The Dead Zone

For 19 years, David — who spoke on condition of anonymity — has been a groundskeeper at the oldest cemetery in Los Angeles, Evergreen Memorial Park and Crematory.

Six days a week, he sets out on a tractor at 8 a.m., with a shovel and a straw hat to protect him from the sun. Over the last 20 years, David has dug more than 1,000 graves.

Averaging about 30 minutes per grave, David has spent around 15,000 hours digging at Evergreen. This is about 625 days shoveling earth from dawn to dusk.

But he believes he will be rewarded down the line for such work.

“I know these souls will help me transition into the heavens when my time comes… It’s very fulfilling work,” David said.

While death is eternal, urban real estate for the dead is not.

Evergreen spans two miles throughout Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. Residencies and businesses surround its borders, halting any plans for expansion beyond its gates.

The cemetery is bound to run out of space entirely — it’s just a matter of time.

Already, David says, “When we need more grave space, we use machinery to pick up the streets that run across the cemetery, destroy them and then add soil.”

Lifeless grass at the drought-stricken Evergreen Cemetery.

David notes other challenges maintaining the cemetery — Evergreen staff had to stop watering the grass due to the water shortage in California. The once-lush green grass is now patchy and brittle under visitors’ shoes.

While David is out in the cemetery working 10 hours a day, his partner is inside the crematory transforming flesh into ashes.

Ronald — who spoke on condition of anonymity — has been the cremator at Evergreen for over two decades.

On a typical day, he begins his shift by receiving one or more dead body shipments that usually arrive in cardboard boxes.

Ronald places the bodies into refrigerators. If they are out at room temperature for over an hour, he says, the bodies begin to release a “terrible odor.”

Tools used in traditional cremation.

Next, Ronald checks the “tracking card” associated with the corpse and verifies it has been cleared for cremation. He then sets the body on a steel cart and rolls it in front of the cremator.

Ronald then uses a flat shovel-like tool that looks like a giant pizza peel to slide the body inside the oven. The temperature is set at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, which is comparable to the average temperatures of molten lava.

“I can smell the body burning… It’s a very distinct smell, but I’m used to it,” Ronald said.

Ronald usually wears an N95 mask — not for fear of COVID, but to lessen the smell of a body being cremated.

After the body has finished burning, Ronald shovels up the remains and places them inside a blender to obtain silky-smooth ashes.

Utilizing two machines simultaneously, Ronald burns about 12 bodies a day, each one taking one to two hours to fully burn.

Ronald places the ashes in a black box, tapes it shut, and sticks on a name identifying label. The ashes are then given to the next of kin.

Eco-Death

Chanell O’Farrill has helped families plan burials for 22 years as the managing funeral director of Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.

O’Farrill knows planning a funeral can be a stressful time, and uncertainty often leads people to fall back on what they know — traditional burial or cremation.

Building up: A behind-the-scenes view of Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s expansion project to create additional space for traditional caskets.

Nearly half of all services provided at Hollywood Forever are cremations. The rest are traditional burials.

But Hollywood Forever’s second location in Northern California performs green burials. The Los Angeles location recently received a body requesting a green burial and mailed it north to fulfill those wishes.

During a green burial, a body is wrapped in a natural cotton material and lowered into a grave. Then a soil roof is placed on top.

O’Farrill said there is no embalming involved in a green burial because the embalming fluid can leak into the ground, releasing toxins into the soil.

There is also water cremation, an increasingly popular but still niche process in which a body is deteriorated with heated water and an alkaline substance, according to Stephanie Poirier, the director of White Rose Aqua Cremation in San Diego.

“The body gets broken down into its basic building blocks. The soft tissues turn into amino acids, sugars and proteins. All that’s left are the inorganic bone materials. Then those get broken down into what you get back, similar to ashes,” Poirier said.

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Poirier described the ashes as more fine and white in color than the ashes left over from traditional fire cremation.

Despite the harmful effects of traditional burial and fire cremation, funeral homes in the United States are reluctant to switch to more eco-friendly services, such as water cremation and green burials, in fear of losing money, according to Poirier.

According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral with a burial in California is $7,290. The average water cremation costs between $2,000 and $3,000.

With water cremation, Poirier says, “They can’t do all the embalming things they charge for, so a lot of cemeteries don’t want to do it.”

She adds that, “You really have to find the right people with the right mission in mind.”

In 2019, state assemblywoman Garcia first heard of natural organic reduction after it was legalized in Washington state. NOR would allow someone like Garcia to fulfill her wish of nourishing a plum tree.

When the body arrives at a licensed NOR facility, it undergoes a preparation process similar to traditional funerals, minus the usual embalming. The body is then laid in a vessel filled with organic materials, such as alfalfa or hay, to help it decompose.

According to Recompose, a Washington-based company specializing in natural organic reduction, the entire process takes around two months to complete.

While NOR isn’t legal in California, Assemblywoman Garcia, who represents Southeastern Los Angeles County, has been working on passing a bill that would legalize it.

It has passed the assembly and now awaits a vote in the state senate.

If the bill passed, California would join Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Vermont. Several other states, including New York and Massachusetts, are considering similar legislation.

Garcia hopes the bill will pass in 2022, but it will have to do so here and in other states over the opposition of one group: the Catholic Church.

A Catholic Conversion

For many people, funeral choices are molded by religious views.

The Catholic Church only began to allow cremation for followers in the United States in 2018 — and only on condition that the ashes are buried in the ground or interred in a space considered sacred.

Despite the church’s growing acceptance of evolving death care, the California Catholic Conference was the only organization to oppose Garcia’s bill.

Father Scott Jakubowski, associate pastor of St. Vincent de Paul parish in Los Angeles, offered his insight into common funeral rituals practiced in the Catholic faith. In his eyes, people are free to make a choice about the type of death practice they want, whether or not the church agrees.

After recently turning 42, Jakubowski composed a will to organize his religious intentions for his own burial.

“I want to be cremated because the idea that I have to get this very expensive box that would never be put to use… It’s out of this world for me to have my body full of chemicals, and then put in a box,” Jakubowski said.

Jakubowski’s beliefs stem from Pope Francis’ writing, Laudato si’: Care for the Common Home, which addresses the pope’s climate concerns.

“We are moving with the science. We believe, as Catholics, we have a duty and obligation to do the right thing for the Earth,” Jakubowski said.

Most people will still want to use flame cremations or caskets and vaults, Garcia said. Some people want to embrace such funeral services because it's what they feel most comfortable with.

For Garcia, it wasn’t initially about saving the planet — it was about giving her family a different way to process her eventual death.

“It was about the experience I wanted to share with my loved ones after I died,” Garcia said.

But, she adds, “The benefit to the environment is something a lot of us are starting to take into account these days. Climate change is here — how do we slow it down? How [do we] create a future that's better for our children?”

Finding the answer may take a lifetime — or longer.