Q. & A.

California Dying

August 29, 2005

This week in the magazine, Tad Friend writes about the California cemeterian who is trying to redefine the idea of last rites. Here, with Amy Davidson, he talks about green burials, graveyard tourism, and the future of funerals.

AMY DAVIDSON: The central character in your piece is Tyler Cassity, who has been an inspiring and at times frustrating figure for everyone from California environmentalists to the producers of “Six Feet Under.” You write that he may end up having a significant influence on the American way of death. How so?

TAD FRIEND: Tyler Cassity is a powder keg of ideas. He rose to prominence in the so-called “death care” industry by taking a bankrupt cemetery in a borderline part of Los Angeles and turning it into Hollywood Forever, where he had movies projected on the side of Rudolph Valentino’s mausoleum, and displayed his “LifeStories,” which are A&E-style video biographies of the dead. The idea of video tributes has been widely adopted by funeral directors across the country. (Cassity doesn’t talk as much about his idea for displaying DNA samples of the dead in an illuminated globe—a concept that had only three takers. And the globes leaked.) His newest project is green burial; if it takes off, it could change our expectation of what will happen to us when we’re dead—and how we relate to nature.

What is green burial?

Green burial entails placing a body in a grave in either a shroud or a biodegradable wooden box—or, in a variation that Cassity is currently working on, a papier-mâché “egg” that resembles a seed pod. The idea is that the body will swiftly rejoin the ecosystem as fertilizer for the grass and trees above it. In a way, it’s a very old-fashioned idea—as Cassity notes, Jews have, essentially, conducted green burials for five thousand years—but it’s also a striking departure from the way most American bodies are now buried.

And how are most American bodies buried?

They are usually embalmed with chemicals so that the body looks fresh for the viewing, and then buried in metal caskets that are placed inside cement vaults or in aboveground crypts. An embalmed body goes into the ground with three gallons of formaldehyde and mercuric chloride in it, all of which merely slows, rather than forestalls, the process of bacterial decomposition. It turns out that the “sealer” caskets that kept all air out—a refinement of casket technology intended to reassure families that their loved ones would “sleep” undisturbed—only hastened the decay. I don’t want to go so far as to say that you can see slime oozing out of crypts, but, actually, you can.

You write that one of the insights behind green cemeteries is that they not only minimize the environmental impact of a burial—the metal coffin, the formaldehyde—but actually conserve land. How so?

The most expansive vision for green burial is that environmental organizations would use cemeterians such as Cassity to help them conserve land: he would bury people on, say, five hundred acres of a five-thousand-acre tract, and the money from that would go toward restoring and preserving the remainder of the land. So far, the idea has yet to be implemented, as there turn out to be a raft of legal and ecological issues that environmental organizations want to work through before they join up with someone who’s going to be planting corpses in their open space. One place where Cassity would like to work with an environmental partner is Carmel Valley, California, a beautiful condor habitat. But the environmentalists are concerned that families visiting the bodies there might carry the sudden-oak-death fungus with them on the soles of their shoes. They also want to make sure that Cassity or his investors can come up with half the purchase price of the land up front—some ten million dollars.

Tyler Cassity initially worked on Fernwood, a facility in Marin County, with two other people, Billy Campbell and Joe Sehee. After a while, they were no longer on speaking terms. What happened?

Dr. Billy Campbell started the country’s first green-burial cemetery, in South Carolina, in 1998, and Joe Sehee had been Cassity’s media consultant. The three men agreed to work together in 2003, hoping to establish “memorial landscapes” across the country. Campbell’s goal was to save a million acres from development by putting bodies in the ground, a strategy that Sehee likes to call “conservation through consecration.” But it all fell apart, slowly and then, this February, abruptly. The rupture was both personal and philosophical. Cassity might argue that Campbell and Sehee were business novices who, in the end, brought neither funding nor realistic expectations to the equation. Campbell and Sehee might argue that Cassity avoided formalizing the partnership—and that, at Fernwood, his primary concern seemed to them to be not saving land and the environment but, simply, making a profit. Despite all the fury and the consultations with lawyers, though, both Campbell and Sehee really seemed to miss Cassity, and in my piece I write about what happened when they all tried to reconcile not long ago.

You portray Cassity as a dramatic man, whether he’s dealing with life or with death. Is that part of a funeral director’s job description, at least in America?

All of the other funeral directors I spoke with, in the course of my reporting, were genial people who took pride in their function. None of them seemed to spend quite as much time as Cassity does philosophizing—for example, about how film embalms time, or how a cemetery is “a library of bodies catalogued by name and date.” Nor, for that matter, did the other funeral directors I spoke with spend as much time being beaten with eucalyptus branches in a Russian bathhouse or musing about the publicity benefits of dying young.

“California Dying” continues
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