In-Person Arrival at the Cemetery · Hannah Suzanna · MFA, Digital + Media 2021

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to go to the cemetery at all due to the pandemic, but everything came together in the last few weeks of the fellowship. I ended up being able to get free housing from a friend of the cemetery (thanks Mary!). I stayed in a mother-in-law unit on the edge of a beautiful turtle filled pond, 20 minutes from Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery (PCCC).

The first day I arrived, I participated in a burial. Being a helper at a funeral instead of one of the mourners was strikingly different, of course. It was not my grief. I followed the lead of the cemetery staff members as they helped to load the shrouded body onto the burial cart, assisted the family to the plot, helped to lower the body into the grave, and with aid from the loved ones buried the body.

The cemetery was quiet while I was there, in comparison to having two burials per week since February (higher than their usual frequency). There was one burial the day I arrived and one the day before I left. I was able to help dig a grave the morning I started my drive back up to Providence. 

Everyone at the cemetery was incredibly supportive. They consistently provided me with images, helped me to collect audio samples, collected bones of wildlife found on the site, and allowed me to interview them. I was able to talk to a board member who had a family member buried in the cemetery and the head of Alachua Conservation Trust, who collaborates with the cemetery to restore the land. I talked with Freddie, the executive director and one of the founders who, when he was dissatisfied with his body disposition options, created Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery. He told me about the origin story of PCCC. The first burial was a woman, Kathy Cantwell, who was involved in the cemetery planning and was an active community member in Gainesville. Carlos told me about the different areas in the cemetery, the wetlands where burials are prohibited, the shady woods which is the domain of mosquitos, and the bright meadow where black-eyed Susans bloom and bats fly at night. Sarah gave me the no-nonsense details how how things were run, how the cemetery has to work with families, how the locations of graves are recorded.  The cemetery staff, board, and collaborators helped me more generously than I could have ever asked.

As for where this will take me next? I recently found another site of interest—the abandoned parking lot by Urban Greens Co-op. I met up with a friend to test a H1 recorder and we ended up wandering to the lot. He regularly would pause by and comment on other crack-filled plains of asphalt, so on this nigh I interviewed him about why he was interested in the sites. He said it was dystopian and a sign of natures ability to transmute, from man-made structures popping up constantly to sprouts breaking through once smooth cement. Later I went back and filmed the wind blowing through plants.

I think there’s a relationship between Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery, The Raven’s Roost, and this abandoned lot. I think I’ll have to consult my colors and my tarot to figure it out.

Here’s a silly preview I made to introduce myself to the new members in my department:

A Personal Investigation into Death · Hannah Suzanna · MFA, Digital + Media 2021

In addition to investigating death through the environmental lens of the site, I also spent time interviewing my dad about what he wants for his own death. This conversation was hard, but not because of anticipatory grief, or because we haven’t broached the subject of his death before. Quite the contrary. My dad would make light of his own death while I was growing up, in order to address the reality without, hopefully, making the topic something I feared. He’s told me to taxidermy his body and mount his head on a plaque like a talking trout trophy so that whenever someone walk’s by a phrase, pre-recorded in his voice, we be shouted at them. Currently, he would like to be rolled off of the path between my family’s home and the beach to decompose naturally and be eaten by animals. He doesn’t care too much though, being cremated and scattered in the ocean with our other family members’ remains would also suffice.

The challenging part when thinking about death in my family always is about logistics. Which is sad, as one part of my brain can separate out the importance of someone dying from the importance of interpersonal squabbles. However, a strange (and disturbing) part of grief in our society has to do with property ownership. Our family’s house, The Raven’s Roost, is a quonset hut with its own strange mythology. It was a WWII aircraft hanger 40 miles inland before, so the story goes, Edgar Allen Poe’s nephew moved it to it’s current location on the coast. My great grandparents, on my Opa’s side, purchased it when their landlord decided to sell in the 70s. As the primary property of a family without a large income, figuring out how to maintain and care for both the land and the house can bring up a large amount of stress.

Down the hill though is a different world. The path down to the Pacific goes past blackberry brambles and ferns, under trees and beside creeks. It opens up just above the beach to an area called “The Flat Space” a clover covered valley filled with wildflowers and multiple artichoke varieties that a friend of my dad’s gave to him. 

The whole family loves this home, and yet it seems sometimes too unwieldy, like the family dynamics are too strained to come together to take care of it. To make it a comfortable place for my Oma, my dad, and probably my uncle, to age and to die. And will it be manageable for my cousin’s and I to keep once it’s in our hands or will it be too full of it’s own holes, too much tax, too overrun with mouldering books and old mattresses? 

Everyone tells met to separate myself from this stress, that it’s far off, that it’s not my responsibility, that it’s just the material world. These arguments make sense, and I can apply them to other areas of my life, but my connection to this upside-down halfpipe of a home is incredibly strong.

Beyond the personal, understanding the societal context of death is also important — particularly recognizing that racial disparities occur around death, as well as in life. Due to bodies being treated poorly by white funeral directors, Black funeral homes became a trusted source within Black communities. No matter what someone had faced during life, these funeral homes would treat the body with the respect it was due. Outside of working with the cemetery and my own personal investigations, I also participated in a book club put on by The Collective for Radical Death Studies about mass death and social justice. Some focuses included memorialization (Who is it for? Who does it benefit?) and the politics of grief (the interplay of grief and activism, and different reasons why grieving would be shared publicly or kept private). 

While I was helping with PCCC’s presentation, another university student studying conservation cemeteries, and who attended one of our events, gave two source about disparities within death toward Black people and Black death rituals:

The Disappearance of a Distinctively Black Way ​to Mourn
By Tiffany Stanley
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/black-funeral-homes-mourning/426807/ 

‘Ours is a Business of Loyalty’: African American Funeral Home Owners in Southern Cities
By Beverly Bunch-Lyons
https://ncr.vt.edu/docs/53.1.bunch-lyons.pdf 

Additionally, there is a video called:
Why Are Black & White Funeral Homes STILL Separate?
By Caitlin Doughty in conversation with Dr. Kami Fletcher, president of The Collective for Radical Death Studies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4-0iAzFIcI&ab_channel=AskAMortician 

It is also important to note conservation’s racism, particularly toward indigenous peoples, which is highlighted in the article:
Environmentalism’s Racist History
By Jedediah Purdy
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history 

Outreach for the Cemetery · Hannah Suzanna · MFA, Digital + Media 2021

For Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery (PCCC), I called hospital chaplains and hospice organizations in Alachua County to see if they would be interested in a staff presentation about PCCC and different body disposition options that many people are unaware of. The cemetery is in an interesting place where more people are tuning into their presence, both due to rising awareness of environmental death practices and due to an increase of death planning as a result of COVID-19. This is leading to them getting more reservations for burial plots at the cemetery, but not the same rate of increase of burials (although burial rate has gone up as well). If the reservation rate stays high, particularly for people who will be alive for 30-50 more years, the cemetery will cease to be a resource for at-need burials. This would be unfortunate because, in addition to being environmentally supportive, PCCC offers the most affordable burial option in the area — only $2000 for the plot and burial. Even with funeral home expenses, someone can have a burial for easily less than $4000 which, while in my opinion should be covered by social programs for everyone, is still strikingly lower than the national average $8000–$10,000.

Because of this, the cemetery wants to reach local end of life organizations who are working with individuals and families who are likely to have a death soon. However, cold calling for a staff presentation was ineffective. In talking with one of the cemetery’s board members, who also is a lead nurse in a local hospital, she explained that medical workers are being asked to manage their usual tasks as well as new COVID-19 protocols. Scheduling an additional meeting for staff is unrealistic. However, through doing the outreach more organizations became at least passingly familiar with Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery, which will hopefully translate to more of their clients becoming informed about the cemetery and make it easier for the cemetery to connect in the future.

The most effective form of outreach was inviting people who had already expressed interest in the cemetery to one-off presentations, virtually hosted by PCCC itself. Those invited included funeral home workers, cemetery volunteers who also work in medicine, board members, university students researching conservation burials, and community members. At the end of the presentations we expressed interest in presenting for more groups, and received leads for future outreach. If I had had more time there I would have worked with them on adapting this presentation for continuing education units required to maintain medical licenses such as nursing. This would have required adding a layer of granularity regarding where different body disposition options were available locally, as well as more precision around pricing and environmental impacts for lesser known options (such as donating to a forensic body farm or liquid cremation). 

Virtual Arrival at the Cemetery · Hannah Suzanna · MFA, Digital + Media 2021

Imagine you’re in north-central Florida. It feels like it has been over 100ºF out for weeks. It’s humid. It’s tick season. Someone you love was just admitted to hospice. All of a sudden you are navigating death planning, which… said mildly, can be challenging—a perfect concoction of tricky-to-figure-out logistics piled generously on top of all-the-emotions-at-once. However, if you are in the southeast of the United States there is a body disposition option available that is not easily found everywhere—conservation burials.

Conservation burials go beyond the standards of natural burial—no vaults, no embalming, only biodegradable burial materials—by promising to forever protect the land where burials take place. Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery (PCCC) is a non-profit community cemetery that borders Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park. The 93 acres that sit between Micanopy, Rochelle, and Gainesville, Florida, look nothing like a standard U.S. cemetery.

Walking down PCCC’s Kathy Cantwell Trail you would think you were in a state park—that is, until you noticed mounds of recently turned soil cocooned in pine needles, some of which are covered in carefully laid flowers. In partnerships with Alachua Conservation Trust and Alachua County, Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery restores land by removing invasive or overly-hearty species to preserve legacy species such as live oaks and hickory trees. Unlike standard contemporary cemeteries, PCCC is a place where wildlife and humans abound. There are deer spotted on graves, gators in cypress ponds, people walking through the meadow or seeking shade in the woods, and community members who come to help staff dig graves. 

Of course, that description is representative of the cemetery before COVID-19. The cemetery seems to be operating as usual for the most part—with fewer people allowed on-site, fewer attendees permitted at funerals, and only staff allowed at burials if the deceased died from coronavirus. There are still eagles flying and large banana spiders making equally large webs. My summer looks markedly different than what I imagined. Instead of being in Florida helping to dig graves, maintain the land, and doing in-person outreach to organizations, I am in Providence. 

I started work at PCCC three weeks ago and was nervous because my plan to be in Gainesville, FL in person this summer had been swiftly eradicated by COVID-19. I wasn’t going to meet my supervisor Freddie, the executive director, or the other staff members, Sarah and Carlos, in person. How would I connect with them? Would the experience “work” without me being physically present to dig graves and assist with burials? I worried I would get stuck in an eddy of administrative tasks and lose my link to the stories of people being naturally buried close to ponds filled with cypress and gators; to the story of my dad hoping (to the point of expecting) that he’ll die on the path between the family’s Quonset hut and the rocky shore of the Pacific. For the first five days, I had a spike in anxiety—the kind that clouds my day, leaving me overwhelmed by the uncertainty of new situations, and putting me right to sleep. This was not the beginning I had wanted. However, through the staff members’ graciousness, I have become grounded—even if my soil is made from zoom meetings and phone calls instead of clay, nurse logs, and earthworms.

I am now conducting virtual outreach for PCCC. We are trying to figure out how, in the middle of a pandemic, to reach out to end-of-life organizations. We want people to know that there are affordable, sustainable burial practices that offer the ceremony of their choice. However, our primary goal is to provide details on each option so families can make the best choice for whatever their situation may be. 

That’s when I think of my dad. 

When I told my dad about PCCC, he asked if he could get buried there before quickly backtracking—wanting instead to naturally decompose on our property. Many people who hear about Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery wish they had known about the cemetery when a loved one of theirs died. If you haven’t researched your end of life wishes, it is easy in our country to believe that embalming is legally required and expensive caskets are the only option. However there are many body disposition options, of which the nine conservation cemeteries in the U.S. are just one— body composting, alkaline hydrolysis, and donation to forensic anthropology sites are a few alternatives.

I am hopeful that this summer I will find effective avenues of outreach for PCCC, so people can choose body disposition options in alignment with their values. I am optimistic that I will continue to learn more about different ways to take care of dead bodies and the environmental, social, and financial implications of each. I’m curious about how being more open to different death practices will impact my thinking around what I want for my own body and what will happen to my family’s bodies. Where’s the form to make the small canyon, below my dad’s house, where the vultures feed, a conservation cemetery? That’s where my dad wants his body. I wish it was that easy.

I keep seeing myself as the third point in a triangle, opposite to two places I have not gone this summer—my dad’s house, Raven’s Roost, in Humboldt County, California and the cemetery in Alachua County, Florida (although I’m still holding out hope for a site visit at the end of August). There’s this thread that I can’t quite grasp yet, that is spun from bodies lovingly decomposing into the earth and blackberry brambles and soul-deep humidity, that connects the three locations. This summer will also be an attempt to expose these connections by looking at COVID-19 cases in all three locations, interviewing people in Florida and at home, and collecting colors from each place and examining the stories those hues tell. Maybe the overlap in color will reveal the relationships I am searching for.

Project Links:
Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery
My General Research
Color Analysis Spreadsheet
Color prototype No. 1

Additional Death Positive Links:
End Well Live with Ladybird Morgan, RN, MSW, Executive Director of Humane Prison Hospice Project
#RadDeathReads