This burial—well—wasn’t like that.
By the time we got Mrs. Shepard into our body preparation room, she had been dead for six weeks, trapped in a plastic body bag under refrigeration at the L.A. coroner’s office. Amber and I stood on either side of her as we unzipped her bag. Mold had begun to grow under her eyes, and carried down her neck and onto her shoulders. Her stomach was collapsed, colored deep aquamarine (brought on by the decomposition of the red blood cells). The top layers of skin peeled free from her calves. The bag had been swamplike, bathing Mrs. Shepard in her own blood and bodily fluid.
We released her from the plastic prison and washed her body down, soapy water sliding down the steel table and disappearing through a small hole near her feet. Amber washed her hair, originally white but now dyed brown with blood, doing her best to work around the patches of mold growing on her scalp. We labored in silence, something about the decayed state of the body making us less vocal than usual. After patting Mrs. Shepard dry, it was clear that she was not done leaking. If Undertaking LA were a typical mortuary, we’d have all types of tricks up our sleeves (Saran Wrap, diapers, chemical powders, even head-to-toe plastic body suits) to combat the aptly named “leakage.” But a natural cemetery won’t accept a body for burial that has been treated with any of those chemical leakage treatments.
We moved Mrs. Shepard straight into her shroud, hoping to wrap her enough times that she wouldn’t ooze through. Amber had sewn the shroud herself from unbleached cotton fabric. The family had little money, and we were trying to bring down costs everywhere we could. The day before, I had received a text from Amber: a picture of a receipt from JoAnn’s Fabrics with the caption, “Guess who just saved the family 40% on their burial shroud with JoAnn’s points!” The finished product was charming, complete with ties and handles (though no peacock feathers or palm fronds).
A SHROUDED MRS. SHEPARD was placed into the back of a van and driven two and a half hours east of Los Angeles, through the Inland Empire (a deceptive Tolkien-like name for what is essentially clusters of suburbs) and finally into the Mojave Desert. You know you’ve reached desert not from the change of landscape but from the casino billboards, advertising performances from a rotating cast of slightly less relevant celebrities. (This particular drive: Michael Bolton and Ludacris.) Then you are well and truly in the desert, among the Joshua trees, Yucca brevifolia, with their spiky arms reaching to the sky in whimsical, Seussian poses.
Joshua Tree Memorial Park was not created to be a natural cemetery. They have done what many cemeteries (of sense) are doing, and dedicated a section of their land to offer natural burials. The distance to Joshua Tree is often prohibitive for a Los Angeles family. We Angelenos would prefer to keep our dead closer to home, but where? Forest Lawn Memorial Park, one of L.A.’s celebrity burial spots, insists on heavy vaults surrounding the caskets, and doesn’t offer natural burial. They do make exceptions for Jews and Muslims, both religions that require the natural burial of bodies. In these cases, they agree to poke holes in the concrete of the vault for symbolic dirt to trickle through.
A natural section has recently opened at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica. But to purchase a plot there you’ll pay a several-thousand-dollar “green” premium, even though a natural burial is easier to accomplish (if you need to go scream into a pillow in frustration, I’ll wait).
Joshua Tree’s natural burial section opened in 2010. They set aside sixty burial plots, forty of which are now filled, in a plot of land surrounded by a low wooden fence. The natural burial section, tiny compared to the vast desert surrounding it, further highlights how ludicrous our modern policies on burial are. The world used to be our burial ground. We buried bodies on farms, ranches, and in local churchyards—anywhere we wanted, really. Some states still allow for burial on private property. But California is not one of them, and our corpses must be herded into small pens in the desert.
One of the priests I met in Japan, Masuda jūshoku, had heard that the cremation rate in America was rising in part because of fears we might run out of land in which to bury people. He didn’t understand this motivation. “From my Japanese perspective, the U.S. is a big country. There is so much land everywhere, it would be very easy to build these big cemeteries and graves.”
Some picture a “green” burial and need that directive to be literal: verdant rolling hills, dense forests, burial under a willow tree. Joshua Tree, with its stocky cholla pencil cacti, creosote bushes, and globemallows fighting their way through the sandy soil, can seem a harsh landscape, not a place of mystical regeneration.
But the desert has always nurtured the rebels, the wild-hearted. Alt-country musician Gram Parsons was only twenty-six when he overdosed on a combo of heroin, morphine, and alcohol in his hotel room in Joshua Tree. His (allegedly) wicked stepfather wanted Parsons’s body flown back to New Orleans so he could take control of his estate, in the erroneous belief that to the body-holder go the spoils.
Parsons’s good friend Phil Kaufman had other plans. The two men had made a pact that if one of them died, “the survivor would take the other guy’s body out to Joshua Tree, have a few drinks and burn it.”
Somehow, through charm and brazen drunkenness, Kaufman and an accomplice managed to track down Parsons’s casket at Los Angeles International Airport and prevent it from being loaded onto the plane to New Orleans by convincing an airline employee that the Parsons family had changed their minds. The duo even got a police officer and an airline employee to help them transfer Parsons’s body into a makeshift hearse (no license plate, broken windows, filled with liquor). Off they drove, Parsons rattling in the back.
When they reached Cap Rock, a natural boulder formation in Joshua Tree National Park, they removed the casket, doused Parsons’s body with fuel, and set it on fire, sending a colossal fireball shooting into the night sky.
The two men fled. A coating of fuel is not enough to fully cremate a body, and Parsons was recovered as a semi-charred corpse. For all their antics, Kaufman and his accomplice were charged only with misdemeanor theft for stealing the casket (not the body, mind you). What was left of Parsons’s body was sent to New Orleans, where it was buried. His stepfather never got the money.