#mortuary practice

Grave Problem: Nothing Is Rotting in the State of Norway

In a Macabre Twist, Plastic Buries Chance to Reuse Plots

by Ellen Emmerentze Jervell 

"Oslo's funeral director has long wrestled with the particularly morbid job of dealing with Norway's longtime insistence on "plastic graves." Now, she is using technology to fight back.

Shortly after World War II, Norwegians began a three-decade-long practice of wrapping their dead in plastic before laying them to rest in wooden caskets, believing the practice was more sanitary. Hundreds of thousands of burials later, gravediggers realized the airtight conditions kept the corpses from decomposing.

"The priest says 'ashes to ashes,' but we ain't got no ashes on the other end," Margaret Eckbo, Oslo's director of funerals, said while walking around Grefsen cemetery on a hill overlooking the city.

"From ashes to plastic doesn't sound all that good," she said.

The presence of plastic-wrap graves doesn't bode well for a municipality where real estate is scarce and expensive. For centuries, Norwegians—and others in Europe—have reused graves after 20 years, so as to conserve land" (read more).

Graves of a Catholic woman and her Protestant husband, who were not allowed to be buried together.

Via @Earth_Pics

I wondered where to find these peculiar graves, and what the history behind them were. I now see that dichotomization can add at least some of the story:

In the Protestant part of this cemetery, J.W.C van Gorcum, colonel of the Dutch Cavalry and militia commissioner in Limburg, is buried. His wife, lady J.C.P.H van Aefferden, is buried in the Catholic part. They were married in 1842, the lady was 22 and the colonel was 33, but he was a protestant and didn’t belong to the nobility. This caused quite a commotion in Roermond. After being married for 38 years, the colonel died in 1880 and was buried in the protestant part of the cemetery against the wall. His wife died in 1888 and had decided not to be buried in the family tomb but on the other side of the wall, which was the closest she could get to her husband. Two clasped hands connect the graves across the wall.

Welcome to Embalming 101

Interesting video on an American mortuary practice that most of us Europeans finds most peculiar.

Top 10 Most Shocking Mummies in the World

When it comes to showing no fear in the face of death, Halloween is mere child's play compared to mummification, the process of preserving bodies for eternity. Come with us on a tour of the world's most lifelike corpses...

Mention the word mummy, and you probably think of the shiny case of King Tut or the linen-bandaged walking dead in a George A. Romero film. But if you haven't seen a real mummy (a.k.a. a body whose skeleton and skin have been preserved) since you were on a school trip, this is a good time to get reacquainted. In recent decades, excavators have dug up remarkably well-preserved mortal remains at locations across the globe—in Italy, Peru, and the Philippines—that have changed a good deal of what we know about the history of preserving the dead. So come with us on a crash course of the world's most "magnificent" corpses.