Quebec cemetery turns former golf course into forest for the deceased – Montreal | 24CA News
At a brand new ecological cemetery north of Montreal there are not any gravestones or plaques. Instead, folks find burial websites with the assistance of a cellphone app.
Cemetery Forêt de la Seconde Vie opened in Ste-Sophie, Que., on Aug. 7 with the objective of remodeling a 232,000-square-metre ex-golf course right into a dense forest. It crops timber alongside the previous fairways and greens to mark the burial websites of cremated stays, a course of it calls “planting roots.”
Visitors can use the cemetery’s utility to seek out their cherished one’s tree. Once there, they’re requested to scan the encompassing panorama with their cellphone digicam till a digital chest pops up on display screen, revealing digital memorabilia inside: pictures, movies and even recipes belonging to the deceased.
The cemetery claims to be the primary in North America to be an official forest producer, a certification that in Quebec includes consulting a registered forest engineer to develop a land administration plan.
For Mylene Hebert, 27, the idea was a welcome various to a conventional burial for her father, a longtime resident of Ste-Sophie who died in 2021 on the age of 55. She rejected the concept of a graveyard interment, which she known as “gloomy” and “negative,” and she or he stated she was instantly drawn to Forêt de la Seconde Vie when she heard about it. She plans to plant his tree on Oct 1.
“I think it’s incredible,” she stated in a cellphone interview. “With paper photos, we can lose them,” however with the cemetery app, “they will be recorded when we go visit … I can’t wait to see how it’s going to look in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.”
In 2019, co-founders Ritchie Deraiche and Guillaume Marcoux purchased the property that will turn out to be Forêt de la Seconde Vie. Both fathers of younger youngsters, they stated they got here up with the concept whereas reflecting on the way to mix environmental stewardship with household legacy.
“We wondered what concrete difference we could actually make right now in terms of preserving the environment, preserving and creating an ecosystem, biodiversity, and then, what we can leave to the generations that follow us,” Marcoux stated in a current interview.
The endeavour was particularly private for Deraiche. In June, his grandmother grew to become the primary individual to have their ashes buried underneath a brand new tree on the positioning.
The founders hope their purchasers develop the same, private connection to the cemetery. Its very design is meant to facilitate an emotional attachment to the land, permitting guests to “immerse themselves in the forest and create a sense of belonging,” Marcoux stated.
An on-line map advertises 5 thematic zones — with names just like the Woods of Sighs and the Nourishing Forest — every with 5 tree species from which prospects can select.
Though there’s little to watch to date, round 20 spindly saplings — the primary of seven,000 deliberate timber — stand as testaments to the cemetery’s first purchasers. Elsewhere, wood stakes poke out of expansive golf fairways to delineate future planting websites.
But there are different factors of curiosity, together with swings, a hammock and a big sculpture of outstretched fingers rising from the Earth. These alternatives for amusement distinguish Forêt de la Seconde Vie from conventional, solemn burial grounds and foster guests’ bond with the property, Fannie Tremblay, its administrative director, stated throughout a web site go to.
The cemetery additional achieves this by encouraging the dwelling to speculate — each financially and emotionally — in their very own timber earlier than their dying. Tremblay is amongst them, with a fledgling oak tree in her title within the cemetery’s northwest nook.
An 18-square-metre plot with a memorial tree and digital chest begins at $3,750, based on the corporate web site. At $14,999, the most costly Forêt de la Seconde Vie bundle contains an extra 55 sq. metres and burial rights for the ashes of as many as eight different folks.
The customizable tributes at Forêt de la Seconde Vie are a part of a “major cultural shift” in attitudes about funerals in North America, defined Tanya Marsh, a legislation professor at Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, who research the therapy of human stays.
Two developments are driving that shift, she stated in a current interview. The first, she famous, is “a greater interest in memorialization options and personalization,” in distinction to the “prepackaged services and goods” one would possibly discover at a funeral dwelling.
The second is what Marsh known as an “increased interest in greening the funeral.” She pointed to the quickly rising reputation of cremation, a follow that consumes gasoline however, she stated, could also be seen as extra environmentally pleasant than embalming and burial in coffins.
Cremation Association of North America knowledge present the five-year common cremation fee was 57.5 per cent within the U.S. and 74.8 per cent in Canada in 2021, in comparison with 33.8 per cent and 55.8 per cent, respectively, in 2006.
Marsh expects various funeral practices to turn out to be extra frequent within the years forward.
“Death is the ultimate human problem. And we’re always gonna have to deal with it,” she stated. “And so people are just gonna continue innovating and coming up with these new and interesting ways ? (to) help us process grief.”
“So it’s an exciting time to be interested in death.”
© 2023 The Canadian Press
