Reimagining Death Care: Cemetery Societies with Cheri Wallace

Funerals in the United States have become unaffordable for many families, often forcing them into debt, fundraising, or unwanted cremations. This episode features Cheri Wallace, who shares a powerful grassroots solution: cemetery societies. By returning to community-based traditions of shared land and collective care, she believes people can reclaim death care in a way that is affordable, sustainable, and rooted in dignity. The conversation highlights how death doulas, grief awareness, and green burial practices are reshaping how we plan for the end of life.

Cheri explains how personal loss and her sister’s struggles inspired her mission. After seeing her sister forced to turn to GoFundMe for burial expenses, Cheri began searching for a solution. Through prayer and research, she realized that communities once managed death care by pooling small contributions to purchase land and create burial grounds. Today, she is reviving this model through nonprofit cemetery societies. These groups form boards, adopt bylaws, and provide affordable burial options without the financial burden of traditional funeral homes.

Her work emphasizes conscious living and dying, as well as legacy planning. Each member can join with as little as $100, ensuring that no one is excluded from having a burial. The societies also embrace ecological responsibility by avoiding embalming, concrete vaults, and costly caskets. Families may choose self-directed funerals or bring in professionals, giving them freedom and flexibility.

Education plays a key role in Cheri’s vision. With support from the Green Burial Council and guidance from death doulas, societies learn how to operate responsibly and sustainably. Grants and petitions are helping expand the effort nationwide, to create 100 cemetery societies in 100 counties led by trained doulas.

This vision challenges the current funeral industry, which often prioritizes profit over people. By encouraging community, creativity, and healing, Cheri offers a way to honor loved ones while reducing financial strain. Instead of debt and stress, families can invest in meaningful memorials, gardens, or community spaces. It is a return to simple, compassionate death care that empowers individuals to reclaim their right to die with dignity.

https://letsbetrees.org

Transcript

Cheri: [00:00:00] People can't afford to die. We could revert back to the way that our ancestors used to handle death care, buy a piece of land and they add a graveyard, and there were no more costs to be buried in that graveyard. You helped to buy it and you could use it. 

Jill: Welcome back to seeing Death clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end of life coach.

Here on my show, I have conversations with guests that explore the topics of death, dying, grief, and life itself. My goal is to create a space where you can challenge the ideas you might already have about these subjects. I want to encourage you to open your mind and consider perspectives beyond what you may currently believe to be true funerals in the us.

Have become so expensive that many families are left scrambling, taking on debt, turning to fundraisers, or settling for choices they never wanted. In this episode, I sit down with Cheri Wallace, who is bringing back a beautiful community [00:01:00] driven solution. Cemetery societies after watching her own sister struggle to afford a burial, Cheri was inspired to revive this tradition of neighbors pooling resources to create shared burial grounds.

Together we talk about how this model not only makes death care more affordable, but also more meaningful and sustainable from green burials to self-directed funerals. Families are empowered to honor their loved ones in ways that feels true to them. Cheri's vision is inspiring 100 cemetery societies in 100 counties, giving communities the chance to reclaim death care with dignity, compassion, and creativity.

Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome, Cheri to the podcast. I've been looking forward to this conversation because I know we're connected on Facebook and you have this really interesting project going on. But why don't you just start us, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you come from, anything like that you wanna share.

Thank you, Jill. 

Cheri: I am here because [00:02:00] of funeral poverty. I'm here to attempt to fix a system that is very broken. People can't afford to die, and we've heard that all our lives growing up. It's. Actually true. My family circumstances brought me here after my sister had to do a GoFundMe to try to raise enough money to bury her husband.

She was unsuccessful. She was forced to cremate him. And I started thinking, how can we fix the system? And I think I figured it out. 

Jill: Well, I'm excited to hear about it and I know it has something to do with communal burial. What's the word? Not burial plots, but we're gonna put everybody in one plot. No, not that it's a communal cemetery.

That's the word that I was thinking of. So how did you kind of figure it out? Did you research to see if there was anything like that out there? Or how did it kind of all happen for you? I [00:03:00] prayed, 

Cheri: I asked God to help me figure out how to make funerals affordable for absolutely everyone. And I feel like God answered my prayer by telling me to revert back to the way that our ancestors used to handle death care.

And they would go around the countryside and get a dollar from everybody and buy a piece of land, and they opened a community center and had a graveyard. There were no more costs to, to be buried in that graveyard. You helped to buy it and you could use it, and it just seemed so easy to me that we could go back to that.

I started thinking, why couldn't we go back to that? And so here we are. We are helping communities all over the country. Start forming a cemetery society. You gather a group of people in any one community [00:04:00] buy land together form a board of directors. Adopt a great set of bylaws, which I'm working on daily, to make sure that the backend of these cemetery societies function the way that they're supposed to people can be buried without regard to cost.

So the concept is to have enough people in your cemetery society that you would only have to put up a hundred dollars a piece. Of course you could put in more money if you wanted to make it go faster, but the whole concept is to be able to buy into a cemetery society for $100. And if somebody didn't have $100 but wanted to join.

Aary society, by all means, let 'em make payments. This isn't about anything except allowing people the right to be buried and not be forced into cremation. Not be forced into selling vehicles and doing fundraisers because 

Jill: somebody died. [00:05:00] Your company let's be trees. Is it a nonprofit? Are you an like LLC?

What's that part look like for you? 

Cheri: So we are a 5 0 1 C3 public charity. It's a nonprofit tax deductible, IRS designated. I just got my designation last month, so I'm super 

Jill: excited about that. If I wanted to start one of these cemeteries, I would contact you. Do you provide the education? Do you help us find places?

Like what's your role? In helping me as the person that says, you know what? My community really needs one of these. 

Cheri: What I did was I made a petition for every state in the country, and then it could even go so deep as to every county in every state in the country, every county's gonna need a private cemetery society, right?

Mm-hmm. So what I am doing right now is collecting the names and numbers of the [00:06:00] people who, who say, Hey, I, I would join Something like that if we can pull it off. My goal is to provide each. With a set of bylaws and standard operating procedures for running a cemetery society and even continuing education, we're working on Green Burial Council has several courses that I think each society should participate in, learn so that they know.

How best to manage a cemetery, even though we might have it written down. Extra certification for each society is, is important. Continuing education. Using a doula was my original thought. Get these death doulas to lead. Their community in forming these cemetery societies. They would already have a background in death care and how that works, but then [00:07:00] add in the green Burial Council's cemetery courses.

So we would help you set up the bylaws and the back infrastructure to make a cemetery society work. You're applying for grants now? I've applied for two of them. I'm super excited because I think that I really qualify for both of them. What we're looking for is 100 doulas in 100 counties. Find 100 people to start a one acre cemetery.

As far as finding the land, I really think that that is gonna be one of the easiest parts of this. Even though there's regulations and zoning and everybody has to, you know, oh, but what about zoning? You're not gonna buy land that's not gonna be zoned. You're not going to wanna be in a neighborhood or an HOA, so you're gonna find the right land.

Maybe a realtor helps you, or maybe one of your 100 [00:08:00] people donate an acre of land, which as this grows, that's gonna be what happens when 100 people come together and say, Hey, let's. Form a cemetery society, somebody's gonna have a little parcel of land. They're gonna say, you know what? We've never done anything with that.

Let's donate it to the, you see what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. Yeah, 

Jill: because I'm thinking already where I live in Jersey, there's not a lot of land around me. There's some further south, but not necessarily close by me. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the entire country. There is a whole lot of us packed into this little tiny state.

I think that's one of the conversations I've had with a variety of people that have to do with funerals and cemeteries and whatever else. It's like the fact that we're kind of running outta land to bury people. We got a lot of people, and it's one of the rare cases where. The cemeteries that already exist.

Some of those people have been there for a hundred years. You stay there like that land doesn't get reused. [00:09:00] I'm not sure near me if there really would be much land, but there is some not too far south of me. And I guess that brings me to one of the other questions that I was thinking about. Our funeral homes, funeral directors involved in this process at all, or would it be.

A green cemetery where you got people out there with shovels digging and you're just shrouded and putting 'em right into the ground. Because it does seem like funeral homes sometimes have some issue with returning back to roots and doing things on a cheaper way than they do it. So how does that work with funeral homes and the burial itself?

Cheri: So the families will be able to self perform their services if they wish. Or if they need to, right? So you know, because of money or what have you. But they can also use the services of anyone that they want. If they don't wanna dig graves, they can hire somebody to [00:10:00] dig a grave. The concept that we think is going to work is when you get enough people to join your cemetery society, you're gonna have 

Jill: a lot of volunteers.

That's part of being in the community. We wanna help each other out and I mean, I would help dig a grave. I don't know how good I would be at it, but I would help. And are they mainly green cemeteries? Like is that kind of the goal is to have them be a green style cemetery or could they be a blend or what, what's the, the logistics of the cemetery?

Cheri: No, we're, we're not going to be using embalming fluid anymore, or, or at least in these cemeteries, we're not gonna be using concrete vaults or metal. Caskets. We're not gonna go so far as to make people take pacemakers out, but certainly we can go back to a more ecological, uh, responsible practices. You'd mentioned earlier about the [00:11:00] funeral homes.

They don't really care for my project. It's a big industry and they are protecting it with everything that they have. My project is aimed at. I mean, I could get myself in trouble, but realistically, the way that we're doing death care is all wrong. The formaldehyde is disgusting. The concrete vaults are terrible.

The pricing, you know what's happening now, Jill, is that poor people can't even make a funeral plan. You realize that, right? If you don't have three, five, $10,000, you don't get to make a plan at all. In today's society, the way that it's done, you can't do it. You can't even plan a funeral because it all revolves around money.

And even these green cemeteries, they're popping up all over the place. They've got conservation cemeteries land that was given to a conservation cemetery. They're charging [00:12:00] people $4,000 to get in. It's a noble cause to make green cemeteries, but if people can't afford 'em, they're gonna sit. They're not gonna be.

They're not gonna sell out. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Cheri: They're not gonna pre-sell if people can't afford 'em. The way that I was instructed upstairs to handle this was to give people a platform that they could afford, give them free will, which on my website, on the resource page, I have a. Free will.com. There's a link and anybody can go on there, fill out a state specific will, and email it or mail it to your loved ones.

We even suggesting that people video record themselves reading their will. Mm-hmm. So that there's no, oh, he didn't say that. You know, or she didn't mean it. I was instructed to provide the people a way to. [00:13:00] Be buried without regard to cost. And that was my goal. My actual words to God were, how can I make funerals free?

That's what I asked and that's what I got. Give them free wills, crowdfund land like your grandparents used to and dig your own holes. It goes back to, it's so easy a caveman can do it, but the North Carolina. Board of funeral licensing, I, I forget what all their name is, but they, they, these states want to protect the, the public.

They say some of these states require a funeral director to witness a burial, even if the family performs the entire service and it's on private land, you have to pay a funeral director to stand there. So I wrote a petition. If a state is going to require a funeral director to witness a burial or require [00:14:00] anyone to witness a burial, then the state needs to provide that to the people.

They can't force us to hire a private company to witness something that the state says it has to be done. There's like. Eight states that require a funeral director to be physically present at a burial, which drives up the cost. Those funeral directors want $3,000 to leave their office file a death certificate, and.

Drive out to the farm to watch this hole get dug, uh, is a $3,000 endeavor. And I'm saying that it can't be that hard if the Green Burial Council recommends for a cemetery to be considered green and compliant. The Green Burial Council has these courses that will be sufficient enough to. Teach society members how to [00:15:00] responsibly bury a body.

But I've been saying for a while now, you know they're already dead. How much harm can you do, right? Yes. You just don't want 'em being dug up by an animal. That would be terrible, and it never happens. It's three feet, four feet in the ground. It's not gonna happen. People say that all the time, but it never happens.

Mm-hmm. 

Jill: Yeah. I guess that is the point in making sure you dig the hole deep enough so that nothing digs 'em up. How much harm could you really do to the person? Right. Yeah. 

Cheri: It's a big scam. It's a big scam is what it is. And somebody figured out that they could make money on dying, and I find that just to, I, I don't like that.

I don't like it. You know, in, in 1950, I was crying to my father when my sister had to do the GoFundMe and then choose cremation. I was crying to my dad and I said, this is just an unfair society that we live in. He said, Cheri, you don't know nothing. [00:16:00] He said, when my father died, when granddaddy died, your grandmother was pregnant with the 13th child.

Oh my, and had to give up the family automobile to pay for the funeral. So there's my grandmom with 13 children, and 75 years later, it's still happening. Families are selling barbecue plates to afford a funeral, selling cars, selling land, taking on extra debt. And it doesn't have to be that way. It's such an easy fix.

It's like a caveman could do it. Truly. 

Jill: Yeah. We all need to make our money, right? If we're in a business, it's a capitalist society. But also, you're right, $3,000 to come out and watch a burial. Like really, that's a bit excessive. So, you know, you can make your money and be able to survive, but it doesn't have to be.

Something, even the cost of the caskets. This is not all funeral homes, this is not all [00:17:00] funeral directors, but I even heard from a funeral director local to me where he was like, I don't make a lot of money, not like some of these other places. He's like, 'cause I'm not gonna be that person where you walk in and I'm gonna automatically sell you the most expensive casket.

I'm not gonna sell you the most expensive option. So there are some folks in even the funeral industry that. Know what's happening, right? Where you're taking advantage of a person who's at their lowest and selling them the most expensive options of everything, because it's gonna be hard for them to say no when they're grieving and upset.

It's not very nice. So yeah, I do agree that there's a lot of things, all of end of life leading up to end of life, not just the funerals. There's a lot of things that we need to work on and. Bring it back to what it used to be, more community care, but we also need to make money. I've heard criticisms of death, doulas that we shouldn't charge for this work.

I have [00:18:00] children and a mortgage, so I need to charge for this work or else I can't do the work. I'm gonna have to go get a job. How do we find that balance? I like to think I'm not overcharging people that I am giving a lot of my services for free, but we gotta find that balance. 

Cheri: I feel like the best way to charge people for doula work is by donation.

I feel like a family who would hire a doula knows it's not free. 70% of the country has no funeral plan. If. Every county had a cemetery society, then they could have a funeral plan. If a death doula was leading these funeral cemetery societies, she would know everybody in the society and everybody would know her.

It's almost [00:19:00] like a built in clientele. Right. That was my thought of it. Give these doulas who are scratching their heads wondering how am I gonna get clients? Well start a cemetery society. Mm-hmm. I think it's genius. I'm giving these doulas the opportunity to create their own society. As they, you know, they're gathering people for their cemetery society.

You know, Hey, I'm a, a death doula. When the time comes, call me. I, you know, I work by donation. I, I feel like the whole donation thing will end up taking care of itself. So like, I don't know what you charge. I think a lot of doulas are like, by the hour and between 20 and $40 an hour. Mm-hmm. And I think if you left it up to the people, you'd actually make more money.

Jill: Yeah. I feel like at this point, it's not that people are not using me because of my [00:20:00] prices. People are just not using doulas because they don't know about us. They don't know that we exist. I do have on my website that it is completely sliding scale. I say, you know, this is the suggested amount. But you can pay me whatever you want.

And I don't even get people contacting me and then being like, oh, I don't know. It's too expensive. It's just like. People don't contact us 'cause they don't know that we exist. So I think we have that hurdle to get over first. Ideally, you know, I love a sliding scale model in general for a lot of things.

You know, where it's like, pay what you can and if you have more funds, pay a little bit more. And if you have nothing, that's okay too. I still would never turn anybody away. I just don't get the people contacting me because people are still not sure that doulas are even around. But we'll get there. And some of that too is, you know, we're not welcomed into some of [00:21:00] the already traditional funeral homes, hospices, nursing homes.

I was on a Reddit once that was all funeral directors, just for whatever reason I was reading something on there. And death rule got mentioned and these people were like, they're charlatans. They're scammers. I mean, they were really, and these are all like funeral directors, so they're not welcoming us into their circle either, you know?

Yeah. So they're not recommending us to people. So people are getting put onto hospice. Hospices aren't like, oh, there's this other service that maybe you could bring on. You know, the assisted livings, the funeral director, nobody is saying to people. Oh, you can actually use this other service. It's really helpful.

So we need to kind of get past that hurdle as well, which, you know, slowly but surely, I think we will get there. Sometimes I will ask God and I'll be like, can you just help me, help people? That is [00:22:00] genuinely what I want to do. I just want to help people not have the end of life experience that so many folks end up having.

It's not. Pleasant. It's not good for them. It's not good for their loved ones, and it doesn't have to be that way. I just really wanna help people. I actually was gonna ask you, because I feel like sometimes when I ask for help, it does come to me, but it comes to me in like a way that's like weird where I'm like, what is that?

Like, where did that come from? Did you get your answers through a dream? Because I'm always fascinated by that for the people that do believe in that 'cause not everybody does. Right. I do believe whether you wanna say that it's God or the universe or your ancestors, whatever you wanna call it, if you ask for help and you genuinely have in your heart the right reasons, that you will get the answers and you will get the help.

But sometimes we're just too. Human to actually hear it, to listen to [00:23:00] it, to see it for what it is. So I'm curious how you got your answers. 

Cheri: One day I was at my desk and I needed to make a website and I had to figure out how to build a website with no money and do it myself, and I was kind of frustrated.

I looked up at the sky and I said, I don't even know what to call a website. Immediately in my head I heard, let's be trees. I thought I that thought of that, but immediately I was like, that's the best name 

Jill: ever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I definitely believe that happens where a thought will just pop into my head and I'll be like, where did that come from?

Because it wasn't something that I would've thought, or sometimes what I'm asking for help. I'll look around and something that has always been around me will just pop out a little bit more. It might be like the words on something or an image, and I'll be like, oh, that's the thing. That's what [00:24:00] I needed.

God is there to help us. We just don't always see it. We don't know how to listen. So I love that you did that, that you got your answers, your plan for what to do was he asked for help and you got it. So I love that. 

Cheri: I asked every day a little more, a little more, get me a little further along. I'm learning so much.

I'm learning that I didn't know nearly what I thought I knew, but we're getting there. I think part of the hurdle that I face. Is similar to what you're saying, that the industry is not accepting. I was on a Facebook group the other day, the doula Facebook group, and a guy working with a green cemetery up north said he thought that my project was a scam.

Hmm. And so I went to his website and saw that his cemetery plots were $4,000. There's the scam. [00:25:00] I don't even promote my donation page. Just want to help people make funerals affordable. There's no scam in that. People are so used to being taken advantage of and everything costs a dollar that they can't imagine that we could have had funerals affordable all this time.

They can't imagine it. What do you mean? We've been paying $20,000 for a funeral for a hundred years. The industry has made everyone think that it takes a degree to dig a hole. Mm-hmm. Well, I started thinking yesterday the surveyor or sort like these, even even the Green Burial Council, they go into a lot of research and discussion regarding the land.

If you get a surveyor to survey your cemetery, he's gonna tell you where, how, and how deep to put each grave. It's gonna mark it out on a plaque. You're gonna have a [00:26:00] acre drawn up at a time and there's no guesswork, right where that surveyor said, put that stick. It's not nearly as hard as everyone is making it out to be.

It 

Jill: seems like a lot, all the things that you have to about and all the things that you would have to do, but like a lot of things, it seems scarier. Thinking about it, and then when you actually start doing it and you're like, oh, this isn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be. This isn't as hard as I thought it would be.

I love the idea. It's definitely. Something where bringing anything back to communities, I'm pretty excited about. I really am a fan of returning bodies to the earth. I've always been very environmentally conscious, even since I was a kid. I think that was the good or the bad about being raised in the eighties and nineties.

Then we were very like, you know, reduce, reuse, recycle, and a lot of that got put into our heads and so I've always kind of been very aware of the environment and the impact that we [00:27:00] have on it. I think there is something to be said for returning bodies to the earth. We take so much from the earth. We don't give it back, and so why put us in a vault?

Why pump us full of chemicals and put us in a vault? It just doesn't make sense. Just go back to the ground. You know, for some reason, some people get really grossed out by that idea. Why? I love the idea of my body returning to the earth and becoming plants and trees and feeding worms, and then those worms feed the birds.

I love that idea of me being dispersed all throughout the universe, not. My body locked up in a vault pumped full of really gross chemicals. 

Cheri: You know, we are even working on oyster mushroom growing to help the decomposition faster and to feed the earth and to make side money. Mm-hmm. So these [00:28:00] cemetery societies will have a opportunity to start.

Growing oyster mushrooms to sell to the community for food and to use in the graves under the bodies, and mixed in with the cremated remains. I, I love that idea. I was calling them deaths. Right? Right. Deaths. I love it. I think it would get a little bit of attention and people could, you know, you put a sign out front, oyster mushrooms for sale.

And somebody stops and says, what are you doing here? Oh, we opened up a cemetery society. Would you like to join? So getting your name out there with something like that and being able to clean the earth and decompose bodies faster. You are talking about land and its value and how densely populated you are in New Jersey.

If [00:29:00] we regenerated our graves, a family could own the same. Few plots and never have to buy any others. So that is their spot, a hundred by hundred area. And when grandma is completely decomposed in 20 years, certainly in 50, you could plan or granddaughter adopt. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Cheri: So regenerating these cemeteries is going to be an option.

The cemetery societies will have the option as to whether they want to have a. Regenerating plot or not. Each family will be able to decide if they want to regenerate their plots. That's what I'm working on. 

Jill: Yeah, I would be fine with that. What do I really care at that point? I am not there anymore.

Eventually even the body decomposes or the bones are there. Sure. I actually kind of like that idea of spending however long our bones will be there with my loved ones. Pile us [00:30:00] all in there together. Hopefully not all at the same time, but put us all in the same plot of land together. Put some nice flowers on top of us because I guess actually that's the thing too, that now I'm thinking about it is, is there any.

Rules or restrictions or maybe even guidance, because I know like with green burials, there's like, you can't have headstones, you have to have like the little rocks or something, but you can't have a traditional headstone. Is there any kind of guidance on that type of thing, or could we all just do it however we wanted?

I want to make beautiful gardens. 

Cheri: I don't want typical headstones. We see, I think there's a lot of different ways to memorialize your loved one other than a big granite stone. And if you didn't have to spend 10, 15, $20,000 on a funeral, how much money would you spend to build a pavilion or a beautiful fountain?

Or maybe you have a sculpture [00:31:00] created for the garden. And I feel like each community should be able to. Be as creative as they can within reason. I don't wanna put limits on people because people's generosity and creativity, they, it could be amazing. So I started to say this earlier and I didn't get through it.

One acre of land can support up to 700 full bodies and up to 7,000 cremated remains maybe even more. So you got 7,700. Members that could potentially be buried on one acre of land, that's $770,000 on one acre. A hundred dollars is too much money. Can you see where I'm coming from? Even in New Jersey, your acres of ground aren't $770,000, you know?

Mm-hmm. Uh, but if you make it any less [00:32:00] money, people really will think I'm crazy, won't they? If I said, oh, we can all buy an acre of land for $10, which really we could, 7,700 people with $10 is 77. Thousand. 

Jill: So I'm thinking, I guess some of it, like the money also, you know, you raise the money, right? You get together your people and you buy the land.

I mean, there's still gonna be some work that has to get done. Like you'll need to use that money to potentially clear the land a little bit, maybe put a driveway up to the land so people can get to it, potentially. You know, maybe you wanna put a little gate or fence around it just to kind of border it off so you could use that money.

To also make it not just a chunk of land. You know, there will be some upkeep over time, keeping things up, but would there be. A person that's in charge, where does that money go? So that would be [00:33:00] part of the society and then they could decide what they wanna do with it. Some places there's cemeteries in Philly that do, you know, tours and educational things.

I guess you could use some of the money for that too, to have events. Where people come in and learn about the local birds or whatever it is. 

Cheri: Every society, you'll have a board of directors and someone will have to be certified in green burial. Hopefully we've got doulas in our society. The money. It goes into a regular checking account that the board of directors and the society vote on how to spend.

In some states, you'll have to pay a funeral director or be certified yourself or the society or somebody in the society acting as a funeral director. I'm working on changing North Carolina laws. Currently you have to have a funeral director's license, even if you're working on purely [00:34:00] green cemeteries, which is ridiculous, right?

You don't need to know anything about formal embalming and whatever else they teach in mortuary school to bury someone naturally. What I am hoping to accomplish. Is that the Green Burial Council's certification becomes the new application. The Green Burial Council's certification will become the requirement so that you don't have to have the Funeral Director's certification, but you can get your certification through the Green Burial Council.

Jill: Yeah, and that makes, 'cause you're right, we don't need to know how to embalm people. If that's not a process that we're gonna be involved in at all, and I don't think that they learn in traditional mortuary schools anything about green burial, honestly, 

Cheri: no, they don't. 

Jill: Yeah. So [00:35:00] it seems like that would be a better fit for.

People that are gonna be doing that in the fall, I'm gonna be going to the New Jersey Funeral Director Association is doing their annual conference in Atlantic City, but they're doing the funeral celebrant training. I was interviewing another doula in Canada that did it through the same company, and I was like, that actually sounds kind of cool, you know, maybe being a funeral celebrant.

So I found a course happening in the fall. In New Jersey, same companies doing the training, but this New Jersey funeral director thing is going on. While we're there for the training, we're allowed to go into the conference. We get to walk around, see all the booths and talk to people. I'm real curious.

What this is gonna be like. I'm wondering if I say to some of these folks that I'm a death doula and I'm training to be a funeral celebrant, how that's gonna go over because I can see some of them are not probably gonna be too [00:36:00] happy about that, but that's okay. I don't need all of them to be happy. I just wanna find a handful of funeral homes in my area that are willing to let me come in and perform some of the funeral celebrations.

For somebody that maybe isn't traditionally associated with a church. I haven't been associated with a church in many years. I left my church that I grew up in when I was about 16. I want something when I die, and I would like for it to have elements of spirituality and God and things like that, but I'm not going back to my old school Catholic church.

It's just not gonna happen. But I'm real curious what this conference is gonna be like because I really wanna talk to people and just see what's happening. 'cause there is a couple green burial. I think there's three at least that I know of now. In Jersey and there's at least two or three in Philadelphia now.

So it is starting to become more of a thing even [00:37:00] around me. I think it's gonna be really cool. It's gonna be interesting. If nothing else, I love going 

Cheri: to their websites and they're straight to the pricing page. Uh, I'm never disappointed. They're always $4,000 or more. Mm-hmm. For a decent spot, or $2,000 for cremated remains.

Jill: Actually fun story. This was going back to the eighties, right? My uncle took my aunt's ashes in the middle of the night and buried her in between my grandmother and grandfather's headstone and her parents, because they didn't wanna pay to bury in the cemetery, but wanted her with her parents. So he went in there in the middle of the night and dug a hole and put her in there.

She might have even been in a coffee can, if I remember the story, it's like. Family lore, you know, PRTs like, guess what they did? Put her in a pop can and buried her out in the cemetery because yeah. Why is it so much money [00:38:00] you, a lot of us, we can't afford that. I've been talking with my mom about what she wants and already calculating the cost to my head and I'm like, oof.

Okay, we'll do it somehow. I'll figure it out. GoFund me. It might be the option. I don't know. 

Cheri: Well, have you done home funerals? Have you? 

Jill: I have not done any home funerals. I know a woman in Philadelphia that she was the president of the Home Funeral like Association. I interviewed her on the podcast a year or two ago.

After I get this training, I'm gonna talk with Isabelle and be like, so what's the, what's the deal? How do I also nail be able to do home funerals? Because again, I, I love that idea. If you're comfortable with it, not everybody's gonna be comfortable with it, but if you are comfortable with it, bring it back into your home.

Do it that way. 

Cheri: These churches sit empty day and night while funeral homes have their lights on day and night. Most of the churches that I have spoke with, they're [00:39:00] happy to host a funeral for a family that's not a member. They'll do it by donation, but at the most they'd charge is $300. If somebody couldn't handle it at their house, maybe they had kids, they just didn't wanna have grandma in the living room.

Mm-hmm. For whatever reason, you could have it at the bar, the bowling alley. You could have it at a, a church, the barn, whatever, a graveside. So I wonder if you could start talking to the different churches around you and ask, would you be open to having. A funeral service for a non-member. And what would that look like?

Then maybe you could become, there's your funeral home. You know, if your clients didn't wanna have it at home, you could say, Hey, I happen to know that the Seventh Day Adventist, or the local bowling alley is 

Jill: hosting, I would love to do a funeral in a bowling alley. [00:40:00] It's like one of those things where I sat on it for a couple days after having that conversation with her.

And the more I thought about it, the more I was like, you know, I think I really would love to do this. 'cause again, it's just a way for me. To connect with families and help them get what is meaningful to them, helping them create it, helping them write it all out. What poems do you want? If you want Bible readings, that's fine.

It doesn't matter what religion you are, I don't care. I will incorporate whatever it is that you want to make it personal for you. Sure. You want it in a bowling alley. Let's do it. I would be happy to do it. I'm excited. I think it'll be nice. Right. 

Cheri: You know, New Jersey is one of our, the states that have one of the, the highest number of signatures.

Yeah. Probably because it's so expensive to be buried up there. You may know I've created a petition for every state and Yeah. 

Jill: I'll have to check out New Jersey's. Yeah, please do. We're at the end of our time actually. It went by fast. It [00:41:00] always does. When I get into the conversation, I check the time and I'm like, oh my gosh.

We're almost done. I will put links in the show notes, but why don't you tell people where they can find you? Your website if you want 'em to find you on social media letsbetrees.org

Cheri:. It's a growing, evolving website that has some good common sense advice on how to reclaim our death rights and make funerals affordable for absolutely everyone.

Let's be trees.org. 

Jill: I love it. Well, thank you so much Cheri, and I'll for sure put the link in the show notes so people can easily find you. I appreciate your time today. This is really interesting. I was looking forward to this and learning more about let's Be Trees and the whole process and 

Cheri: how it works.

Thank you. If you've got any questions, send me a message or call anytime. I'm here to help. 

Jill: Wonderful. I'll let people know to reach out if they need anything. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family [00:42:00] member who might find it interesting. Your support in spreading the podcast is greatly appreciated.

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