More and more people are choosing what’s being called a green or natural burial. In natural burials, there are no chemicals or embalming, and no concrete vaults or expensive caskets. Family and friends can actually participate in the burial process, and the burial grounds look more like parks than cemeteries, with no monuments or headstones.
“I love the simplicity of it,” said Anissa Ferguson, whose mother is buried at Reflection Park in Montgomery County, Maryland.
“You get to still see the beauty that God created, and that’s why I really love this space,” she said.
Reflection Park is 40 acres of mostly undisturbed wooded hills. It doesn’t look anything like a traditional cemetery. The graves are marked by simple plaques in the ground. It’s one of the few natural burial grounds in Maryland.
Anissa believes it’s the perfect place for her mother.
“Her creativity and her love spoke volumes,” she said of her mother. “She’s a creative at heart. … Anything that required you to think outside the box, she was going to do it. She created it; she loved it; she embraced it.”
“I wanted to do something that looked and felt like her,” she said.
Her husband, Trey Ferguson, said: “We felt like this was like my mother-in-law. This was like the place, you know, just really felt natural, really felt peaceful and calm and everything that she was.”
Natural burial is about much more the just the burial site, said Basil Eldadah, executive director of Reflection Park. It’s also about the burial process and the family’s experience.
“Returning our bodies to the earth in a way that’s simple, beautiful and environmentally sustainable,” Eldadah said. “So we’re only putting into the earth what belongs and we’re leaving out of the earth what doesn’t belong or what harms.”
“So that means that we’re not using concrete vaults or liners. We’re not burying embalmed bodies. We’re not using metal caskets. We’re just getting back to the way that it used to be, that allows the body to return to the earth unimpeded,” Eldadah said.
Families can choose biodegradable caskets or simple shrouds. The graves are dug by hand. Families can even choose to lower their loved one into the grave and return the earth themselves.
That was something the Fergusons were at first reluctant to do.
“We didn’t anticipate putting her down, but it turned out to be one of the most beautiful aspects of it, to have my husband and my son and my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, to put her down. It was just, it really moved me in a way,” Anissa Ferguson said.
Because of the simplicity of it, natural burials can be much less exspensive than tradional burials.
For the Fergusons, the choice was not about the cost. It was about the meaning and the emotion and saying goodbye to a loved one.
“It really starts to reshape the way that we think about tradition and how we are to honor our loved ones. And so, a few people said to me later that it really does feel like going back to the earth,” Anissa Ferguson said. “And that’s what the Bible talks about, you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And so we return it back to where we originally came from. And so it gives the opportunity to feed the land and just really replenish what God has already put here for us.”
Reflection Park is a nonprofit. The grounds are open to the public every day.
from Local – NBC4 Washington https://ift.tt/uUrdLvf
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