in a public space. And the cemeteries have been a great way to do that. Like, I've done tours on things really broad, like symbolism, but that also highlights, you know, our collective visual culture and the history of art to things like Forgotten Disasters of New York to show that, like, you know, there's a terrible train crashes or steamship fires that I'm sure the people involved in would never have thought could be forgotten to kind of think about, like, how we remember things within the city.
- [07:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fascinating. I think a very. I wonder if you might have now prompted people to go, maybe I should go be a cemetery trainer.
- [07:56]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
I hope so.
- [07:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So obvious. That introduction makes this question even kind of more something I'm curious about. Obviously, with any book, there's decisions that have to be made about what to Include what to focus on and what, unfortunately, to leave out with object lessons being, in a lot of ways, quite a short form that's even more intense. But then you think about graves. I mean, that's a big topic. How did you decide which topics, times and places to include and focus on?
- [08:27]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, and there was definitely a lot of things I wanted to include that I couldn't in the end. Like, I won't go into it in detail, but if any of your listeners are on TikTok, there's, like, a big grave talk thing. I'm very fascinated by, like, cemeteries on TikTok, but I just didn't have time. So I kind of thought about, like, what's the story? I can confidently tell. So it's very much focused on the American grave. And kind of its examples or places that I discuss are almost all places that I've visited, whether it's Greenwood, which I've mentioned, or like a small cemetery in Oklahoma, which is the state I grew up in. And so I tried to think about, like, you know, I'm hardly the first person to write about cemeteries or graves. There are. There's any number of books other people have written. Some people who are. Have devoted their whole lives to this, like their funeral directors or their academics that focus just on burial traditions. And so I tried to approach it like, what's my perspective on this, on somebody who has certainly spent more time than an ordinary American in a cemetery and bring together those experiences and something that's like a manageable size. Because I think, as I write in the book, if I was doing the entire history of the grave of all time, it would be probably the biggest book ever written because we all have had a grave of some sort, and it is a pretty huge topic to tackle.
- [10:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So given that extent and that range, I was especially struck by a line in the book where you talk about how our graves, despite being something that everyone really has some kind of experience with, are not as diverse as our dead, Are not as diverse as we are. Why not?
- [10:25]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, you know, it's we. I think there's a term, you know, that death is the great leveler. But it is hardly that, even though, you know, the ultimate fate of our bodies, which is not really the thing I focus on. Like, we all end up dead, but we don't necessarily all end up having the same type of grave. And all of those divisions within life have tended to carry into the cemeteries, including now, like, you can go to any cemetery and kind of see the difference between this person has a really Big granite monument that's going to hold up for a long time. Or like, these graves are a lot smaller and they don't get as much attention in the cemetery. So to. There could be unmarked graves that you don't even have attention to in New York, like our potter's field, which is basically where anyone who's unidentified, unclaimed, or for whatever reason has a public burial is interred in these long trenches, like, with coffins stacked up. And it's been the exact same way as it's been since the 19th century. It's just that, like, it's very easy to ignore because it's on this island off the coast of the Bronx. So, like, the reasons these things happen is just the reasons we have divisions in life as well as the reasons, like, some of us are able to live in mansions and get mausoleums when we die compared to, you know, some of us in apartments. Like, I am ending up in one of those group columbariums where they have all the cremation niches. It's not like a perfect analogy, but there has definitely been divisions of class, of economics, of race, definitely. Including in a quote, unquote, progressive city like New York. I found articles about segregation in the cemeteries after slavery was abolished. So there's been those divisions as well. And you can see them in any cemetery that has been open for a century or so. Just seeing how things have changed over time, but then how those divisions have endured.
- [12:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Would you be able to give us maybe a short example of something you might be able to see now in a cemetery that would showcase these divisions?
- [12:44]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah. You know, I spend a lot of time in New York, and it's interesting, I think, thinking too about, like, perpetual care is very different. Like, if you go to certain cemeteries that are very well funded, the grass is perfectly cut, there is no trash. People are visiting usually those kind of places on Sundays. But there's a cemetery, I don't think I mentioned it in the book called Bayside in Queens, which is a small Jewish cemetery that basically has been abandoned. The synagogue that owned it no longer is taking care of it. And there's this one guy who I know, Anthony Pushoda, who, like, has taken it upon himself to kind of tend to the graves there. And he doesn't have anyone buried there. It's just that he said, like, we all have dead, and he couldn't drive past this place every day. So, like, even within the city, which, like New York, you can see very visibly the differences of, like, how a cemetery is cared for and like, how that changes kind of the vibe of it, of, like, people wanting to visit, wanting to be buried there. Like, I've heard of some neglected cemeteries, like, family members wanting their remains to be disinterred from not their rooms, but the relatives remains, because they don't want them to be in those kind of conditions. And so there are a lot of, like, disparities of what a cemetery looks like and how it's being cared for. And, like, I think that that kind of influences, too, our attitudes towards wanting to visit them and see them. Because, like, if it's a decrepit place where it looks like the monuments are going to fall on top of you, people are probably less likely to go visit their relatives graves or if it's, like, well maintained. But then it also creates this error that it's like, if you don't have anyone buried there, you're never quite sure if you're allowed in, if there's, like, intense security and all that. So there's a lot of interesting extremes of sort of cemetery management, which I wish I had a whole chapter in cemetery management, but that's a future book we'll look into.
- [15:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, thank you for taking us through it. I think it gives a really good idea of these different places and kind of the idea that it's not one size fits all. There's lots of differences over space and time. But I almost want to. Well, no, I do want to move on from the dead to the living. We've mentioned them a little bit. Right. This idea of where do you want to visit? What do you feel is respectful to your relatives remains or your loved ones remains. But you go further than that.
- [15:31]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is not just a book that talks about the dead. It also thinks about graves without any dead people at all. Right. Fully thinking about the experience of the living, whether or not you have a relationship to a particular cemetery, it's still something nearby that you walk around, that you walk through, that you spend time in. Why don't graves, or at least sometimes, often maybe not serve these living people?
- [15:58]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, because as you said, a grave serving the living, that is ultimately kind of what it should do. Because while the disposition of the body is kind of its initial task, the reason to have some sort of permanent marker or something you can see is really for the people left behind. And I think what you're getting at with the, you know, why don't they always serve the living? I think that there's a lot of optimism with graves, which I think is kind of beautiful of like thinking that like what you put down there, somebody is going to care for and visit for centuries. But the fact is that even for our great great grandparents, we likely haven't visited their graves or we might do it once a decade or something. And so I think that then they become sort of these tough places for especially cities to deal with. I think that in rural areas, a cemetery that isn't visited that much or is just kind of like something you drive by, it doesn't matter as much. But in New York, there can be these kind of space voids that people just walk all the way around without cutting through, or maybe just drive through because they're trying to get a shortcut to a different street. And I think that something I talk about in the book is I think there are a lot of opportunities for respectful recreation, for lack of a better word. We're encouraging people to come just to walk around, just to enjoy that. This is a public space. In London, I know there's a lot of public parks that used to be cemeteries where they have. The actual tombs are still out and people are like, I've seen people sunbathing on top of old monuments. And that's a very different attitude than New York, where I think even in the least visited cemetery, it would be very frowned upon to lay on top of monument and have a coffee. But then it is in the end, just a piece of granite. And so thinking about how you can have a balance between the purpose of a place, respecting the dead, especially if they're the recent dead, and then also welcoming people in is, I think, an area that there could be a lot of improvement in.
- [18:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Interesting. Okay, so that's, I mean, just that mental image, right, of someone lying on a slab of granite, drinking coffee. Does it matter what that slab of granite was originally for? You know, I'm sure that there are listeners going, yes, absolutely, and others going, no, no, it really doesn't. So that gives us a really great example of kind of mental models of change. Right. In a way, and how this can be different in different places. But even within the same place, there's a lot of change. Actually, when we pause and look at the cemeteries, you talk about in the book, how there's four cemeteries within walking distance of your flat, and yet they're very different. So you've told us a little bit about one of them. Could you maybe take us through kind of how these four in particular demonstrate just how much graves have changed in the last few decades? Few hundred years?
- [19:21]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah. And I think I wrote quite a few words on this, so I'll try to keep it concise. But basically, the four ones I use as an example are Greenwood, which I've already mentioned, which is this very grand 19th century cemetery. It's like over 300 acres. It's massive. The other three I haven't mentioned yet is in. I live right across the street from Prospect park, which is sort of, for anyone not familiar with Brooklyn, is like the Central park of Brooklyn, in fact, designed by the same people that did Central park, so very, you know, Normal Park. Except there's a cemetery in it, the Quaker cemetery that actually predates the park. And I use it as an example of cemeteries kind of changing the landscapes or being part of landscapes and also being places of religious haven. Because the Quakers were persecuted in what would be the United States. And so they had to kind of like move their cemetery around the city a lot. And it's a really beautiful place. And it's actually still active. I believe the Quaker Friends still bury people there, and they unlock the gate only a few times a year. And so it's this kind of quiet nature sanctuary. Now, even though it's very much a cemetery, just a fun fact, Montgomery Clift is buried there. So they also have, like. I think they get some Montgomery Clift, like, fans that want to go in, but it's just a kind of quietly visible, yet invisible place that has been able to endure the changes of the city by having the park grow around it. And then the other two are a little bit more. And I also feel bad that, like, technically that I could have put Holy Cross Cemetery, which is a fifth, but it's kind of in the same era as Greenwood. So that's a secret for your listeners, that I could walk to even more cemeteries in my neighborhood, but it would be too many words about this very specific part of Brooklyn. And I was trying to pick ones that showed cemetery change. So the oldest one, there's a very old Dutch Reformed church on Flatbush Avenue near me. And it's, you know, the oldest building for blocks around. It's kind of like interesting stone facade, and then out back, it has a whole churchyard of, you know, 18th century tombstones that you don't really see much around the city, and it's almost always locked. And it's also like the congregation has changed over time. While there was a point when it was actually a Dutch Reformed Church, it's, you know, the neighborhood is known as the Little Caribbean now. So it's a different community that's using the space. And if you look at the graves too. They're not the kind of graves that we would use now. Like, you can still see some of those, like flying souls which fell out of favor as people didn't want, I don't know, spooky faces flying on their graves. And then though that one is still preserved, it's pretty well maintained, although they have had some vandalism, I think it was this year. But it's somewhere that like, it's still cared for. It's still there. But then just a couple blocks over, the fourth one is an African burial ground that was in the same area. Likely people who were enslaved by the people. Some of the people buried at the Dutch Reformed Church were probably buried there. And it was no secret it was there. Like you can find old newspaper articles about it, maps of the city. And yet it just was built over, you know, without I am sure, much investigation into whether the remains were entirely removed. If they were, they tried to remove them at all. I couldn't find a good recording of that. And now it's just like it. It's not visible as a cemetery, but there's been some recent grassroots efforts because there was some development proposed to build on that site to have it recognized finally, like in a public way. And I can't remember if it's still up right now because I haven't walked by recently. But there was like a really big like sign on the fence about it being a cemetery. And so this call to remember, like, this too is a cemetery, even though it has been marginalized, built over and disrespected in a way that like, that Dutch Reformed Church cemetery was not. The Quaker church cemetery cemetery was not. And so I brought all those together in a much more lucid and cohesive way in the book than I have right now. And trying to just like think about, like how cemeteries change from like the 18th century in New York when they were part of the church, like the Dutch Reformed Church, to Greenwood, which was in the 19th century. And then thinking about like, who was left behind, like the African burial ground, and then also who kind of like had to manage their own way of caring for the dead, like the Quakers when they weren't allowed into the main spaces of internment in the city. So that's a very long winded answer to your question, but hopefully that gives sort of an overview of it.
- [24:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [24:48]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
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- [24:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [24:59]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
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- [25:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [25:01]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
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- [25:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think so. I'd love to move. Now that we've got a lovely idea of kind of Brooklyn City and a lot of the things to think about. There's a. I want to move to the more rural spaces. We've mentioned kind of the differences between considering a cemetery in a rural area versus an urban one. So I'm wondering if you can tell us about the rural cemetery movement in America and the impact it had.
- [26:05]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Sure, yeah, I know. I think in London you have. Are they called the Magnificent Seven or is that the name of a western movie?
- [26:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's something like that, yeah.
- [26:16]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
There's like Highgate, Kensal Green, Abney Park. I can't name them all off the top of my head, but it's sort of a similar. So the rural cemetery movement in the United States was kind of at a similar time that those were being established. And it was a little bit inspired by them, but mostly by Pere Lachaise in Paris, which had opened in the early 1800s. And you know, they had all their own problems with the dead, like of needing to get rid of this centuries old cemetery called Cementire des Innocents. And that's kind of how they ended up with the catacombs too, is like being able to move the bones somewhere away from daily traffic, where bodies were just decaying in the open air, pretty much, or very shallow graves. And when they did that, they established Pere Lachaise, which was much more of sort of like a garden, like space. And in the United States, the rural cemetery movement, as it's known, starts in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Mount Auburn Cemetery in, I believe 1836, if I'm remembering the date right, definitely mid-1830s. And it was started by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. And they were kind of like looking at Pere Lachaise, looking at like the English garden movement too, and thinking about like, our city doesn't really have this kind of like open garden like space to just walk around. But building like experimental gardens is expensive. So they also had this idea like, well, the cemeteries of Boston are getting pretty bad. Like, similar to Paris, they are filling up with bodies. I even read some old, like, letters from the gravediggers who were like, we simply cannot dig into the earth more. Like everywhere you dig, there are bones already. And so they were running out of space in their old colonial cemeteries. And when Mount Auburn was formed, it was proposed as the solution to these two needs. So they're like, we're gonna build a beautiful new cemetery where, like, it's actually pleasant to go visit. You want to stay there, even if you don't have anyone buried there. And then also it's going to be a garden, like a park, where you might have some, like, an uplifting experience thinking about those that have come before you and like, experiencing nature. And while I'm sure they would have been excited if a whole bunch of experimental gardens got formed, instead, what people were really excited about was the cemetery. And so about every major city in the 1830s, like 1890s or so, built a kind of similarly spirited cemetery, so to speak, where there are these lush places, where there's landscaping, there's trees, there's paths. And they are kind of encouraging you to just come and walk around, like, spend time. And a lot of them had like, you know, carriage paths or ponds you could sit by and all these things. And it's kind of a. It did have an interesting legacy in terms of like informing Central park, which didn't exist before that, and then Prospect Park 2, which I'd mentioned, which I live by. But it. It dies out a little bit in the can't stop with any death intended pun. So it dies out a little bit in the end of the 19th century. And I think people just got a little bit tired of all the maintenance involved. And so the 20th century gets dominated by this less exciting lawn style cemetery, which of any Americans have visited a grave in the past decades probably have experienced, which is that neat grass, flat granite stones. But yeah, it's a very influential movement and I think is often overlooked in terms of thinking about parks and landscapes, because those rural cemeteries really had a radical idea about, like, not just caring for the dead, but like thinking about what a public green space would look like, even though I should say they were mostly privately run. So saying public green space is just this idea that everybody was welcome in to walk around.
- [30:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very interesting to think about the kind of links between different cemeteries and like the transatlantic dissemination really of ideas. And that ideas really do have such an impact on kind of the spaces that end up. And so I'd love to kind of continue this idea of tracing ideas, because we've been kind of talking about cemeteries and graves without really talking about what's in them, or at least not more than kind of catacombs in Paris. But you do talk about this in the book. You talk about not just kind of the transition or the idea that it's always coffins. You talk about cremation. And I found this really interesting from this idea of kind of tracing an idea over time, because, as you show, we might not think that much of cremation now. It seems pretty normal to a lot of people, but that has not always been the case. So just like we can see changes in the physicality of a graveyard, what changes can we see in sort of understanding how we got to this more mainstream point of cremation?
- [31:36]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, because I would bet. I don't know about you, but that a lot of the recent graves I've experienced for family or friends have been cremation. It's definitely far more common than it used to be, and I believe has surpassed burial in the United States since in the past few decades. I should remember that off the top of my head. And however, it's very, very competitive with burial, like, in terms of the. How people are caring for their loved ones. And it has, as you said, changed what the cemeteries look like. Because if you're cremating someone, you don't really even necessarily have to have a grave like a lot of people do. A lot of people still bury urns or even, like, do grave scattering or cremaine scattering at a cemetery, which is where you scatter the ashes there. But, you know, you're not necessarily having a marker or maybe you do. There's also, like, the columbariums, which have niches for urns. So there's a lot of different structures that became common for that and also allowed cemeteries to use less space, because you can definitely fit in more cremation urns into a given site than you can graves, which, for a city like New York, where there is a limit on land, has been particularly valuable. I think also people are. With people moving around more and not having those same. You know, we don't have to go to the cemetery to walk around, because now we do have parks, as opposed to, like, when Greenwood opened and Central park didn't exist yet. People are like, well, this is great. I'm gonna go here. But I think it's. It's number two, probably on most people's list within the city, if they're Thinking about how they want to use a spring day, actually, I might be ranking it very high. I don't know. I think Greenwood is pretty popular, but maybe it's not the second most popular outdoor destination in the city. I do have a bias towards cemeteries, but I think that the cremation is interesting because we kind of forget that it used to be taboo for a long time. It's a very ancient rite, and I should say has been in use. Hinduism, a lot of religions have practiced cremation consistently for centuries, but it was not really in practice in the 19th century. There was a end of the 18th century in the United States. There was a real emphasis on, like, the wholeness of the body, and people were not comfortable with cremation. I just did a talk at the Woodlands in Philadelphia, and they have a very famous physician buried there, Samuel Gross. Thomas Akins did a painting of him that's at the Philadelphia Art Museum, that's fairly well known. And he chose to be cremated in the 19th century. And it was such a significant thing that, like, there were newspaper articles about it. And I think him and a lot of other people were seeing it as a more sanitary way to dispose of the dead. Thinking about, like, if you've just experienced decades of the churchyards being very grim places where the decay of flesh is sometimes too visible, you might prefer to be cremated. But it did take until the early 20th century for it to really take off. And, you know, it was a taboo from, I would say, into the mid century. And, you know, it's still not something everybody wants. There are still religions that don't practice cremation, but I think for the general public it has become a lot more of a normal choice in terms of thinking about what you want your grave to be.
- [35:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And that's a great way to lead into the fact that in the book, you don't just talk about cremation, you investigate a whole bunch of other things that people might choose to do, some of which might be more well known than others. What was the most unusual one, or maybe to you, surprising, one burial practice that you came across in writing this bit of the book?
- [35:57]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, because there are. There are, like, to tag along to cremation. There are, like, a lot of wild things people have done with cremains, like put them in fireworks or put them on records. You can play the voice of the deceased, which seems spooky to me, but somebody's into it. But I think the most surprising and actually has the potential to be a widespread option, one that I looked into was human composting has this. I don't know if this really has a presence in the uk. Have you heard of it?
- [36:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Not much.
- [36:32]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah. So I think it sounds a little bit like you're just throwing someone in with all of your food scraps. But it's a process where you are basically just speeding up decomposition. And this company, Recompose, that was founded by Katrina Spade, has been a leader in it. And. And like, it's using techniques that have been used for livestock composting, but for people. And they have a really beautiful facility that kind of takes away any of the squeamishness people might have about it. Because if you think about it like, it's the same as what happens in a grave. It just happening much quicker. But I think what was surprising about it is I was kind of thinking about it being. I don't know. Then you take the soil and you disperse it at the park. And then you can think about your loved one in the park. But. And also, please don't dump your composted body in the park. I'm just sort of using. If there was like a designated area, they were welcoming human composted soil there. But Katrina has a really interesting idea of, like, they are working with. I think it's called Bell Mountain in Washington to use soil from these composted remains to kind of like rehabilitate landscapes where there have been invasive plants or anything. And they're really adamant about, like, they don't even want you to have, like, a marker or to think about, like, the specific place where your loved one's soil is or where your friend's composted body has been placed. And to think about that, they have just become the land themselves. They are part of everything. And I thought that was just kind of a really radical way to think about the grave. Because even in Green burial, which is where you're taking away the embalming fluids and the metal casket and just returning someone to the earth, there is usually, you know, where the grave is. There's a GPS coordinate or there's a stone of some sort. But that idea of just really returning, kind of just letting yourself go into the. Into nature, I thought just was really beautiful and surprised me in that I hadn't really thought about the grave in that way.
- [38:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I admit I found that one quite interesting as well and prompted some Google searches after reading the book. So I'm sure that some listeners might. And this idea that there's kind of more possibilities than we might casually be aware of suggest to Me that there's no one answer to my next question, But I'm wondering kind of what your thoughts are on the future of graves. What might that look like?
- [39:23]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, I hope, you know, we've talked a lot about the history of graves in this conversation, like, the divisions of graves. And I would hope for the future that whatever the grave looks like, looks like that it's accessible and respectful to everyone. Because I think that continues to be a problem. It's like, who gets to have even the beautiful. Letting yourself go to nature through human composting, that's only legalized in a few states. And the states where it is legalized don't necessarily have facilities, and they certainly don't have facilities for every single person that's going to die that year. So I think that, like, I'm hoping that the future grave, like, is something that is reflective of what you want to. Because I think that ultimately a lot of us get stuck with, like, oh, I can only be cremated or buried, and those are my only two choices. And, you know, when I. And I write this in the book, but when I started the book, I was pretty fine with my living well, saying I wanted to be cremated, like, and my ashes scatter. I was like, that seems that's fine. But then after writing all this, I was like, is that really, you know, the best thing is, like, having my pulverized bones scattered on a beautiful landscape, like, and not even really helping the landscape. And so I'm hoping that, you know, in New York, they have legalized human composting, but there's not yet any accessible facility. But, like, I've been excited that Greenwood here is trying to establish a green burial site and also a communal kind of area for mourning. And I think that, like, having more options is just what I hope the future of the grave is. And also that, like, those options are just something that we can choose because it does become, like, I mean, we haven't really talked about this much, but it's like, death is a sad, stressful time, and often you just want to do whatever is the path of least resistance. And so I think that's why often our graves don't really call us to visit them. Like, you know, my grandma planned her grave far in advance and knew exactly what she wanted, and it happened. But I think for a lot of us, and so, like, I'm like, well, that's what she wanted. I'm happy that that is there. But I think for other people, death happens suddenly, and what you choose might be not that meaningful. And then it's not going to necessarily be something that, like, I don't know, rambling a little bit. But I guess I think I just want the grave to be easier and more meaningful ultimately.
- [42:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And how do those sorts of goals translate to what could be changed about current cemeteries? All the graves we already have?
- [42:33]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, current cemeteries are very expensive. And I think that there is also this endless selling of land to fill up every single scrap of space within a cemetery. While it is good in the short term, obviously to sustain the cemetery financially, you lose a little bit of that beautiful landscape that it might have been established with that would encourage your community to go there. So, like I mentioned, the Woodlands in Philadelphia, and I think they have a really thoughtful approach to how to manage the cemetery. Like Jessica Bomert, their director, is very open to the fact that they are in a neighborhood now. Like they might have been rural at some point, very not rural now. And so they do things a lot of cemeteries don't. Like they allow jogging. They have like a jogging path that goes around the cemetery. And I should say what a lot of American cemeteries don't allow because other places are more open, but they allow picnics. You can ride your bike through there, you can walk your dog. And so it's respectful to what their neighbors did. But also they're very thoughtful about who is buried there and how to care for them. And they have this program called the Grave Gardeners where people can adopt a Victorian cradle grave, which were these graves designed to have like flowers and everything in them, you know, as families move away, as people stop caring like that all kind of died out. And so people can plant flowers there. And I was just there when everything is kind of blooming for spring. And it's so beautiful to just see those flowers and to see people caring for graves of people, you know, they didn't know, but lived in the city that they live in now, like centuries, decades before them. And so I think about the Woodlands as a model for, like, how we can approach cemeteries as places of community, but that are still. And they still bury people. They still bury a handful of people each month. And so they're also an active cemetery. And while they don't have to deal with the level of burials a lot of places, I think that they're a great model for what could work for smaller scale cemeteries that are kind of thinking about their future.
- [44:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So then coming back to the big picture in this idea of future and what all this means, you have a really interesting line in the book Living in a Good place to die. What does it mean to live in a good place to die?
- [45:14]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah. And it was, as I read in the book, too. And I attribute that line to somebody else, because it wasn't. I was interviewing someone for the book, and I told her. She's like, oh, where do you live? It's like, I live in New York's. Like, oh, I wouldn't want to die there. And I was like, oh, no, I never thought about that. Like, you don't really think about when you're picking a place to live. Like, is this. You think about, like, it does have good schools for my kids. Like, can I rent an apartment? Is the grocery store close? I never really considered, like, do I want to die here? Because that is just. We don't like to think about death. And I think a good place to die is somewhere I feel like I will have my remains treated with respect. And that also I'm able to get a memorial that, like, I can afford if I want it and if I don't want it, that there is something accessible for green burial cremation, human composting. There's other systems we haven't talked about, because, like, even in New York, there are only four crematories for the entire city. And New York is huge. So even being cremated can be an inaccessible thing. And there is only so much burial space. If you want to be buried as a New Yorker, you might have to go to Staten island or New Jersey, New Yorker's worst nightmares. And so I think that thinking about how we can have burials for the city that are actually something people would want. Like, I'd end just by circling back to Heart island, which I mentioned briefly, which is that public burial ground. And I don't mention this in the book, I don't think. But Melinda Hunt, or maybe I do, who runs the Heart Island Project, has been advocating that, like, they could continue burying people there, but make it like something people would want because it is technically a green burial ground. Like, you put people into the earth there without any embalming, just in these pine boxes. And if the potter's field could become a desirable green burial ground, that's this island, you know, the Long Island Sound. If it was cared for as a landscape, people might actually be excited to be buried within New York City at a beautiful place on the water. And then it would also kind of take away some of the stigma that place has experienced as an island, the unclaimed and the indigenous. So I hope there are changes like that. Just thinking about, like, if you're designing a city or you're a city planner or you work in city management. I would love just. There'd be more attention to thinking about how we die in addition to how we live.
- [48:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I think you've given a lot of people food for thought and hopefully ideas for the future. Which leads me to my final question about your future. The book is out. People can read it. Is there anything you might be working on, whether or not it's about cemeteries, whether or not it's a book that you'd like our listeners to be aware of?
- [48:27]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, I mean, I'm probably the only author attempting to do a cemetery exclusive, exclusive book tour this year. So I'm trying. I think I'm going to try to do some talks at different cemeteries throughout 2013. 2013, Jesus, 2023. I wish we'd all be younger then. And I just, professionally, I guess I. I just took over as editor of Fine Books and Collections magazine, which is a nice publication if you're into books, especially nice books or collecting books. And in the cemetery beat, I also publish a lot of zines because I think they're fun. And I just did one called NYC Epitaphs of like, different epitaphs I've seen on graves around the city. And you can find those on my. I have like an Etsy account. So I have a whole range of things from like my professional writer job to just me making zines. I love to do things and it's been fun. I appreciate it, always being able to talk about graves and death because I feel like if I hadn't said it already, I just think it's important to just talk about these things because often it's the last thing we want to talk about. And being able to talk about it in a way that's just open and whatever. I know I'm promoting my book, but also I'm just more than happy to just talk about these things as a person because I think it's important.
- [49:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, if anyone is inspired by this, to go read the full book with even more thoughts and conversations about these topics. The book is obviously titled Grave, and it's part of Bloomsbury's Object Lesson series. And it's just come out so you can get it hot off the press. Alison, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.
- [50:11]
Dr. Alison C. Meyer
Yeah, thank you so much, Mirinda. Sam.