>> NARRATOR: They lie in silence
cities within cities, where a tomb is a home, where a fire
isn't cheery, where your name is sandblasted into stone...
and your transportation is one-way.
Let us be your guide to a land you will someday enter and never
leave. Now, "Cemeteries," on<i> Modern
Marvels.</i> <font color="#FFFF00">[Captioning sponsored by
A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS]</font> (<i> church bells tolling</i> )
Since the first man walked the earth, more than a hundred
billion people have been born... (<i> woman singing mournful song</i> )
...and although we mortal souls live longer than ever before,
inevitably we wind up in places like these, with only ghosts and
worms for friends. (<i> singing continues</i> )
No fewer than two million people die in the United States each
year. And that makes dealing with our
dead a $20 billion industry. America witnesses approximately
5,500 burials a day. Most of us will kick back in
caskets. About 25% of the dead will have
their corporeal form incinerated.
Others take a more exotic journey into the next world,
including launching one's remains into space.
But most corpses take up residence in those cities of the
dead we call cemeteries. >> ROBERT FLORENCE: Well,
they're called "cities of the dead" for the most immediate
reason is that they resemble small-scale cities, particularly
if you look at an aerial view of them.
>> DAVID SLOANE: We plan them carefully.
We have business in them. We have deviance that occurs in
them. They, in some sense, are both
the sacred realms that are outside of our daily, routine
lives, and, at the same time, they are reflections of those
and part of those and, in some sense, shape those.
>> NARRATOR: Above ground, the human history of cemeteries is
made of stone and sings of eternity, but beneath, that
history is made of flesh, forever altered by the insidious
process of decomposition. In as little as ten years, the
skin of the corpse begins to loosen and sag, turning to
liquid and toxic gas, or in extreme conditions, dry into a
mummified mask. The bones, even in a well-made
casket, remain whole only for a few hundred years.
Nonetheless, it's comforting to think of death as peaceful
slumber, and cemeteries as pleasant places...
...where a single soul may be glorified or millions speak in a
single voice. At the dawn of history, the dead
were left to rot or were devoured by vultures.
Later, traditions developed in which heavy stones were placed
on the corpse, not only by way of marking the grave, but also
to prevent the dead from rising, to walk among the living.
Superstitious people feared that the dead might not stay that
way. >> SLOANE: Someone who was ill
would be put in a cave and rocks would be put in front of the
cave so that if they got well, they could move the rocks, but
in some cases they didn't and they became early tombs.
>> NARRATOR: As early as 50,000 BC, Neanderthals dug graves and
scattered broken bones as offerings.
There is evidence they marked their burial places with
flowers. In 3200 BC, the Egyptians
developed the art of embalming to ensure their royals could
contact the beyond. According to the historian
Herodotus, the Egyptian embalming method required 80
days. First, the corpse's brain was
pulled out through his nose. Then, the corpse was soaked in
brine for 30 days. After drying out, the desiccated
body was placed in a wooden coffin surrounded by a stone
sarcophagus. For their trouble, Egyptian
embalmers produced a rather off- putting result-- blackened, dry
skin stretched tightly over a chemically tanned body.
But they believed such a body would attract the psychic
double, the astral being who would lead the deceased to the
everlasting. By 800 BC, cremation was the
most common method of body disposal in Greece.
The Greeks coined the word <i>koimeterion,</i> or sleeping place,
from which the word "cemetery" is derived.
In 600 BC, the cremation tradition spread to the Roman
empire. >> SLOANE: One reason that the
Romans embraced cremation was hygienic concerns, that the
cities themselves were so lacking in hygiene that they
feared the contamination that was associated with the
decomposing body. >> NARRATOR: In 400 AD, however,
cremation's flames were dampened.
Christianity was on the rise and Emperor Constantine declared
burning the dead to be pagan. The alternative, earth burial,
had deep significance for early Christians.
Their churches were built over tombs of martyrs.
In Rome, for example, St. Peter is buried beneath an altar
bearing his name. The rich and powerful arranged
to be buried in consecrated ground inside the church.
Christians believed that such a burial meant the body would rise
again come Judgment Day. Those who couldn't afford a
proper burial ended up in mass graves in potter's fields.
The term came about because the first field so used may have
belonged to a potter. >> SLOANE: To be buried<i> in</i> the
church is to be as close to God, as close to that magical
relationship between human and God, as possible.
Very quickly, of course, the church becomes overcrowded with
burials and it becomes impossible to satisfy all the
claims on that space. >> NARRATOR: In 1374, a dark
cloud appeared over Europe-- the Black Plague.
Carried by rodents infected with a deadly virus, the plague
brought death to millions within just 18 months.
As cemeteries spilled over with bodies and bones, horrified
eyewitnesses reported on the end stage of the disease.
>> MAN (<i> dramatized</i> ): "Those infected felt themselves
penetrated by a pain throughout their whole bodies.
Then, vomiting of blood continued without intermission
for three days-- there being no means of healing it-- and then
the patient expired. >> NARRATOR: As the plague
spread, churches were clogged with the dead, who were stacked
up like cordwood. There was no choice but to move
cemeteries out of the church and into the churchyard.
When space grew precious there, in the 18th Century, cemeteries
moved beyond church property. The dead had little rest in
Europe. Burial and crypt facilities
there were rented, not owned. That meant last year's bodies
were cleared out, ground to dust and new terminal tenants took
their place. >> SLOANE: In many European
cemeteries even today, you pay a fee for a specific period of
time. That period of time can be
20 years, it can be a hundred years.
>> NARRATOR: In the 1780s, authorities in Paris even built
an underground boneyard called "the catacombs."
But as the numbers of the dead grew, the city fathers had no
choice but to give them more space.
Pere Lachaise cemetery, established over 200 years ago,
still offers permanent burial within its spacious walls.
In frontier America, cemeteries were not yet as developed as
their European counterparts. Even the grave markers were
rough-hewn, hand-lettered notices speaking of violent
ends, mass murders and lynchings.
Unlike in Europe, space in American cemeteries was never
rented. You could decay at your own
leisure. But as cemeteries inevitably
filled up, the dead in America began to take up valuable real
estate that the living felt belonged to them.
>> SLOANE: The problem was that the churches of New York City,
or the churches of Boston or the churches of Philadelphia, had
been in the center of town and they could no longer fit more
people into their graveyards. >> NARRATOR: In 1831, Mount
Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts was at the leading
edge of the new cemetery movement in America.
The goal, soon echoed in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery in
1838, was to move the cemetery out of the city and also make
cemeteries attractive places that mourners would want to
visit. >> RICHARD MEYER: The time
period when cemeteries really became tourist attractions dates
from the 1830s, when they created the first of these very
large and beautifully landscaped cemeteries on the outskirts of
major cities. They actually served the
function of city parks before city parks existed.
>> NARRATOR: In the 19th Century, often because of poor
medical knowledge, people who had fallen into a coma were
believed dead and buried prematurely.
In his short story, "The Premature Burial," American
gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe mentions a device that was
common at the time. It had a large bell mounted
inside the tomb, with a rope for the mistakenly buried to tug
on... frantically. The Grave Signal, patented by
Albert Fearnot in 1882, enjoyed brisk sales among those who
worried about going before their time.
Next: when your time comes, you might be needing one of
these-- a place to enjoy your dreamless sleep.
More caskets are made here than anywhere else.
Each day, a thousand roll off the line.
Ever since Dracula emerged from his coffin, the box in which we
place the dead has achieved iconic power.
From the time of the pharaohs, the design of a coffin was
anthropoidal, or shaped to accommodate the human body.
Like a fine suit, it was generally custom-made, fashioned
wide at the shoulders and narrow at the feet.
Yankee ingenuity changed all that.
In 19th century America, coffins became rectangular.
They were easier to mass- produce.
As the coffin evolved, its name changed.
American funeral directors thought that "casket," derived
from a French word meaning "a box for precious things," could
soften death's sting. As the shape changed, so did the
materials. First stone and wood, then lead
became popular, for its permanence.
In 1848, the Fisk Company patented a streamlined steel
model for the voyager into the next world, and advertised it as
airtight. Preservation of the corpse
became an obsession in 1940, when the sealed protective
coffin was perfected. The idea was to protect your
loved one from flesh-eating vermin and agents of decay.
As metal became the casket material of choice, the box in
which we lay dead soon became something like a car: an object
of transit, made on an assembly line.
>> JEFFREY SEELEY: In Batesville, Indiana, we produce
roughly 1,000 caskets per day, or one every 55 seconds, five
days a week, on two shifts. In terms of our size, we are the
largest in the world. >> NARRATOR: These sheets of
metal represent the beginning for 1,000 caskets daily, rolling
off the line at the Batesville Casket Company.
>> SEELEY: When we look at the automotive industry and how it
parallels to our products, we have very similar processes.
The first is we do heavy-duty stamping with large presses that
create deep draws, very similar to how an auto manufacturer
might produce an auto body-- a fender, a hood, a trunk, those
types of things. >> NARRATOR: Once the raw metal
is stamped into shape, workers apply welds, often aided by
computer-controlled mechanical welders.
A double-weld can be applied simultaneously to the top and
the bottom of the casket. Water flows to cool the metal,
and the worker manipulates the casket in a rotating jig, so the
weld properly extends to the corner.
To identify it during assembly, each casket is bar-coded so that
a central computer can track its progress.
Each unit is vacuum-tested to ensure the integrity of the seal
between the top and the bottom. A feature of the Batesville
product line is the monoseal, a gasket around the lip of the
casket. It stops grave elements like
dirt and moisture from entering but allows gases, the natural
product of decomposition, to escape.
This inhibits a pressure buildup that could force the casket to
pop open. The corpse gases, referred to as
mephitic gases, include methane and hydrogen sulfide, with its
characteristic rotten egg smell. The automotive metaphor rolls on
down the Batesville assembly line, as paint is applied, often
in the same colors that are popular on Detroit's finest.
>> SEELEY: When you saw hunter green cars coming into play,
hunter green caskets became, shortly thereafter, a fairly
popular item, so as the culture of automotive and consumer
culture of color comes in, it also then flows into our
business. >> NARRATOR: Moving from the
outside of the casket to the interior, Batesville does its
own embroidery on the cloth liner of the casket lid.
It has more than 10,000 standard designs available, and no limit
to the custom designs. Controlled by a computer, which
sets up the designs, embroidery machines knock out basic floral
designs in about 35 minutes, while a military emblem on a
higher-end machine requires more than two hours to finish.
Speed is important, because once most families make a decision on
casket design, they expect the finished product to arrive at
the funeral home within 24 hours.
>> SEELEY: Literally, if they call today, and said "I would
like this product delivered tomorrow," they would identify
what they wanted engraved on the casket.
That would be sent to one of our rapid deployment centers.
This evening it would go out to a service center that we have
and from there be delivered to the customer tomorrow morning.
>> NARRATOR: Not only does Batesville make more caskets
than any other manufacturer, they also make some of the most
expensive burial containers available, with sleek polished
metal and gold fittings, like the millennium model.
>> SEELEY: The millennium will go anywhere from $7,500 to
$12,000, depending on individual funeral director prices.
They're designed around simplicity, but true elegance,
and there's a percentage of the population that that has a high
appeal to. >> SLOANE: We live in a society
where I can't afford to spend $75,000 on a car, I can't afford
to spend $45 million on a house. These are choices that people
make, and again, we come back to if this is someone who was the
world to you, and you have bought them a $45 million house
and you've bought them a $75,000 car, why is it surprising if
you're going to spend that kind of money on their burial?
>> NARRATOR: The visual appeal of a box meant to spend eternity
under the dirt may seem a paradox to some, but a
gravestone is a different matter.
Exposed aboveground, for all to see, your marker says a lot
about you, even as you decompose.
It wasn't always so. Early markers were simple wooden
crosses, the cross being a sign of death even before it was a
Christian symbol. The individual stone marker
placed over a grave is a recent development, only about 300
years old, but the method of making stone markers hasn't
changed much over the centuries. A hammer and chisel were the
tools required. In 18th century America,
gravestones made of granite depicted familiar images of
death. >> MEYER: There are symbols
that, at certain times in history, reflect the things
that are important to people during that time period.
If you go back to the earliest cemeteries in the United States,
those that are found in colonial New England, and especially
those from the Puritan period, you find a dense concentration
of mortality symbols. >> NARRATOR: Today, grave
markers have become more expressive of the individual.
At Quiring Monument Company in Seattle, Washington, they make
18,000 monuments a year, many of them custom designs.
Such production would not be possible without the computer.
>> DAVID QUIRING: The computer gives us a lot of choices, in
other words, cut more intricate, more detailed designs with more
variety, and as we get more unique in our hobbies and our
vocations and our lives, why, we require more unique and
specialized ways to memorialize. >> NARRATOR: Consider a Datsun
280Z depicted in granite, one of the many images of work and play
graphic artists add to grave markers.
Designs go to a computer- controlled electric plotter that
scores the design into a rubber stencil.
A technician glues the stencil to the stone.
Then the marker is placed in a protective enclosure and
sandblasted. The sand, made of a synthetic
substance called zirconia, which rivals a diamond for durability,
removes unwanted areas, while the rubber sheet protects the
polished stone beneath. When the final bits of rubber
are peeled away, the finished design emerges.
>> QUIRING: You know, my father, when he started in the business
in 1925, working for his uncle, he started as a chisel
sharpener. When they were working on
marble, those guys could use a chisel about every ten minutes.
Now we can use dry diamond wheels to cut granite, to polish
it, all that equipment now is computerized, and while it's
very expensive, the cost per square foot to polish is lower
than it's ever been. >> NARRATOR: A statue that may
have taken a year to complete with the old tools can go from
sketch to cemetery in three months.
Next: if you're rich enough, you don't have to rely solely upon
your grave marker to say who you are.
You can build a mansion in the cemetery, a house to die for.
(<i> playing jazz</i> ) If you want to go out with a
song, the place to be buried in America is New Orleans.
In the traditional jazz funerals still popular today, music and a
sense of celebration send the dead to rest with a swinging
beat. (<i> lively jazz playing</i> )
There are more cemeteries and more burial methods here than
anywhere else. Common in New Orleans but unique
elsewhere is aboveground burial.
>> FLORENCE: New Orleans aboveground burial happened for
two reasons historically: one is cultural-- it is an
ancient Mediterranean tradition.
However, there was a more immediate reason that people
began to use aboveground tombs, and that is geology.
The water table here is very high, and much of New Orleans
itself is below sea level. Imagine what would happen to a
wooden buoyant casket which is forced below the ground when the
water table rises. They would get pushed back up
above the ground. >> NARRATOR: In 19th-century New
Orleans, yellow fever epidemics produced an explosion of death.
Mosquitoes rose from murky cisterns to suck the blood of
the innocent and spread contagion.
City cemeteries were flooded with cadavers, and newspapers
published frightful accounts. >> MAN (<i> dramatized</i> ): At the
gates, the winds brought intimation of the corruption
working within. Not a puff was not laden with
the rank atmosphere from rotting corpses.
Inside, they were piled by 50s, exposed to the head of the sun,
swollen with corruption, bursting their coffin lids.
What a feast of horrors. >> NARRATOR: In those days,
bodies were not embalmed with preservatives such as
formaldehyde. This had, believe it or not,
several positive aspects. The hot weather and busy insects
of New Orleans helped dead bodies decompose.
Flesh could begin to rot away in little more than a week.
In this environment, the cemetery walls could cleverly
serve two purposes: enclosing the cemetery, and also packaging
the deceased. >> FLORENCE: They're called wall
vaults for obvious reasons. They act as the walls of the
cemeteries. And they're also know as oven
vaults for a couple of reasons, in that, well, one, they look...
some of the old vaults are in a barrel vault shape and they
resemble old brick baker's ovens.
Uh, also they act like ovens. One of the reasons that the
city's been able to get away with aboveground burial and the
common repeat use of tombs is that the bodies break down more
rapidly. >> NARRATOR: After the
traditional interval of a year and a day-- the origins of the
tradition are not clear-- an old body may be removed from a crypt
to make room for a fresh corpse. >> FLORENCE: You throw the
casket away, then you take the human remains and you put them
in a bag and you put them back in the vault and you push them
to the back or to the side. You basically make room somehow,
and you put the next casket in there.
So if you see 15 or 20 or 30 names on an inscription tablet,
the remains of all those people will break down together in the
recesses of the wall vaults. >> NARRATOR: Association crypts,
built by immigrant or labor groups, maximize the use of
space by interring dozens of bodies in a single place.
>> FLORENCE: If you take the Italian Society Tomb, for
example, there are 24 vaults on that tomb.
Now, you have 24 vaults and you have this year and a day period
of time, historically. So, if you do the math on that--
24 vaults and a year and a day means that conceivably, within
one century you could entomb 2,400 people in that Society
Tomb. Now, of course, it never would
have been that many, but maybe a thousand wouldn't be out of the
question. So that gives you an idea of how
efficient the use of space is as opposed to one person per casket
horizontally below the ground forever.
>> NARRATOR: In 1872, New Orleans cemeteries were filling
up fast, because Civil War casualties had strained city
resources. At the same time, an economic
downturn left a local racetrack idle.
In the spirit of convenience and efficiency, the racetrack was
converted into a city of the dead.
Today, Metairie Cemetery retains its distinctive racetrack oval
shape. Run by a corporation, its rows
of crypts and tombs are vast enough to require street signs.
Angels, sphinxes and even dogs stare with sightless eyes at
those paying their respects. Tombs like these on
Millionaire's Row can cost more than $700,000.
Some are empty, built in advance by their rich owners, who have
planned ahead for their own demise.
In the late 1860's, the Egan family recreated their ancestral
Scottish castle in Metairie Cemetery, complete with a ruined
effect to illustrate the ravages of time.
>> FLORENCE: It's very interesting because it may
appear to be damaged, but they actually went to a lot of
trouble to replicate the decay there, which I think is a real
New Orleans sensibility, almost, to have this controlled sense of
decay. >> NARRATOR: And the Brunswig
family monument is known worldwide as an example of the
Egyptian revival style. Next, while cemeteries can be
deathly still, the sound and fury required to build a hearse
is enough to wake the dead. For centuries, the dignity of
the funeral procession was choreographed with the squeak of
wagon wheels and the clop of horses' hooves.
Civilians rode to the cemetery in wagons enclosed by carved
wooden panels, or sometimes with glass, to show off the coffin.
From the time of the Napoleonic Wars, in the early 1800s,
soldiers who died in battle were carried to their final
resting place in a caisson-- a wagon designed to carry
ammunition. When General John Pershing, the
leader of the United States Expeditionary Forces in World
War I died, in 1948, his funeral procession featured the
traditional caisson, covered with an American flag.
When the first motorized hearses began to appear in the United
States and England, they cost as much as $6,000 at a time when a
horse-drawn hearse could be had for $1,500.
But forward-looking funeral directors found that the faster-
moving motorized hearse paid for itself, because it could handle
more funerals in less time. But it wasn't until the early
1920s that the automobile was considered dignified enough for
a funeral procession. For the 1938 model year, a
company called Sayers and Scovill introduced the
industry's first landau, or Victoria-style hearse.
Its roof was decorated by S- shaped irons, inspired by those
used to lower the tops on horse- drawn carriages.
The S-shaped iron decoration remains on hearses to this day.
At the Crystal Car Company in Brea, California, a hearse is
still a hand-crafted affair. Each day, only five are made.
The death rate can't justify a production-model hearse--
after all, each of us only requires one ride-- so an
existing car must be modified. It starts when a new Cadillac or
Lincoln is sliced like a cantaloupe with a high-speed
saw. After the luxury car is
bisected, a fiberglass shell is placed on top...
ensealed, sanded and finished. After painting, the electrical
system-- removed so that the vehicle could be stretched--
must be replaced by hand... wire by wire.
The finishing touches include a bed-- complete with rollers for
easy casket removal-- the basic design of which hasn't changed
in more than 50 years. And the cost: $60,225...
not including flowers. The completed vehicle might be
one of those that enter one of the Forest Lawn chain of
memorial parks, where there are 10,000 funerals a year.
With its famous statuary, including an exact replica of
Michelangelo's<i> David,</i> the original Forest Lawn can
resemble a Southern California theme park.
But few other theme parks are so quiet, and none of them make
their own burial vaults. Forest Lawn, one of the few
cemeteries to fashion vaults on-site, makes as many as two
dozen a day... and their purpose is to prevent
the ground over the grave from settling.
In order to maintain a perfect lawn, many modern cemeteries use
similar vaults. The vaults are formed from two
L-shaped molds that fit together snugly.
Once cast, the vault is sealed and painted and shipped out to
one of the five Forest Lawn properties.
Hubert Eaton, the builder whose creed guided the creation of
Forest Lawn, felt that cemeteries should be places of
life and they shouldn't bd called cemeteries.
He wanted them known as "memorial parks."
>> DARIN DRABING: He set out to basically design a cemetery for
the living... a place for people to come, and a place to secure
or care for the memories as opposed to just a repository.
So, it really is a different way of looking at a cemetery.
>> SLOANE: It's much sleeker, it's much more accessible.
Forest Lawn shifts the landscape from this enveloping picturesque
sense, where you're very close- contact with death, to one where
you have open vistas. It's still a natural landscape,
but it's a controlled-- in aesthetic words-- beautiful
landscape. >> NARRATOR: At Forest Lawn,
computer-assisted designs deliver the appropriate crypts,
graves and tombs. Graves are dug in advance, and a
cement vault set in place. Then the whole is filled and
covered with fresh green sod. Ready for its future occupant.
>> DRABING: When we start with a master plan, we define the
boundaries and we define the types of properties that are
needed in order to maintain our inventory, which is obviously
driven on by demand. >> NARRATOR: The vault weighs
700 pounds. Forest Lawn engineers custom
designed a vault carrier to lower it into place.
Then, as has been customary for centuries, human muscle, aided
by a winch, is required to lower the casket into the ground.
Today, ground burial is the most popular method of body disposal.
But an age-old alternative is making a comeback.
Next, it's the hottest place in town-- about 1,800 degrees:
the crematory. ) Varanasi is India's city of
the dead. Situated on the northern bank of
the Gangese River, the city features a hundred ghats, or
steps. Many are used for bathing in the
sacred waters... but one of the oldest is for
burning. Cremation on a pyre of burning
wood is said to free the soul from the cycle of reincarnation.
Each month, hundreds of corpses are disposed of here, literally
requiring boatloads of wood to fuel fires.
Cremation was also a tradition of the Vikings, who, through
the 8th and 11th centuries, set their most venerated dead to sea
aboard burning ships. The Greek tradition of cremation
called for placing the remains in box-shaped vessels.
As cremation migrated from India to America, it traveled indoors,
for health reasons, into sealed cremation chambers.
In 1876, a retired physician named Francis Julius LeMoyne lit
the first crematory in America. But, actually, Dr. LeMoyne was
not the first to go<i> in</i> his device.
The body of a local baron was pressed into service by
enthusiastic cremation advocates, who wanted to show a
doubting public that cremation was a sanitary way to dispose of
bodies. Faced with zinc, topped with
corrugated iron, Dr. LeMoyne's crematory cost $1,500 to build.
By 1900, 20 crematories were glowing in seven American
cities. In 1913, there were 52
crematories in North America, and over 10,000 cremations took
place in that year. (<i> servomotor humming</i> )
Today, cremations are performed in computer-controlled chambers.
The procedure takes place inside a casket-shaped container, made
of particleboard, that is rigid, combustible and
leak-proof. After the container is loaded
in, and the door sealed, a series of computer-controlled
burners are activated. The heat inside the chamber must
reach as high as 1,800 degrees to consume a corpse over a
period of one-and-a-half hours. The main burner aims a column of
flame directly at the chest cavity.
This part of the body contains the most fat and burns most
efficiently. Later in the process, an
afterburner kicks in to ensure that any particulate matter is
burned completely before it is expelled into the air.
>> JONES: When I started in the cremation profession, a
crematory had four buttons: stop, start, open and close.
You can see today that the crematories have come a
long way. The dials and the gadgets you
see today are electronically controlled.
They're computer-generated. You have different gauges
that'll be able to start the crematory, determine the amount
of time the cremation process will take place, the amount of
air that will be used during the combustion process, the air mix
with the gas, and be able to determine if particulates are
going into the stack. There's a gauge that'll be able
to adjust the amount of burn to eliminate any emissions through
the crematory itself. >> NARRATOR: Families who want
to see their loved ones off can watch the cremation from an
observation room. >> JONES: With the multicultural
changes in the United States, with the religions wanting to be
able to be part of the cremation process, and with family members
wanting to be part of the closure, a room like this--
crematories built such as this-- are becoming more popular.
>> NARRATOR: Indians often have their first-born son push the
button, echoing the tradition of the funeral pyre in India.
The end result of cremation is not ashes, as is commonly
believed, but bone fragments. Depending upon the size of the
body, from three to nine pounds of these fragments remain to be
placed in the cremation urn, or box.
Of course, once the cremation remains are placed in an urn,
they may be cast to sea... or even sent aloft.
A company called Celestus offers to shoot about eight ounces of
one's remains into space. (<i> rocket engine roaring</i> )
Psychologist and LSD advocate Timothy Leary and<i> Star Trek</i>
creator Gene Roddenberry have taken that long, strange trip.
The cost is $5,300-- about the price of the average funeral.
Placing the ashes in lunar orbit costs more-- about $13,000.
(<i> bell chiming</i> ) Cemeteries have changed
throughout history to reflect the inner desires of humans, as
well as the practical matters of disposing of millions of bodies.
While burial rituals of the past were standardized, today, people
expect a more personal, more individualized approach...
and technology seems able to deliver the needed image,
container or transport. No matter what changes lie in
store for the cemetery of the future, death will remain a
healthy business, with millions of new customers each year.<font color="#FFFF00">
[Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00">A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS
Captioned by</font> <font color="#FF0000">The Caption Center
WGBH Educational Foundation]</font>
