Please read this touching essay by Nicole Brodeur, a columnist for the Seattle Times, about her family scattering her mother's cremated remains. When Nicole wrote about her mother's death last year I emailed her and we corresponded for a little while about life, death and memories. I was glad to see this follow-up column. I posted it on my facebook page with the comment that while a lot of people in death care disapprove of scattering, and that I agree there should be a place to "visit" your loved one, that does not mean scattering can't be a meaningful, healing experience and form of disposition. Just a refreshing look at our profession from the point of view of those whom we serve.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nicolebrodeur/2009465947_brodeur14m.html

Note: This is part 2 of a 2-part discussion of cremation.

WHAT: Spring Grove would like 100 percent of the people who make use of its crematory to stay at Spring Grove. That's not happening yet, but we've been changing our strategies for working with cremation families and our retention rate is climbing rapidly. We also find cremation memorialization areas can provide good income for the cemetery, and often are a lot of fun to plan, involving creativity and imagination.

At Cremation Association of North America training seminars, we've talked to some of the East Coast "big boys" as far as crematory operations, places where they're handing 2,000 or more cremations a year, compared with Spring Grove's 200. But up to 90 percent of those cremated remains are being returned to a funeral director, final disposition unknown. At Spring Grove, we're retaining 50 to 60 percent at the cemetery.

WHY: When we look at what it costs to run our crematorium properly and what we're charging for cremation—especially to families who bought cremation certificates from Spring Grove preneed at prices set 30 or 40 years ago—it's a concern.

Looking at the numbers, it's obvious that memorialization is crucial in terms of the dollars the cemetery receives. We also believe it's of real and lasting value to the family.

HOW: "I want to keep my husband (or Dad, or Mom) on the mantel." How often do you hear that? That does seem to be the very first comment from a lot of survivors. In fact, some people perceive this as one of the advantages of cremation: "I can bring my spouse home; I haven't lost my loved one entirely."

It's understandable, and we in the business need to be sympathetic to this impulse grieving people have to try to hang on their deceased loved one. Our job is to help them see a bit beyond that and realize the benefits to themselves, other survivors and future generations of a final resting place—and to provide some great options.

It's your job as a cemeterian to show these families something that will make them say, "You know what, I think this would be a better place for Dad than sitting on my mantel."

Good family service follow-up can really make a difference here. Just as cremation gives people the option of scheduling a memorial service at any time, rather than within days of the death, so the cremated remains allow people to decide two months, four months, six months down the road to select memorialization in a cemetery.

Just make sure your family counselors will be able to show families the right spot when they ask themselves, "What would Dad have liked?"

Our options
We think everyone deserves a "footprint," so one thing we don’t offer is a scattering garden, even though we know it's a popular option today. We promote property instead of scattering, though who knows, someday we may change our minds.

So, what do we offer families?

• Interment in existing family lots, of course. We've thought this through to incredible detail. For decades now—possibly 50 years—our rules and regulations have allowed for two sets of human remains in one space, as long as at least one is cremated remains. So you can have one full-body casket and a set of cremated remains or two sets of cremated remains. (We only allow two full-body caskets in our lawn areas specifically constructed for double-depth burials.)

We diagram with scientific accuracy exactly where the remains must be placed, so that when the second interment takes place we know exactly where the first one is located. You don't want confusion, you don't want people bumbling around, saying, "Wait a minute, there's something down here already."

• Cremation areas within sections. We developed our first one in 1967 when we opened our Johnny Appleseed section. The feature is a bronze statue of John "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman by a Dayton, Ohio, sculptor. We didn't have many cremations back then, so the garden got off to a slow start, but the popularity eventually took off exponentially and by the '90s we were sold out.

People were still asking for space in that garden, so we took a look at some land nearby that had been left vacant. (The Grove tries to incorporate some undeveloped land in its designs rather than designing areas so that there's no room for changes in the future.) We were able to put in another 30-40 spaces, but within three years those were gone.

Last fall, we opened an area on the other side of a small roadway from the original Johnny Appleseed area, with hundreds of new in-ground cremation spaces. It ties together beautifully with the original area.

We have several areas throughout our historic sections designated for cremation. 

• Cremation interment areas with more room for personalized markers. Sometimes people want the opportunity to memorialize with a large marker. The perception probably is that cremation automatically means a small marker.

The typical size in cremation gardens seems to be 12 inches by 24 inches, and in some gardens it's even smaller. Why? Because it's always been like that?

We decided to create what we call our ledger area, where we allow larger memorials—30 inches by 48 inches. That provides people with a lot more surface area for etchings, photographs, Biblical verses, favorite poetry. It's very, very popular.

Ledger lots are created by taking our typical full-casket grave size, which is 40 inches by 9 feet, and splitting it in half.

We understand that some cemeteries have limited land available, so some of the cemeterians out there are probably shaking in their boots as they read this. Even at Spring Grove, where we don't face that kind of pressure, we wrestled with whether it was good stewardship to create lots that, technically speaking, are larger than we need for interment, larger than we need for an urn vault.

Down the road, we may revisit the issue, but at this point, we have thousands of old family lots that still have space remaining. As the cremation rate increased, we'd get more and more calls that went something like this:

"I have a right of burial in my great-great-great-grandfather's lot, and I noticed on the lot there's this little wedge of land that's about 14 inches wide and 16 inches long, and I'd like to have my cremated remains interred there."

That would mean another marker for the landscape crew to maintain and trim around, and the return to the cemetery was minimal, since this was not a new sale. And that's just a small sample of what was happening. We were getting calls from people saying, "We want to put three sets of cremated remains... five sets of cremated remains...."

We decided we needed to define the amount of land required for interment of cremated remains. Once we did that, the whole question of "Can I use that little space there to slip in some cremated remains?" no longer existed.

The issue also comes up with family mausoleums with only one crypt space left. We define how much space is required for a niche and if the family requests it, we'll have a contractor turn that last crypt space into several niches.

• A columbarium to give people a new option with a traditional flavor. In one of our newer sections we're designing an above-ground, granite columbarium we hope will do two things for us.

One, it will give us our first aboveground opportunity for cremation memorialization in our newest area.

Two, even though it will be a new structure in a new section, it's going to look a lot like one of the family monuments in our historic sections. This will remind people who would like a family monument but think that they are a thing of the past that we still have the technology and craftsmanship to offer them today.

Spring Grove still has family lots, and a family monument is still an option.

• Cenotaphs. We don't have a separate cenotaph area or feature (though we track them separately in our computer system), but we definitely encourage them. We think everyone should have a footprint, a marker, in a cemetery.
• Mausoleum niches. We include plenty of niche opportunities in our mausoleums, whether they are indoor or garden types. We offer wood, bronze and glass fronts.

Niches are low-maintenance items and very cost-effective for the cemetery any way you look at it, so including as much niche space as possible in your mausoleums should be a no-brainer.

If you've got a mausoleum that you're heating and cooling, operational costs just keep going up. Our heating and cooling bill for one building is $40,000 a year! When you're spending that kind of money on energy on a building where most of the full casket entombment has been sold, you need to look at ways to bring in more income, and finding spots where you can add niches is key.

When glass-fronted niches are done correctly, they become a sort of artwork feature for the cemetery. We recommend you deal with a lot of different vendors, because there are so many different materials and styles available, and that's what makes the niches so interesting.

Turn a problem into an opportunity
Cremation memorialization can sometimes provide an opportunity to create some extraordinary inventory that you wouldn't have otherwise. Two examples from Spring Grove:

• In the early '80s, we were faced with a problem landscape in a grotto by a waterfall. It was ugly and covered with poison ivy. The rocky landscape was interesting, though.

We started removing the weeds and as we looked at the topography—this was when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, was being built, and it inspired us—the idea came to us of how we could use the terrain.

We placed niches in the grotto and built a bridge over the water and alongside the niches, creating a garden where people could enjoy the quiet solitude of the area, really the ultimate in inventory at that time. As the first niches sold out, we added more.

• Just this year we were faced with a maintenance problem in a mausoleum. The slate on the fountain feature in the solarium had started to degrade with salt-like deposits on it.

We had decided the fountain was too loud anyway for the quiet ambiance of a mausoleum—sometimes we had to turn it off when services were being held nearby. So our capital improvements plan called for redoing the fountain. Management said heck, if we're designing a new fountain, why not design one containing niches?

This is a beautiful area, very popular. It's typically our highest-priced interior space for cremated remains, but people just love it, and all the existing niche banks were sold out.

We had a new fountain professionally designed. It features intricate, hand-cut tile with the water very quietly trickling out onto a black granite plate—first class to the max! So this was a way to make 48 more spaces available to our customers in a premium area.

The first day we made the area available for purchase, we had beautiful, professionally designed placards placed at the entry to all our buildings to let people know about it. On that very first day, we sold two! The reaction was just what you hope for: "This is absolutely perfect, exactly what Mom would have wanted."

We realize some people look at the increase in cremation as a bad thing for cemeteries, but we think this is an exciting time to be a cemeterian. There's no question that cremation memorialization offers some exciting opportunities for developing options that wouldn't be possible for full casket burials.

With full-casket burials, we can only handle an incline of 20 to 22 percent, but we can certainly go beyond that with columbariums—even with in-ground cremation burials, because we don't have to get the larger-sized equipment in to handle the interments.

In areas that would be difficult to mow, we'll use low-growing ground covers, create naturalized areas or leave the section wooded and place columbariums in it.

In fact, in our newest section, we continued our tradition of leaving some land undeveloped for the future. In this case, we left a half-acre of woods untouched.

Who knows what Spring Grove will decide to do with it in the future. Develop a nature trail? A scattering garden? Some subtle, natural in-ground memorialization areas? A granite columbarium designed to fit right in?

Like Will Rogers said, "Land—they ain't making any more of the stuff." If you can, leave some for the future stewards of your park to use to respond to the changing needs and desires of your families.

At the Grove, we look at our hills and the incline of some of the undeveloped land we have and we feel blessed, even though the topography of what's left makes dealing with our developed hills and valleys look like a walk in the park.

There are some steep, ravine-like areas in our future that we'll be able to turn into cremation areas with spectacular vistas our customers are going to love!

Several years ago our sales team came to a startling conclusion: We probably were losing more sales to the decision to scatter cremated remains than to any other cemetery. But what could we do to stop this alarming trend?

We decided the best tactic would be to create a cremation burial area that simulated the natural areas where people might choose to scatter. With 85 acres of forest and meadow, we had a great natural resource to begin with. And, as a fully certified member of the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary System, we were already committed to trying to preserve the forest and the wildlife it supports.

But what would we use for memorialization? How would we mark out individual gravesites? (We do not perform the service of scattering.) Would the trail need to be accessible? What if families wanted to hold a committal service in this area?

Over the years, we considered a variety of answers to each of these questions. Finally, it all came together when we discovered some wonderful artificial rocks that hold bronze plaques in a specially formed recess.

We saw them first in an ad for Rock and Water Creations light here in International Cemetery & Funeral Management magazine. Then we saw an exhibit by another ICFA member supplier, Valley Monuments, at the ICFA trade show last spring in Las Vegas.

Even though the rocks are artificial, they look natural and have several practical advantages over real rocks. They are made of construction-grade GFRC cast stone and are hollow, making them much easier to move around. It is also much easier to install the bronze plaque in the recess provided than to find a real rock with a flat enough space to accommodate a plaque.

With these rocks and some small, "woodsy” bronze memorial designs provided by Matthews International, we felt we could create just the right look for our trial area.

The main criterion was that it NOT look like a cemetery.  So we avoided straight lines and regular rows and even decided not to allow standard cemetery decorations such as floral vases and bouquets. We took an existing grove of mature pine trees and added a pond and waterfall and some native plantings to create a peaceful, woodland setting.

We started the trail in an existing burial section so it would be very visible, with roads and parking options nearby. Near the entrance to our nature trail sits a large, white gazebo, which has turned out to be a very appropriate place to conduct a "graveside" service for nature trail burials. We decided to pave the initial phase of the trail to make it fully accessible.

A thick bed of mulch borders each side of the paved trail. Since all of the rocks and memorials are surrounded by mulch rather than grass, we created not only a very natural setting, but also a low maintenance one—a tremendous benefit to the cemetery!

In a similar vein, we also offer very simple burial options, from putting the cremated remains directly into the soil to burying them in a standard or biodegradable urn. These burials can all be made using just a shovel or post-hole digger, so we do not have to take a backhoe or other equipment out onto the trail. We also do not make traditional burial setups, with lowering devices and greens, saving additional employee hours and use of equipment.

The bottom line is that our "natural solution" is a winner on all counts. Our customers have welcomed it as a "brilliant idea" and "just what we always wanted but never knew existed."

Many of them have a spouse or other family member who would not even discuss the possibility of burial in a cemetery until the nature trail option was presented to them. Once they saw the trail, they knew immediately it was what they wanted.

Without us even pointing it out to them, many people instantly grasped a key concept: ''Now there will be a permanent place for the family to come and visit."

For the first time in many years our grave sales have increased over the prior year. Sales of crypts and niches have remained constant, so we know we are not taking sales away from our mausoleums; we are selling graves to people who had planned on scattering their cremated remains.

We are fortunate to have 85 acres of beautiful forest and meadow waiting to welcome additions to the trail. Using at least parts of this forest and its mile long overlook of Irondequoit Creek for cremation burials will help us put to good use many hard-to develop banks and ravines. And best of all, it will save us from clear-cutting the forest and turning it into more hard-to-maintain lawn areas.

We at White Haven, as well as the people who purchase property in our nature trail, feel great joy in knowing we are being good stewards of this land. Truly, this is a natural solution that works for the wildlife, for the cemetery, for our community and for the many families who planned to scatter a loved one's cremated remains.

CREMATION
How can a cemetery appeal to people whose first inclination is to cremate and scatter? Forest Lawn, known for pioneering the memorial park concept in the early 20th century, was inspired by national parks to design a 21st century cremation garden that combines the appeal of nature with the comfort of memorialization.

It's hard to believe The Woodlands is in Los Angeles—Hollywood Hills, no less. There are no freeways in sight, only greenery and rocks, and in the distance a church spire and a backdrop of mountains and trees.

It's a place where visitors can listen to birds singing and the soft rustling of leaves while remembering their departed loved ones or simply lost in thought and the beauty of the moment.

It's a cremation garden created to appeal to nature lovers and to those inclined toward cremation for environmental reasons.

It's a place for permanent memorialization designed to appeal to those who might otherwise scatter a loved one's cremated remains to the winds somewhere in the great outdoors, only to regret later having done so.

''Memorialization is really important, and many people will regret not doing it,” said John M. Warren, senior vice president marketing for Forest Lawn Memorial Parks & Mortuaries as he talked about The Woodlands.

Forest Lawn's market research told the company that today more people like the idea of being "one with the earth" and that this feeling is feeding the inclination to scatter in natural parks or similar areas.

Many traditional cemeteries and memorial parks have cremation gardens, but they are designed along a traditional, English garden plan. Forest Lawn officials wanted a garden that would feel as if it had been designed by nature.

They chose about an acre in their Hollywood Hills location that adjoins a section of the park protected by a preservation easement, Sennet Creek Canyon. The first phase of the project covers about one-third of an acre.

Existing trees set the design
Dallas, Texas, architecture firm J. Stuart Todd Inc. gave Forest Lawn some ideas and sketches, "and helped us develop some concepts," Warren said. The bulk of the design was then done in-house.

"We left the trees as they were and developed interment property around the trees and put in a meandering path," Warren said. The path is of decomposed granite, so it is not as hard as concrete but not as loose as sand or gravel. Where steps were necessary, flagstone was used.

"Everything flows with what was growing there already," Warren said of the design. " A lot of it was hard work, because you can't get backhoes in there."

By starting in an area with mature trees, Forest Lawn was able to end up with a garden canopy of 30 to 40 foot pines, accented with some cedars.

Made-to-order rocks
Forest Lawn ordered products from Rock & Water Creations, Fillmore, California, with some adjustments to the standard product lines.

The company's faux rocks and boulders that mark the location of the cremated remains come with a flat indentation where a bronze plaque can be attached. "We didn't want our rocks to have flat spots, so we asked Rock & Water to cast extra thickness in some spots, and then when someone orders a plaque, we ground it down at that time, so you don't see flat spots."

Forest Lawn also wanted additional security to give families the assurance that the cremated remains containers would remain in place, so they designed a system whereby the rocks are bolted to in-ground concrete vaults.

The interment spots are on a grid so they can be easily mapped. The question was, Warren said, "How do you have a grid and make it look random?"

The answer: "You skip a lot of the spaces and orient the rocks different ways, and use about every style rock they make."

Each rock has a capacity of up to four urns. Phase 1 includes 526 rocks. Two earth-tone columbaria with granite niches provide 212 above-ground interment spaces, as do granite benches that can hold the cremated remains of up to eight persons.

Because of the multi-urn capacity of the rocks and niches, Phase 1 has a total capacity of 3,000 interments. Additional phases will add an estimated 700- 800 rocks and niches to The Woodlands.

People who prefer a more traditional columbarium niche but like the location can choose one of two small columbariums, only two or three niches high—the height of a rock wall.

The soft ground cover, plants and trees absorb sound. "It's very quiet; you can really hear nature," Warren said.

Visitors can enjoy the solitude, the sights and sounds of nature, while remembering their loved ones. The benches provide seating, though some people choose to sit on a rock or boulder, as they might anywhere else outdoors.

Acceptance and expansion
Construction on The Woodlands started in April 2004. Interments were accepted beginning in December. "So far, we've had a great reception," Warren said. "We had some people waiting for us to finish the garden." Sales of rock memorials are on target and interest is growing as more families learn about The Woodlands.

"We're getting people who normally would take the urn home. We don't know if they would have chosen to scatter or to keep the cremated remains at home."

Now, they're choosing the option cemeterians believe in—permanent memorialization in a spot that will be available for generations to come.

In addition to developing additional phases at The Woodlands, Forest Lawn plans to add similar areas at other locations. The next one is planned for Covina Hills.