The dilemma to Rent or Bury

A recent radio broadcast drew my attention to the common practice in 19^th Century France for burial graves to be rented rather than bought outright. 

In some cases, if those liable for payment of the rental defaulted, whether a Bequest Arrangement or simply an arrangement with surviving family or relatives, then there was a perfect entitlement for the freehold owner to exhume and dispose of the contents. 

This situation has persisted in other parts of Europe with, in 2016, the same situation arising in Greece with the very real prospect of incumbents being removed and relocated forcibly or with dependants being requested to take back the bones and make alternative arrangements. 

If you want your grave to be your final resting place or indeed to be a family plot then you would be best avoiding getting buried in the Netherlands.

Graves in the Netherlands are typically rented for 10 or 20 years, with remains being cleared out once the lease expires. 

Interestingly, this has nothing to do with burial rituals. It is actually because there just isn't enough cemetery space in the country. 

The combination of poor soil conditions and high ground water tables slow down the skeletonisation process of the bodies and preclude the Dutch from building up enough cemeteries.

It is technically possible to tackle or at least mitigate these bio-geological and climatic issues by artificial means but the required actions are expensive for cemeteries to consider.

This detail may be specific to Dutch cemeteries and is an interesting fact on its own, but it is also worth considering the demographic issues facing many European countries.

Many of the countries in western Europe, including the Netherlands, have an ageing population that is becoming significantly larger than it was in previous generations.

This in turn will have an upward impact on mortality rates and numbers throughout the EU. The ten most populated state of the EU as of 2004 will all experience a negative natural population change, i.e. the total number of deaths in the period 2004-2050 will be higher.

For the Netherlands specifically researchers on the subject have calculated that the expected number of deaths in 2050 will be 65% higher than the number of deaths in 2004.

The implications of this trend is that the inevitably larger population of older people will eventually result in a larger number of deaths than people saw in the past.

In turn this lead people to address all sorts of small daily life problems such as finding enough cemetery space for everybody.

As an interesting end note grave leasing is not actually always done due to the labour-intensive nature of tracking down surviving next of kin and that many graveyard organisations or local communities are reluctant to even think about or attempt to clear graves for reasons of respect for the dead.

As they say, watch this space.

Source; Business Insider Article by Elena Holodny 2016