brendan halpin

I did not know green burials were a thing until my mom said she wanted one. So I made the arrangements but didn’t really know what to expect. And my mom died on Saturday, and on Tuesday we buried her. (There’s no embalming with a green burial, so you have to get it done pretty quickly. They told us it could be as long as a week.)

Here’s what it was like. (We did this in Greater Cincinnati, so obviously the details may be different depending on your location, but I just wanted to give people an idea of what the process is like)

First, the burial ground is a beautiful and peaceful meadow that is also a nature preserve with hiking trails. Scattered around the meadow are little mounds with grass growing out of them where folks have been buried. So it doesn’t feel like a cemetery—there are no rows of granite markers or anything—it just feels like a field.

My mom’s body was in the back of the hearse, wrapped in a (thick and definitely not see-through) shroud that was in a big wicker basket. Me and five of my relatives moved the basket onto a little wagon, and I pulled the wagon to the gravesite. Once there, we lifted the shroud out of the basket and placed it on planks that were over the grave.

My mom’s priest said some words, and a representative from the place said some words. We had a moment of silence and listened to the breeze and the birds flying overhead. There were straps under the shroud, and we grabbed those and held my mom’s body up while the staff pulled the planks away. We then used the straps to lower my mom’s body into the ground. And then a mix of staff and relatives grabbed shovels and filled in the grave. (It was hot and I was in a suit, so I did one shovelful. Some of my relatives really went hard on the shoveling).

I’ve been to a fair amount of funerals, and this felt much better to me than seeing a body in a metal casket lowered into a concrete vault. My mom’s body quite literally returned to the earth, and in a few years there will be nothing left of her as the matter of her body will have become the soil that feeds the grass. There will be a marker—a little stone flush with the ground that has her name on it. Like, a literal stone, not a granite monument.

Once the grave was filled in, they gave me a rock to place on a cairn that was made up of rocks placed in honor of everyone who’d ever been buried there.

I was really struck by the beauty and simplicity of the entire process. It felt very natural and respectful, and at no point in the process did I feel like anyone was trying to upsell me in that “Don’t you want the $500 pillow for your loved one?” way that funeral directors so often do.

Throughout the day afterward, people kept coming up to me and saying how much the appreciated the green burial and that they’d never heard of it but now wanted one for themselves.

I should also mention that the entire process cost about half what a traditional burial would have cost.

There aren’t too many places that offer green burials yet, but I think as more people experience green burials, more people will want them. If you’re have questions about the process that I didn’t answer here, please feel free to click on the ol’ contact me link above. I’m just a consumer here, but I think this is a really nice process, and I’d like to help people who are interested.