By Joshua Kay

On a cloudy afternoon this past winter, as we stood in the muted, gray light of our kitchen, I said to my wife, “When I die, just put me in the ground, maybe wrapped in a shroud—or in a pine box, or something like that—and let nature do its thing.”

“Me too,” she said. “That’s what I want, too.” With that, we’d sketched out a key portion of our after-death instructions, and we soon found ourselves talking about it with others. A friend told me that if he could, he’d just have his body laid out in the woods. Then another friend revealed she wanted her body to be composted.

In short, what we all wanted was to be returned to nature through a green burial—well, except the friend who wanted his body to be tossed into the woods. No burial there, but close enough.

We are not alone. According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), over 70% of cemeteries report that demand for green burial is increasing. In 2022, the NFDA found that nearly 61% of surveyed consumers expressed an interest in exploring green funeral options, up almost five percentage points over the year before. With many Americans still unaware that green burial is an option, these numbers promise to rise further as more people learn about it.

The Green Burial Council has published standards for both green burials and green cemeteries. In its most comprehensive form, green burial forgoes the use of toxic embalming fluids, metal caskets, and grave vaults (i.e., concrete boxes in which caskets are sealed). Instead, the body is placed in a shroud or a biodegradable casket, often made of wood or cardboard, and lowered into the ground. Clothing and any mementos buried with the body should also be biodegradable. Graves might be unmarked, marked with a natural or native stone or wooden marker, or sometimes even adorned with a traditional headstone, depending on what the cemetery allows and the family’s wishes. The GPS coordinates of graves are documented, so there is a record of where a person has been laid to rest regardless of whether a marker is placed.

Green burial is legal, and though it strikes many of today’s funeral directors as novel, there’s nothing new about it. In fact, it’s consistent with how people have been burying the dead for thousands of years and shouldn’t be contrasted with “traditional” burial. Green burial is traditional. It’s just no longer conventional.

Merilynne Rush, an end-of-life doula, founded The Dying Year (thedyingyear.org) to help people plan for natural death care including, if desired, a home funeral. She points out that embalming was uncommon in the United States prior to the Civil War, when the bodies of thousands of soldiers killed in action had to be preserved for long-distance transport back to their loved ones. Having a deceased family member embalmed gradually became a symbol of wealth, and the funeral industry grew. It became more and more common for a body to be embalmed and otherwise prepared by a funeral parlor rather than laid out, washed, and dressed in one’s home by family members. The home funeral, which was common until the 1930’s, was largely relegated to history. So, too, was green burial. Now it’s coming back.

Rush was introduced to green burial around 2008. She had been a birth midwife for decades, leaving that practice in 2007. A friend sent her an article in which she learned about both green burial and home funerals. “It just really appealed to me,” she said, “because it woke something up in me that was dissatisfied about what I’d experienced in my own family. What appealed to me is that this is what I want for myself and for my family.” Soon, she was on the boards of directors of both the National Home Funeral Alliance and the Green Burial Council. Rush was careful to clarify that home funeral and green burial are separate decisions. Home funeral deals with after-death care of the body and related rituals, and green burial addresses final disposition. Rush stressed that it’s important to work with a funeral director who can understand and offer what you want.

Funeral director Mike Mitchell owns and manages Staffan-Mitchell Funeral Home in Chelsea, which offers green burial services as well as conventional options. Mitchell has a degree in environmental and natural resource policy studies from Michigan State University. After working in several environmental jobs, he was lured back to the family business and eventually earned a degree in mortuary science. Soon after that, in about 2007, he connected with the head of the Green Burial Council and learned about the practice. Prior to that, Mitchell didn’t know that green burial was an option despite his environmental background. Soon, he met Rush, and the two have worked together on behalf of many families providing after-death care for their loved ones.

According to Mitchell and Rush, there are about fifteen cemeteries in Michigan that offer some form of green burial. Some are near Ann Arbor, including in Dexter, Chelsea, and Milan, but none are within Ann Arbor. Mitchell notes that all the green burial grounds in Michigan are part of hybrid cemeteries that offer both conventional and green burial. The Green Burial Council website (greenburialcouncil.org) also describes “natural” burial grounds, which are entirely devoted to green burial practices, and “conservation” burial grounds, which are “affiliated with or in partnership with a land trust or other conservation entity.” Conservation burial grounds preserve native or natural habitat and flora and are legally protected in perpetuity by instruments like deed restrictions and conservation easements. Michigan does not yet have any natural or conservation burial grounds, but with increasing interest in green burial, it’s possible that some will be established.

Both Mitchell and Rush emphasize the flexibility of green burial options. Mitchell said, “I always tell people, whether they use my facility or not, to call and ask questions.”

Rush agrees, noting that funeral directors might say they handle green burials, but it’s important to ask detailed questions about how they do that and how willing they are to have family involvement. “There’s no one right way to do a green burial,” Rush said. “No one right way that everyone agrees on, so it’s incumbent upon a person to do some research and know what they want.”

Green burial can be more affordable than conventional burial, Mitchell said, depending on what the family wants. Again, it’s important to discuss details with the funeral director. While cremation tends to be cheaper than green burial, it isn’t an environmentally sound option, since it requires the equivalent energy of driving a car across the country to cremate a single body. With more people concerned about their environmental impact and wanting to be returned to nature after they die, Mitchell believes demand for green burial will continue to rise. He noted that as more cemeteries offer the option, more people will learn about it and choose it for themselves, a case of supply influencing demand. Rush, meanwhile, hopes that more people will ask cemeteries to allow green burial. If people do so, she believes cemeteries will “start getting with the program.”

Some people have misgivings about green burial. Rush said that people sometimes fear that animals will dig up a body or that bodies buried directly in the ground can spread disease or contaminate ground water. However, the practice does not actually pose these risks. Others worry that the lack of embalming prohibits any visitation, but Mitchell said simple measures like refrigeration and using dry ice address these concerns.

Green burial isn’t the only environmentally sound method of after-death disposition. Another approach is natural organic reduction or, more colloquially, human composting. This practice is not yet legal in Michigan, but an increasing number of states allow it. The process involves placing a body in a vessel with various organic materials and allowing microbes to reduce the body to soil. Various companies offer human composting, mainly in Washington and Oregon.

Mitchell hasn’t yet encountered much interest in human composting in Michigan, but he said the option may become more widespread out of necessity. “Eventually, we are going to run out of space to bury the dead. Here in Southeast Michigan, there’s not a whole lot of room for new cemeteries, so you could see some form of composting in a cemetery or elsewhere. I think some form of it will happen at some point in time.”

Rush has found that the desire for green burial is usually motivated primarily by environmental concerns, or the wish to nurture the earth with one’s last act. But people often get much more out of it, perhaps especially when combined with a home funeral or in-home vigil. Rush said of family members, “They say it’s beautiful. They say it’s meaningful. In the midst of grief, it feels good, and ultimately it helps them on their grief journey to be able to wade into the pain of it and make choices that heal.”

Mitchell agrees. “When I do a service that has an in-home vigil, and then these people are caring for their dead at home, I don’t think I’ve had a request for grief counseling, because these people have been caring for their loved one and they see the death and the finality of it. It’s a meaningful process of death and dying and caring for the dead.”

No matter the motivation and exact wishes of a person and their family, both Rush and Mitchell encourage people to reach out and discuss them. The amount of flexibility can be surprising and comforting. People should also discuss their wishes with their family members.

“While death is hard,” Rush said, “thinking about this ahead of time, and knowing what different options are available and sharing [your wishes] with your loved ones so at the time they have the comfort of knowing what you want… It’s a loving thing to do, and there’s no one right way to do it.”

For more information on Green burial you can reach Merilynne Rush online at thedyingyear.org or by email at thedyingyear@gmail.com.

To reach Michael Mitchell visit mitchellfuneral.com/chelsea-michigan or call (734) 475-1444.