With climate change gaining prominence, there’s a concerted effort around ensuring eco-friendly, well, everything – including end-of-life processes. While traditional fire cremation burns fossil fuels ...

Matt Baskerville has served as a licensed funeral director in Illinois for the past 24 years. In that time, he’s seen his industry—and what people want after their deaths—change dramatically. For ...

When a person dies in the United States, there are three (legal) options for putting his or her body to rest: burial, cremation, or medical donation. Burial was long the method of choice for those ...

Traditional burial methods harm the planet in various ways. Embalming slows the decay of a person’s body so that it’s presentable at a funeral—but after burial, the chemicals used for embalming leach ...

One out of every two Americans chose cremation over burial in 2016, according to newly released industry figures, the first time the cremation rate reached 50% in the U.S. The nation’s embrace of ...

For Jarrod Hammond, this all started with some casual internet research. “It’s kind of strange to say that I decided to do this after binging a YouTube channel for a couple months,” he said. “But that ...

A small Colorado town maintains the country’s only public outdoor funeral pyre. Philip Incao saw it as his own perfect ending. The cremation of Dr. Philip Incao at the country’s only public open-air ...

Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, is awash in small-town trappings: tree-lined roads, rolling lawns, and street signs at every corner. On this Wednesday midsummer morning, the familiar routine ...

About 9,500 years ago, a community of hunter-gatherers in central Africa cremated a small woman on an open pyre at the base of Mount Hora, a prominent natural landmark in what is now northern Malawi, ...

The rate of cremation in Kentucky increased from 12.3% in 2011 to 40.3% last year for reasons that include price and changes in religious identity. Kenneth Earl Wilson, who had worked at a bank and in ...

Cremation’s rise to 61.9% in 2024, driven by affordability and cultural shifts, has surpassed burials, reshaping the funeral economy with projections of 82% market share by 2045. Lower-cost cremation ...

What will soon be a meticulously landscaped garden with a pond and circular walkways is taking shape in a corner of the Roseland Park Cemetery at Woodward Avenue and 12 Mile Road in Berkley. By the ...