In this marketing image from a headstone manufacturer in Houston, a blank quartzite headstone sits atop a blanket of grass, flanked by two vases of fresh flowers. Most gravestones made over the past few centuries were composed of marble, slate, granite, or whatever stones were locally available - rocks composed of minerals that ultimately break down to a myriad of environmental factors. To address this inevitable transformation of matter, funeral homes have increasingly begun to use quartzite, a metamorphic rock made by heating and pressurizing sandstone to form interlocking networks of sand grains. Quartzite headstones are highly resistant to both chemical and physical weathering and are sold as options whose inscriptions will be readable for all of time (or at least, “as long as possible”). Contrary to materialities of biological death that are characterized by “messy” cycles of decay and regrowth, these textures and structures are meant to be impenetrable and immortal.
Desires for eternal memorialization in the United States is also mediated by relationships to space and land ownership. Due to a lack of land scarcity and thus no need to recycle graves for new generations (which is common practice in Europe or Asia), individual dominion of grave space is often codified in particular ways. Many states have what are known as “perpetual care” laws, which hold that cemeteries must save enough money to ensure that they can maintain graves in perpetuity. These legal configurations have particular temporal effects, embedding ideas of the human as hierarchically above and separate from the ecosystems they are immersed in. The leader of a green burial advocacy organization in Washington state once told me in response to this state of affairs, “What kind of hubris is that to think we get to have that space forever?”
In this marketing image from a headstone manufacturer in Houston, a blank quartzite headstone sits atop a blanket of grass, flanked by two vases of fresh flowers. Most gravestones made over the past few centuries were composed of marble, slate, granite, or whatever stones were locally available - rocks composed of minerals that ultimately break down to a myriad of environmental factors. To address this inevitable transformation of matter, funeral homes have increasingly begun to use quartzite, a metamorphic rock made by heating and pressurizing sandstone to form interlocking networks of sand grains. Quartzite headstones are highly resistant to both chemical and physical weathering and are sold as options whose inscriptions will be readable for all of time (or at least, “as long as possible”). Contrary to materialities of biological death that are characterized by “messy” cycles of decay and regrowth, these textures and structures are meant to be impenetrable and immortal.
Desires for eternal memorialization in the United States is also mediated by relationships to space and land ownership. Due to a lack of land scarcity and thus no need to recycle graves for new generations (which is common practice in Europe or Asia), individual dominion of grave space is often codified in particular ways. Many states have what are known as “perpetual care” laws, which hold that cemeteries must save enough money to ensure that they can maintain graves in perpetuity. These legal configurations have particular temporal effects, embedding ideas of the human as hierarchically above and separate from the ecosystems they are immersed in. The leader of a green burial advocacy organization in Washington state once told me in response to this state of affairs, “What kind of hubris is that to think we get to have that space forever?”