Understanding Bereavement Leave

Before cremations as part of Cleveland, OH cremation services, immediate family members of the person who died will have to ask their employers, if they’re still working, for time off of work to attend make funeral plans for their loved ones. Some employers have bereavement leave plans in place, while other employers do not.

Bereavement leave is leave granted from work for employees who’ve lost an immediate family member (spouse, child, sibling, parent, grandparent, grandchild, in-law, stepchild, or stepparent). While it would be logical to assume that all employers would have a bereavement leave policy, many employers do not.

There are no federal laws that require employers to grant bereavement leave to their employees.

At the state level, only Oregon has enacted a bereavement leave law for companies with 25 or more employees. These companies must give two weeks of bereavement leave – it doesn’t have to be paid – to all employees who’ve lost an immediate family member.

The state of Illinois has a bereavement law that requires companies with 50 or more employees to grant 10 days of unpaid leave to employees who’ve lost a child.

Therefore, most employers can decide whether or not to grant bereavement leave. If they do grant bereavement leave, they can decide how long the bereavement leave lasts and they can decide whether to grant it as paid or unpaid time off of work.

For those companies that do grant bereavement leave, the usually amount of time is three days after the death of an immediate family member. Often this puts family members who must travel long distances to the location of the funeral in a situation where there isn’t enough time to get there, take part in the funeral, and return home.

So, there are many instances where immediate family members miss the opportunity to say goodbye to their loved ones and miss the opportunity to grieve in person with other family members.

The bereavement leave policies in the United States are, for the most part, left up to the goodwill of employers. The federal government’s only real effort toward enabling family members to be with their dying loved ones and to be able to plan their funerals and share other family members’ grief is the Family Medical Leave Act.

However, the Family Medical Leave Act also has stipulations as to whether it can be used as part of bereavement leave. Only private employers with 50 or more employees during each of 20 or more weeks in the previous year are eligible to offer Family Medical Leave to their employees.

And, while the Family Medical Leave Act offers up to 12 weeks of family and medical leave, the time off is unpaid. Additionally, many employees who use the Family Medical Leave Act find that their jobs are not protected, and if they use the maximum time available (three months), often come back to find that they no longer have a job with their employer.

Other nations do a much better job taking care of their citizens and employees when a death in the family occurs. In Canada, for instance, all citizens who have been continuously employed for three months are guaranteed three days of bereavement leave following the death of a loved one in their immediate family. In Sweden, every employee is entitled to up to 10 days of paid bereavement leave each year.

For more information about bereavement leaved and Cleveland, OH cremation services, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 2165 E. 89th Street, Cleveland, OH 44106, or you can call us today at (216) 791-0770.

The Needs That Mourning Meets

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After funerals at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH, you and your family will go through two processes related to the death of someone you loved. One of these is grief. The other is mourning.

Although grief and mourning are often used interchangeably to mean the same thing, they, in fact, are not the process. Grief is what you feel internally after someone you love has died. Mourning, on the other hand, is what you do externally to express your grief. In other words, grief is centered around feelings, while mourning is centered around actions.

Grief is defined by feelings of sadness, sorrow, anger, and, sometimes, denial. These all happen on an internal level, and each person will experience some or all of them in their own unique configuration. Grief is not communal, even though you may be experiencing the same loss of a loved one as other people.

Mourning, on the other hand, encompasses the activities you do to express your grief. These are things like attending funeral services, wearing black, or sharing memories and photos of your loved one. Some of mourning is done with others and some of mourning is done in private.

Mourning is the way that you make your way through the grieving process. It is a tangible way to work toward acceptance and healing, even though the grief of losing someone you love will never go away.

One of the things that mourning does is help you to accept the reality that someone you love has died. As you think and talk about the death of your loved one, it becomes more real as a factual event that has occurred. It can take time to completely accept that someone you love is gone, but by sharing stories about them with friends and family, your feelings of disbelief about their death will turn to belief.

Mourning also helps you process the pain of losing someone you love. At first, you will feel a pain unlike almost any other pain you will ever experience in life. That pain will bring tears, fears, feelings of weakness, and, at times, feelings of being out of control. Instead of avoiding the pain, it’s important to acknowledge it by feeling it in its full intensity for short periods of time, and then moving to other things so that it doesn’t overwhelm you.

Sharing memories of your loved one who has died is another aspect of mourning. You can do this through telling stories about them, listening to their favorite music, tuning in when something reminds you of them, and even dreaming about them. Over time, the initial pain of remembering your loved one will be largely replaced by happy memories of the time you shared together.

Mourning serves another purpose: the adaptation of a new identity that doesn’t include your loved one. This can be one of the hardest parts of the grieving process, especially for spouses, who had well-defined roles within their relationship. If your deceased spouse, for example, handled all the car and lawn maintenance, you will now have to take those responsibilities on yourself. It can be quite uncomfortable at first, but over time, you will adjust and adapt to handling them adroitly.

If you’d like to learn more about grief resources at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 2165 E 89th St., Cleveland, OH 44106, or you can call us today at (216) 791-0770.

The Paperwork You Need after a Loved One Dies

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With cremations as part of cremation services offered in Cleveland, OH, important paperwork will be needed through the funeral process and after the funeral is over. All of this paperwork should be kept in one place and the person handling everything should know where it is and have complete access to it.

When a family is grieving over the loss of someone they love, they will not have enough clarity to think of everything they will need to take care of funeral arrangements and take care of their loved one’s affairs afterward. If you take care of making sure all of these are together now, then it will make it a lot easier for your family when you die.

If you are the executor of your loved one’s estate, you will need to get two different documents to fulfill your responsibilities.

One document is a certified death certificate. You should ask for at least 20 in your meeting with the funeral home director (you can also get more later if you need them) if the estate is small. Larger estates may need more.

The second document you will likely need to execute the estate is an Employer Identification Number (EIN). This document makes the estate of your loved one a legal entity that can pay outstanding bills, pay funeral expenses, and distribute assets to the estate’s heirs.

You will also need identification papers and personal papers. For identification, you will need a birth certificate, citizenship papers, social security card, driver’s license, and passport (if applicable). The personal papers you will need include a marriage certificate, divorce/annulment papers, prenuptial agreements, military discharge papers, and birth and death certificates (if applicable) for the rest of the immediate family.

You may not need all the personal papers, but it’s good to have them in case you do. Make sure to keep your loved one’s purse or wallet (if they died some place other than home) so you have their driver’s license. In hospitals, hospice houses, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes, these should be among the effects of your loved one that are given to you after they die.

To make funeral arrangements according to your deceased loved one’s wishes, you will need any documentation they left that gave instructions for their funeral. You will also need biographical information for the obituary, and you will need contact information for anyone who needs to know that your loved one has died (don’t forget employers, if your loved one was not retired and still working).

There are some other papers that you’ll need at various times before and after your loved one dies. Before death, you will need your loved one’s durable power of attorney, living will, durable healthcare power of attorney, and organ donation papers. Without these, you will not be able to handle your loved one’s affairs if they are unable to do so themselves.

After your loved one has died, you will need either their will or revocable trust to execute the estate according to their wishes.

You will also need your loved one’s financial information. This can include bank accounts, investments, insurance policies, retirement accounts, pensions, payable on death accounts, and income tax returns.

For more information about cremation services in Cleveland, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 25900 Emery Road, Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Unforgettable Epitaphs on Gravestones

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Part of the funeral process at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH includes having a gravestone engraved with pertinent details about the person who has died placed at the gravesite. Some people use their imaginations to come up with very unique gravestones that include great epitaphs.

These memorable gravestones may give you some inspiration for your own gravestone or the gravestone of a loved one.

When Gabriel “Gabe” Williams died at the age of 27 in 1995, his family had two gravestones placed at his grave. The first gravestone was traditional. The second gravestone gave a nod to Gabe’s two passions in life: rock music and gymnastics. The second gravestone has a caption at the top that says, “For those who about to rock, Gabe salutes you from heaven.” Just below the caption is a gymnast on gymnastic rings. And on the lower left corner is the official logo for the metal band, AC/DC.

Really good cooks often joke that they’ll take their most beloved recipes to the grave with them. In the case of Kay’s family, they took her literally and created a tombstone with the title “Kay’s Fudge.” Kay’s recipe for fudge follows: “2 sq. chocolate/2 TBS butter/Melt on low heat/Stir in 1 cup of milk/Bring to boil/3 cups of sugar/1 TBS vanilla/Pinch salt/Cook to softball stage/Pour on marble slab/Cool & beat & eat.” Kay (no last name) was remembered with an epitaph that says, “Wherever she goes, there’s laughter.”

Andrew Olszak died in 1979 at the age of 86. He expressed his bitterness at how his life ended in the inscription he had engraved on his gravestone. It says, “Abandoned in old age by wife and children/May God be more understanding and merciful.”

People die in unusual ways and unusual circumstances. When George Spencer died in 1909 at the age of 15, his parents decided to permanently detail how George came to die on his gravestone: “Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office of Metropolitan Life Building.”

When Nathaniel Grigsby died in 1890 at the age of 79, he had left his heirs a very specific inscription that he wanted on his monument. Grigsby was friends with Abraham Lincoln, who was a Republican. When Grigsby placed Lincoln’s name on the 1860 ballot for president of the United States, his Missouri neighbors, who sympathized with the South and were Democrats, plotted to kill him, and a friend advised him to leave town immediately in the cover of darkness.

Grigsby heeded the advice, but he made his feelings about the Democratic party clear on his grave monument: “Through this inscription I wish to enter my dying protest against what is called the Democratic party I have watched it closely since the days of Jackson and know that all the misfortunes of our nation has come to it through this so called party therefore beware of this party of treason. Put on in fulfillment of promise to Deceased.”

Sometimes it’s easier to sum up a person’s life with just one sentence. Such is the case with the gravestone of Robert Allison, who died in 1887 at the age of 47. His epitaph reads, “He never killed a man that didn’t need killing.”

If you’d like more guidance on personalizing gravestones at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 25900 Emery Rd., Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Your Digital Life after Your Death

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After cremations as part of the cremation services offered in Shaker Heights, OH, whoever you’ve designated to take care of your final affairs should have access to your will or revocable trust (this will automatically transfer to them upon your death), any life and burial insurance policies you have, and access to your bank accounts and other financial accounts.

However, there is one other area of your life that you need to make sure your executor has, and that is all the login information (usernames and passwords) for everything you do digitally. Most of us have a gazillion of these. They include logins for digital devices, wireless routers, logins for online banking and other financial services, logins for streaming services, logins for credit card companies, logins for taxing filing sites, logins for airlines, and logins for online shopping sites.

You may also have social media logins for services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. If you blog online, then you have a login for that as well.

We need a quick note about using face recognition or fingerprints to log in to your digital devices instead of a password. While this may be a very good way to secure your digital devices, it’s important to remember that faces and fingerprints are unique for each person, so no one else will be able to access devices where you have this as your login method after you die.

Almost every online password is now required to be at least eight characters, using capital letters, numbers, and special characters. Because different sites use different ways to login – for example, some require a username, while others require an email address – there is no way to standardize all our online logins to be the same.

Even if that was possible, though, it would be a huge security risk, because if someone was able to hack into one account, they could potentially hack every single online account you have.

We all have different strategies for keeping up with all these logins. Many people use free password managers on their digital devices to store all this login information (however, there’s a login for the password manager too). Other people store this information in a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet.

One of the potential problems with password managers on your computer is that no one will be able to access it because they don’t have the administrator password to access the program. Additionally, if the computer crashes, then all your login information is completely inaccessible.

The Word document or Excel spreadsheet is the best way to keep up with your logins and to update them when they change, because you can keep a current copy – printed or on flash drive – with your important papers (replace it when the document changes), so that all your digital information is available to the person you’ve chosen to take care of your final affairs.

Keep your current login document stored on flash drive, not the digital device you primarily use. Label the flash drive and keep it where your executor can easily access it in case you forget to print or provide a current copy to include in your important papers.

For more information about cremation services in Shaker Heights, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 25900 Emery Road, Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

How to Plan a Funeral

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Planning your funeral before you die at funeral homes in Shaker Heights, OH gives you the opportunity to specify what your wishes are for your funeral. Planning for your funeral in advance also reduces some of the stress that your family will be dealing with, because all they have to do is put your funeral plan in motion with the funeral director. This frees your family to grieve and deal with the impact of losing you.

One aspect of planning your own funeral is whether you want to pay for the funeral in advance. This is optional. If you have a burial insurance policy for covering all the expenses of your funeral, then you’ll want to make sure that you have the insurance company’s name and the insurance policy number included in your funeral plans.

If you don’t have a burial insurance policy, you may be able to convert a portion of insurance coverage you already have into a burial insurance policy. You’ll need to check with your insurance company to see if this is possible.

Some insurance companies allow you to take a portion of mortgage insurance (which covers total value of the mortgage) you purchase when you buy a home and convert that into another type of policy, such as a burial insurance policy, as the mortgage of your home is paid off.

For a traditional funeral and burial, you will need to get a cemetery plot. Military veterans can be buried at no charge in a national cemetery, so if this is where you want to be buried, be sure to include a copy (not the original) of your military discharge papers (Form DD-214). If you’re affiliated with a church with a cemetery, you may be eligible for a free grave site in its cemetery. If your deceased relatives are buried in a family cemetery, you may have access to a free grave site there as well.

The next step will be choosing your casket. When you do this, you’re not paying for the casket, but you describing the type of casket you’d like to be buried in.

Next you’ll want to detail how you want in your funeral service. Include readings and songs that should read and performed. You’ll also need to specify who oversees the funeral service and provide their contact information.

Finally, you can address burial arrangements and services you’d like the funeral home to provide for you and your family during the funeral and at the cemetery.

It’s extremely important to document everything in your funeral plan. For example, if you want people to donate to causes or charities instead of sending flowers, specify that. Outline your funeral service. Write your obituary, if you’re so inclined.

All of this should be included with your other important papers and stored in a fireproof home safe or a bank safety deposit box. Whoever will be handling wrapping up your affairs, including taking care of funeral arrangements, after you’re gone should have access to the safe or safety deposit box.

Finally, sit down and talk with your family about your funeral plan so that everybody in the family knows what you want and will be on the same page when you die.

If you’d like to know more about funeral planning at funeral homes in Shaker Heights, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 25900 Emery Rd., Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Understanding What Next of Kin Means

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Guidance on who qualifies as next of kin is part of the cremations services in Warrensville Heights, OH that are offered. While we tend to think of next of kin as a colloquial phrase, it is actually a legal phrase in the United States. It determines who can make decisions for someone at the end of life if they don’t have a living will or other advance directives in place and who is in line for legal duties and inheritances if the person doesn’t have a will or living trust in place.

Generally, next of kin refers to someone’s closest blood relatives, which can include both immediate family and extended family, depending on who is alive that is the closest relative. Next of kin has significant legal meaning for end of live medical decision and for the rights of inheritance.

If you create a will, then you designate who executes it and who the beneficiaries of your estate – property, financial assets, and personal belongings – will be and how much of the estate each beneficiary receives.

However, if some dies intestate – without a will – then the legal statutes of Ohio will determine who your next of kin are when deciding on the beneficiaries of your estate. This may mean that things you promised to certain people won’t be done, because there’s no legal document with those instructions.

When determining the line of inheritance for next of kin, a surviving spouse and children are first. The surviving spouse will get most of the estate and the rest will be split among the children.

However, if you do not have a surviving spouse or children (biological or adopted), there is an order in which next of kin is decided.

If your parents are still living, they will be first in the order. Next will be any siblings that survive you. Grandchildren are next in line, followed by your grandparents, if they are still alive. Next are nieces and nephews, then aunts and uncles. Finally, great-grandchildren and great-grandparents, they’re still living, are in the line of inheritance.

Once the next of kin have been identified, then the state will appoint an administrator to distribute the estate. Most of the time, the administrator is a blood relative. If a spouse or children survive you, one of them will most likely be appointed as the administrator of your estate.

Next of kin comes into play when you are unable to make medical decisions for yourself, such as in the case of a coma or dementia. If you don’t have a health care directive that appoints someone as your medical proxy, then the closest blood relative will be designated as your medical representative.

The order for making medical decisions for you is your spouse, your adult children (for minor children, parents or guardians are first), your parents, if they are living, and a line of succession similar to that if you die without a will.

To ensure that your wishes for medical care, end of life decisions, and your estate are handled and carried out the way you want, you should get a health care directive (living will, DNR, etc.) appointing the person you want to make medical decisions for you if you are unable and what you want and done want done to prolong life if you are dying. You should also have a will or a revocable trust drawn up with the distribution of your estate spelled out. Both of these documents are legal with just your signature and a date, but you should try to get your will or revocable trust witnessed and notarized.

For more guidance on qualifications for next of kin after cremations services in Warrensville Heights, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 25900 Emery Road, Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Have the Last Word

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Part of the funeral process at funeral homes in Warrensville Heights, OH includes getting a tombstone or memorial to place at your gravesite or the gravesite of a loved one. Much of what happens during the funeral process are established rituals that can include some originality, but don’t stray too far from the predictive pattern.

There is the visitation, followed by the funeral service. Then there is the graveside service, followed by burial. And then some sort of reception or meal for the mourners after the graveside service.

Each of these parts of the funeral process has a format that doesn’t vary a whole lot, although some of the internal things may be more creative and original. Your tombstone or the tombstone of a loved one is a blank piece of marble or granite that is a canvas upon which you can leave your mark for future generations.

So what would you want your tombstone to say? Vince Gill, a country music artist, wrote a song about a husband who routinely cheated on his wife by going to bars, taking his wedding ring off and putting it in his pocket, and giving the appearance of being single and available. Gill predicts that the man will be caught and killed by a jealous husband or boyfriend, and the epithet on the cheater’s tombstone would read, “Here iies a rich man with a pocket full of gold.”

While none of us would want that kind of tombstone or memorial epithet, we all can think of that one last thing we might want to say after we’re dead. Of course, if we don’t choose our epithets, our family members might get the pleasure of giving us our last words.

A few examples of real epithets on tombstones can show us how creative some people can get and how tombstones can be used, even if inadvertantly. On R. Andersen’s (who was clearly a computer guy) tombstone, the epithet is, “Connection reset by peer. He came, he saw, he logged out.” Another memorial placed for George Johnson, who died in 1882, reads, “Here lies George Johnson. Hanged by mistake. 1882. He was right. We was wrong. But we strung him up, and now he’s gone.”

When a husband dies young, and leaves a young widow, a tombstone might be a matchmaking tool. Consider the tombstone of Jared Bates: “Sacred to the memory of Jared Bates. His widow, age 24, lives at 7 Elm Street. Has every qualification for a good wife and yearns to be comforted.” When the wife of a monument maker dies, the tombstone can be a marketing tool for the family business: “Here lies Jane Smith, wife of Thomas Smith, Marble cutter. This monument erected by her husband as a tribute to her memory. Monuments of this style are 250 dollars.”

Tombstones and memorials are not just rectangular, round, or tall pieces of granite or marble anymore. For example, in a rural church cemetery in northeast Tennessee, where most of the residents are farmers, a tombstone for a lifelong farmer and his wife depicts the family farm in vivid colors on a black background, and the epithet is, “Always Home.”

Other tombstones are being custom-designed to look like electric guitars, teddy bears, or favorite flowers. Scenes are often now painted on tombstones, with a smooth finish applied to the marble or granite. One couple had a tombstone built that was a life-size replica of a Mercedes Benz. The work took two years and the cost was over $250,000.

If you’d like to know more about tombstone customization at funeral homes in Warrensville Heights, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 25900 Emery Rd., Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Speak from the Heart

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After cremations as part of Cleveland, OH cremation services, the grieving process begins for the family members who have lost a loved one. When these family members are friends or extended family, we immediately are moved to comfort and support them, but we don’t often know if we should say anything, or if we do, what would be the right thing to say.

In reality, sometimes more silence than words is okay if we don’t know what to say and we’re afraid that we might say the wrong thing. But we can acknowledge the loss of a loved one and we can express our sympathy to our grieving friends and extended family members.

When someone is grieving, they may simply want to talk about their loss and their grief (some people don’t want to and we should respect that as well). They are not looking for advice or wisdom or counsel. They just need to be able to express to another person how they are feeling. We can show our hearts in this case by just listening with an empathetic ear.

Many of the feelings of loss and grief are complicated. They can range from anger to sorrow to fear and to regret. It can be hard to hear grief out loud, and we might be tempted to try to counter what our grieving friend or extended family member is saying by, in essence, disagreeing with how they feel and what they are saying. This can make things so much worse.

What we need to do instead is step back and put ourselves in their shoes. What would we want someone to say to us if we were in the throes of grief and emotional turmoil? Something kind and understanding that comes from an empathetic and gentle heart would sooth our wounds of loss instead of aggravating them.

Another way to show and speak from our hearts is not to disappear after a few weeks of supporting and consoling our grieving friends or extended relatives. One way to disappear is not making the time to check in with them regularly to see how they’re doing. They may not be up to in-person visits, but we can text or call them to let them know we care about them.

Another way to disappear is more subtle, but also much more hurtful. This disappearance consists of being impatient with our friends’ or extended relatives’ grief by essentially telling them that it’s time to move on and get over it. If you want to damage, or possibly destroy, a relationship, this is a sure way to begin the process.

Grieving takes time, and no two people grieve openly – grief, in some shape or form, lasts the rest of ife – the exact same way or for the same amount of time. It takes a lot of patience sometimes to listen to some of our friends and extended family members say the same things and express the same feelings over and over for an extended period of time.

But this is a part of healing and we need to affirm the validity that they are feeling these things and give them a safe and supportive environment to work out their grieving, no matter how long it takes. That’s friendship and that’s love.

For more information about grief resources as part of Cleveland, OH cremation services, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 2165 E. 89th Street, Cleveland, OH 44106, or you can call us today at (216) 791-0770.

Many Urban Cemeteries are Almost Full

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After funerals at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH in the near future, it may be quite difficult to find a cemetery with a single cemetery plot for sale. Cemeteries in urban areas are simply running out of space. Many of them have removed sidewalks, acquired more land around the cemetery, and shortened the amount of space between plots to continue to accommodate burials. But the amount of available land is finite.

Even the largest urban cemeteries, like Arlington National Cemetery, are facing a land crunch. Arlington National Cemetery is projected to run out of cemetery plots by 2041.

Baby Boomers, the largest generation since World War II, are now aging and beginning to die. As Baby Boomers die, they will push the land shortage that urban cemeteries are facing to its absolute limit. Baby Boomers moved out of small towns and into urban areas at a level and pace not seen in any generation before them. Once they got to urban areas, Baby Boomers eventually established homes and families and continued to contribute to the population growth of these areas.

What is problematic about cemeteries running out of space in urban areas is that many people want to be buried near where they live or they want to be buried with family members. That may not be possible in the future, and some people may have to choose cemeteries that are further away from where they live or where nobody else they know is buried.

Although it’s estimated that there are about 10,000 cemeteries in the United States, there is no concrete data on whether they are all active cemeteries or whether they still have room for future burials. Very few new cemeteries have been built in the last decade anywhere, but especially in urban areas.

One reason is because land is so expensive, and there so little of it available, in urban areas that cemeteries simply can’t compete with commercial interests in acquiring more land. Another reason is the ubiquity of housing developments, where huge tracts of land are purchased by developers and houses are built and governed by a homeowners association. Neither the people who purchased the houses nor the homeowners associations want a cemetery, figuratively speaking, in their backyard. So part of the contractual agreement for the housing development includes what is allowed on the land – and around it – and what is not.

About 76 million Americans will turn 78 between 2024 and 2042. 78 years of age is the average life expectancy in the United States. If all of those people decide to be buried in a casket, 130 square miles would need to be added to American cemeteries.

However, there is a silver lining. Since cremated remains can be buried in a cemetery and they take up much less space than a casket, cremation opens the avenue for more burials in urban cemeteries. With more than 50% of Americans choosing cremation over traditional burial, with that percentage expected to rise to 80% by 2035, cemeteries are now creating spaces for urn burials. These urn gardens are landscaped and maintained just like the rest of the cemeteries where caskets are buried. This may be the answer to keep urban cemeteries active and room available for several more decades.

If you’d like to learn more about funeral planning at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 2165 E 89th St., Cleveland, OH 44106, or you can call us today at (216) 791-0770.

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