No room for burial rituals when cemeteries are short on space

Given the limited amount of land available, environment issues and the cost of a funerals, Tanya Farber questions whether the bodies of the deceased should take priority over the lives of the living

Option one: curl the body into a foetal position, wrap it in an eco-friendly bag, bury it in a shallow grave and plant your favourite tree on top. Have many picnics on the spot to commemorate the dead.

Option two: make sure your loved one is impeccably dressed and add jewellery if so desired. Place the body in the silk-lined coffin - preferably the four-tiered one made of marble - and then start saving up for the tombstone.

If these options make you uncomfortable, there are several other ways to "enter the afterlife". Or should that be "dispose of the body"?

It depends on your beliefs.

For Lucienne Kelfkens, who has recently finished her doctorate at UCT on this very issue, it is time for an inter-faith conversation: we are creating havoc in the name of our rituals around death.

"The project started with the discovery that we are running out of space. And most cemeteries are ugly spaces that aren't maintained anymore," says Kelfkens.

She says the three most important issues are space, environment and cost - especially the last, which pushes countless South Africans into debt that can cast more of a shadow than death itself.

"We must have these conversations while we're alive," she says, "because a death in the family is not the time to start getting innovative."

The elephant in the room is the conspicuous consumption. Put bluntly, the monetary "showing off" that goes with many modern funerals.

"I understand if you overspend on your wedding, but I don't understand overspending on your funeral," she says.

So how do you change all that?

Kelfkens dreams of a mobile death café - a truck with a built-in expo, and screenings of her documentary Creating a Space for Change. She says she wants to "chat to people because they don't have enough information about the alternatives".

But even if they make a new choice, where would they find the products? Good luck sourcing a wicker coffin in Soweto.

Wally Wallace, who owns Thusong Funeral Supplies with his son in North West province, says: "Whites are not going for expensive coffins anymore. Blacks are going for the more expensive ones."

Kiaat, pecan and iron are popular, and a big seller is the Last Supper Oak Dome which contains a rendition of the famous painting encased in hard plastic and attached to the inside of the lid.

Wallace says he never gets customers asking for eco-friendly options. "Steel caskets and fibre glass are popular but they take a long time to rot. And you can't put the tombstones on for four or five years because the soil collapses and the tombstones fall over if you do it too soon."

People keep dying, but times are hard.

"Coffins we sell for R800 are being sold for R500 by Pakistani and Indian manufacturers. We don't know how they do it."

But he does know how to stay afloat: "Coffins are like motor cars. You can't keep the same models all the time. You have to be creative."

Then there is the prospect of cremation. In Cape Town, an average of 1 000 burials and 600 cremations are conducted on a monthly basis. More people die than this, but some bodies are taken on the long drive back to the Eastern Cape.

Belinda Walker, Cape Town's mayoral committee member for community services, says the City encourages cremation but is aware that some religions and cultures are opposed to it and this must be respected. Because of this, the City continues to look for appropriate land.

For Dawn Daniels it was the funeral of a friend's baby that led her down the "green" route. "The baby was just 12 days old and it was so hot and full at the municipal cemetery where she was buried. It felt rundown and like we were trying to celebrate her life in the noise of an inner city."

And so, when her aunt died she chose a "natural" burial at Legacy Park, a private farm near Stellenbosch that offers eco-friendly burials on the property.

"I liked the idea of an easily compostable coffin in a shallow grave," she says, "and all around is fynbos and a beautiful view. So going there feels like a great day out."

Then again, like most things "green", it costs a little extra to go back to basics. Even if "natural" burials were offered in specially designed public spaces, a major mind shift would still be needed.

As Kelfkens points out, some burials (like Jewish and Muslim) are innately greener than others (no embalming and only pine coffins for the former and no casket at all for the latter). Cremation can also cause air pollution, depending on what the coffin is made of.

Walker admits that while the City has sufficient capacity to bury the dead for the next 10 years, "residents may find that space is not available in their preferred cemetery" in the coming years.

This echoes the fight for land among the living.

Berm graves (graves without pathways and no flat memorial stones, only upright headstones) are like houses without gardens, and graves where one coffin is buried on top of another is reminiscent of housing densification that stretches upwards (in this case downwards) instead of outwards.

But the analogy is as far as it goes.

Kelfkens says we place our dead in "sacred" spaces and then, after the first year, more than 50% of people never return.

"The whole concept of a public cemetery should be far more integrated," she says. "We create these graves which take up so much space, but then nobody visits or maintains them properly. All the dead relatives are abandoned."

At present, Maitland Cemetery in Cape Town is the equivalent of 140 soccer fields - and still growing.

Kelfkens says we are short of beautiful spaces for recreation for the living, and land is in short supply. So why keep them separate, and why prioritise the bodies of the deceased over the lives of the living?

It is a question which begets another one - the one about life after death.

And therein lies the rub.