Why Choose Burial?

We can learn a lot through ritual.

Some of our earliest information about our prehistoric ancestors tells us they shared an important characteristic with us: they honored their dead through burial rituals.

Through human history we have continued this tradition:

• We use funeral rites and rituals to proclaim something critical to each other, something quintessentially human: that the life we are mourning mattered to us.
• We grieve our loved one's departure from this life and thereby proclaim our kinship with them even beyond the grave.
• We honor the body of the loved and lost and lay it to rest — with the rituals of our faith and the customs of family.

The practices differ across our cultures but the intent is the same: it is the human family throughout history standing in solidarity, affirming and celebrating that life matters, that this life mattered, that our lives matter.

Our sacrifices in this regard speak volumes on our behalf:

• We spend our time and treasure to lay our loved one to rest.
• We dedicate the precious resource of land to the memories of those who held their brief tenancies on this earth before we staked our own claim.
• And we trust that when we ourselves die, those we leave here will remember and celebrate our existence in similar fashion.

For we do something else when we bury our dead:

• We mark a time and a place for our mourning.
• We allow ourselves to grieve through the established traditions of our family.
• We allow ourselves to feel the pain of loss and to survive it, to remember our loved one and still to go on living.
• Our rituals both assist our grieving and help us to contain it. They are a critical part of what makes us human.