Nature, Pulled by Strings: Mourning at a Green Burial Cemetery in New England

Describe your research in 1-5 sentences:

Given their increasing predominance on the American landscape, I am curious if green burial cemeteries instill a new form of mourning within American culture. Green burial cemeteries practice a form of burial in nature, which is without embalming, the casket, or a headstone. I entered this first summer of exploratory research at Life Forest, a green burial cemetery in New
England, to learn about family members’ long-term engagement with the cemetery. In interviews and participant observation with Life Forest’s owners, employees, and bereaved family members, I explored what it means for the figure of the dead to become interwoven with the ecology of the green burial cemetery. What was its signature in their language, emotions, and spirituality?

How did you come to this work?

I came to this research after my master’s thesis on the green burial movement which showed me that green burial cemeteries are rewriting family members’ attachments to their dead loved one’s remains.

What resonated with you as you conducted your research? What were you most excited or surprised to find out?

The co-owner opened Life Forest in 2019 as a personal project to memorialize her mother in a way that was meaningful to her—with a tree. When she first acquired the land for Life Forest, it was barren. The mission of Life Forest is to regenerate a forest through the planting of memorial trees, grown from the cremated remains of the dead. The burial ceremony, which revolves
around planting the memorial tree on top of interred ashes, initiates bereaved family members into a new relationship with their loved one through the tree at the gravesite. The ashes are assimilated into the soil, and they contribute to the cycles of growth that occur at the cemetery, nourishing the memorial tree and other nearby vegetation. In other words, the cremated remains
of the deceased loved one become part and parcel of the cemetery’s ecology. I was fascinated to learn, in my fieldwork this summer, that the owner’s conception of the afterlife is generated from Life Forest. She told me that many of the bereaved family members report to her that they notice signs of their loved ones’ presence in the ecology of the cemetery (e.g., a butterfly visiting; the memorial tree sprouting a flower). She does not think that the memorial trees house the souls of the dead, but she believes that people can call upon the deceased person’s soul to work materially through the ecology of the cemetery (e.g., calling upon a loved one to grow a flower on the memorial tree’s bare branches). The owner calls this, a sign of the dead’s labor—proof that their soul goes on. I am interested in how ideas like this shape mourning.

How does this fit into your larger project?

This summer’s fieldwork was executed in preparation for my dissertation project on green burial cemeteries in the U.S. Next summer, I will continue this preparatory research at a different green burial cemetery that practices full-body green burial, rather than the interment of cremated remains, to continue investigating how long-term engagement with the green burial cemetery
shapes mourning in the U.S.