Quote:
Originally posted by John Henry
Don't worry, the ones we've already buried eventually turn into mud and we bury more underneath them. It's all gonna be OK. As for the headstones, that is part of our denial that they're really dead. Without that denial, we just drag them out of the way and carry on working.
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That used to be the case, back in the day of wooden caskets, modest headstones (often wood) and no embalming. A few hundred years ago, your average graveyard essentially recycled itself every century or so. The old bodies and caskets become one with the soil, the headstones weathered away, and new bodies were buried in the soil. At the church I go to, we have a charming remnant of this, in that people who die and are cremated can have their ashes scattered in the rose garden if they wish. And many do.
Problem is, today's embalming techniques, cement lined graves (to reduce moisture), and built-to-last caskets provide a grave installation that just doesn't go away in a hundred years --- or even several hundred. At some point it's all going to become impractical, and those graves will have to be torn up -- either that, or we take a state like South Dakota, which is emptying out of live people, and make it one huge graveyard.