In 1997, Bridget Verhaaren chose a tiny square casket for her stillborn daughter, Ava, after which the baby was flown to Utah and buried in the West Jordan City Cemetery between her great-grandparents’ graves.
When a New York City social worker at the hospital suggested cremation, the grieving Latter-day Saint mother recoiled, saying she found the idea “repulsive.”
Some 15 years later, Verhaaren again had to confront the cremation versus burial options when her husband, Rob, was killed in a freak accident while cycling in a race from Logan to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
This time, she gave medical researchers permission to “harvest Rob’s soft tissue and bones” and, acquiescing to pressure from her family and his, buried what remained in an Arizona graveyard, where they were living.
“I rarely visit it,” she says. “He is not there.”
For her part, Verhaaren now would like to be cremated herself — half of the ashes buried with Rob, she says, and the other half “scattered from a mountaintop,” eventually mixed with ashes from her current husband, Gary Garner.
As relatives throng cemeteries for Memorial Day, some like the American Fork mother may have a new perspective on interment. More and more people of all faiths — including members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — now choose burning over burial.
In 2023, the cremation rate reached 60.5%, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. That figure is forecast to top 80% by 2045.
And, for Latter-day Saints, the church has revised its directives in the past few years.
The Utah-based faith, which had long discouraged cremation, updated the statement in its General Handbook to say that decisions about bodies should be up to families, urging members to follow “the desires of the individuals.”
Such moves have been prompted in part by exorbitant costs of caskets, embalming, funerals and graveside services. Cremation is much, much cheaper. It also reflects some environmental concerns and, frankly, a generational divide.
Abby Maxwell Hansen has seen on-the-ground evidence of this. “I’ve noticed that the generation in their 80s and 90s still tend to believe cremation will make it harder for Jesus to resurrect their bodies,” says Hansen, who works in a Utah County mortuary, “while the next generation (in their 60s and 70s) kind of laugh and roll their eyes.”
Still, many Utahns of every generation opt for traditional burial practices for themselves.
“I wouldn’t lose sleep at the idea of my body being lost or destroyed in some cataclysm,” says Latter-day Saint research historian Ardis Parshall, a Salt Lake Tribune guest columnist who is undergoing cancer treatment, “but my druthers are to be buried in my temple robes without a funeral and certainly without a viewing.”
She does want her grave to be “dedicated,” Parshall says. “Beyond that, anything low-key my friends want to do graveside is for their feelings, not mine and is OK.”
‘Sleeping places’
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) "He is Risen," by Del Parson, depicts Christ's resurrection.
For many ancient civilizations, cremation was the normal, common way to dispose of bodies.
Indian religions, such as Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, held “open-air cremations,” explains the Cremation Society of New Hampshire, based on the belief that “the god of fire receives sacrificial offerings on behalf of all the gods.”
It was also practiced by Romans and Greeks, but early Christians considered cremation to be pagan, pointing to the burial and resurrection of Jesus as told in scripture as the example to follow.
Christian doctrine teaches that humans are “embodied souls,” argues Baptist Pastor Justin Dillehay of The Gospel Coalition, which is why “God plans to resurrect our bodies rather than allow our bodies and souls to be separated forever in death.”
It is also why Christian gravesites “were called coemeteria (cemeteries), he writes, “which literally means ‘sleeping places.’”
Christian burial is not simply “disposing of a corpse; we’re planting a seed,” Dillehay concludes. “Just as we sow in hope of the harvest, we bury in hope of the resurrection.”
God has ways
(Tom Jamieson | The New York Times) An urn made from salvaged wood. Families are creating new ways to remember their loved ones after cremation.
Others who have faith in bodily resurrection believe God can accomplish it in a variety of ways.
“My son-in-law, who died recently, had wished to do a ‘green burial,’ but cancer and chemo made that inappropriate,” says Meg Stout, a Latter-day Saint in Annandale, Virginia. “Cremation was acceptable to all and affordable.”
Given belief in “an omnipotent God who can raise all and has clearly allowed untold billions to use practices other than traditional Western burials,” Stout says on Facebook, “it seems odd to me to have anyone insist their their grandparents’ preferred form of interment be mandatory for all or be required for God’s resurrection miracle.”
(Eric Lee | The New York Times) The simple coffin of Pope Francis lies in St. Peter's Square for his funeral in Vatican City.
The Almighty knows “how to put me back together when it’s resurrection time, whether my remains are dry bones,” writes Marcie McPhee, a Latter-day Saint living in Cape Verde, off the African west coast, “or ashes scattered in the Guadalupe River.”
Indeed, burial is not an option for multitudes across the globe.
In some countries, the Latter-day Saint policy points out, “the law requires cremation. In other cases, burial is not practical or affordable for the family. In all cases, the body should be treated with respect and reverence.”
It adds that the bodies of those who have participated in temple rituals should be “dressed in ceremonial temple clothing when it is buried or cremated.”
Mary-Ann Crow Muffoletto, an elder at Logan’s First Presbyterian Church, says she sees the cremation trend in her Cache County congregation and the wider denomination.
“I don’t think any funerals with a body have been held at the church in the past year,” she says on social media. “The reasons are cost and environmental responsibility.”
To Presbyterians, she says, the emphasis “is not on the body, but on the risen spirit.”
Jews and Muslims
Jewish law mandates that intact bodies be buried so they can arise when the Messiah comes, says Rabbi Samuel Spector of Salt Lake City’s Congregation Kol Ami, and when the dead will be resurrected.
By Jewish law and traditions, he says, “cremation is prohibited.”
It is also deeply offensive to many, the rabbi says, because of its connection to Jews burned in Nazi crematoria during the Holocaust.
As cremation becomes more common in mainstream society, My Jewish Learning website reports, “the number of Jews opting for cremation appears to be increasing.”
That is happening in the Beehive State, too.
“Reform Jews allow cremation as they reject the idea of resurrection and a Messiah coming,” Spector says. “Utah’s B’Nai Israel Cemetery has spots for cremated remains.”
For Muslims, there is no question, says Imam Shuaib Din of the Utah Islamic Center in West Jordan. Cremation is out.
“We have to bury the dead as soon as possible as a way of showing respect to the deceased,” Din says. “At least within 24 hours but sometimes as little as four hours after death.”
First, there is ritual washing of the bodies and then wrapping them in white shrouds, which is done by family or friends, not mortuaries, he says. “When they are buried, bodies should have the most exposure to the dirt.”
At the Khadeeja Cemetery in West Valley City, Muslim bodies can even be laid to rest “in a cardboard box,” Din says. “The simpler, the better.”
Multiplying options
(Scott Sommedorf | The Salt Lake Tribune) Then-church President Thomas S. Monson ponders at the funeral for his friend President Gordon B. Hinckley at the Conference Center in 2008.
Because funeral arrangements and burials cost so much — by some estimates equivalent to buying a midsize car — people of all faiths are finding ways to bring a more lasting meaning to cremation.
Some put cremated remains into a casket and bury them, says Debbie Madsen, a preplanning funeral counselor with Inspired Funeral Home in Salt Lake City. Families also can rent a casket for a viewing and then cremate after the service.
There are now “cremation gardens” and columbariums, indoor niches, Madsen says. “Some people have remains in artwork, paintings, crystal statues that light up, jewelry, or turn them into pebbles.”
She advises survivors to think about where they want their loved ones’ ashes to be after the third or fourth generation.
“Do you want Mom and Dad to be in a closet or a garage?” she asks. “You want them to be in a place where people who have loved them can come and remember.”
In 2018, Claire Peterson’s Latter-day Saint bishop asked the animated grandmother to explore cheaper end-of-life options for members of their Provo congregation to avoid families facing huge expenditures.
After she concluded an in-depth study of options other than burial, Peterson has become a passionate advocate for offering families nontraditional options.
Here’s what she found:
• Cremation by heat.
• Aquamation, dissolving the body by chemicals and hot water (now approved in Utah).
• Green burials — without a concrete vault, chemical embalming, and with a biodegradable container.
• Terramation — placing the body into a special container, covering it with wood chips, which transforms the remains into nutrient-rich soil (currently illegal but being considered by the Utah Legislature).
Burial remains “the preferred way” of Latter-day Saint leaders, Peterson says. “It’s the way we bury prophets.”
Some Latter-day Saints don’t think about their end, because they think Jesus is coming back soon, the quilting grandma jokes, and they will be “translated” — taken up to heaven without tasting death.
A divine end.
