Say it with flowers… REAL ones There’s a tradition in the United States – and elsewhere – of placing flowers on the graves of loved ones as tokens of remembrance and respect. In fact, “sympathy flowers” (as they’re known in the funeral and flower marketing sectors) are a huge business for the death industry, accounting for millions in annual sales. Flowers are a wonderful way to show love and care, but a couple of trends have raised their heads in the last few decades – namely, artificial flowers and elaborate displays on artificial mounts. These create an unexamined burden on cemeteries, the environment, and landfills. Fortunately, these practices can change…
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Scatter Day at River View Cemetery
Saturday, April 22 Scatter Day is an annual tradition at River View Cemetery and an opportunity for people to provide a beautiful send-off for a loved one’s cremated remains. Remains that were previously at home on a mantle, bookshelf, dedicated display, discovered in a closet, or inherited. Many are unsure what to do with these cremated remains, but now, for a third year, River View offers an option to area families to scatter cremated remains in the cemetery for free. This free service to the community provides peace of mind and a beautiful setting for 16 families per year to gently and securely place cremated remains along the cemetery’s beautiful…
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Planting Grandma
Cremated remains are considered personal property in Oregon, so the use of a cemetery for burying them isn’t required by law – that means the garden is just fine.
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Back to Earth Day with Natural Burial
We get many things that we use in our daily lives from “the Land” – the food we eat, fiber for our clothes, and raw material for heat, homes, buildings, and roads. We’re surrounded by element-based things extracted or grown from the soil and fashioned into shapes we find useful or pleasing enough to consume. We’re also getting good at re-using the elements in that fiber, that liquid, that meltable plastic, so we don’t have to use virgin material, thereby reducing costs and impacts on the environment in the process. In fact, our bodies are some of the best recycling machines around. We eat foods that begin as soil, like…
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Going Out Green
Choosing an Eco-Friendly Green Burial #1 Forego Embalming Embalming is used to temporarily inhibit the decomposition process and involves the use of formaldehyde, a toxic chemical that has been shown to cause higher rates of certain types of cancer in workers who perform embalming (Beane, Blair, and Lubin 2009). Depending on the circumstances of death, a dead body poses no health risk when kept in a 65° room for up to three days, and decomposition is slowed by natural cooling. What you can do: • Ask for the use of a refrigeration unit • Ask for the use of dry ice or Techni-ice • Ask that they use a nontoxic…
