Natural burial: bringing death back down to earth.

• Author: Harris, Mark
• Position: The Good Earth

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Shelia Champion wasn't surprised when she got the call saying her father had died. Her father, "Buster" Stice, a one-time cattleman from Stockton, Kansas, was almost eighty-six by then and in hospice care with advanced prostate cancer. On her last visit weeks before, Champion had been shocked at how bad her father looked. As she hugged him before heading back to Alabama, she suspected it would be their last goodbye.

Yet while Stice's death in July 2010 had been expected, what happened afterward, at his funeral, was not. "I was shocked by how sterile and impersonal it was," Champion says. At the funeral home chapel, she and her family were herded into an alcove, shielded from other mourners by a curtain, while a preacher who hardly knew her father offered platitudes.

She also thought the burial service at Stocktons "cookie-cutter cemetery" was bland as it was brief, with the casket left suspended above the grave as everyone wandered off. "I thought, 'Oh, my God. We've reached a point where we don't let a feeling in,' " Champion says, recalling the event six years later. "It was like we were all pretending that Dad hadn't died."

Then there was the bill: $12,500, a sum Champion thought outrageous. "Talk about a waste," she says. "All that money and no one knows or cares if Dad's casket is dry or if his vault is crumbling. It's all irrelevant."

Back in Hazel Green, Alabama, mourning her loss, Champion found herself imagining the funeral she wished her father had had. Instead of his black suit, they'd have buried him in his overalls, like the ones he worked in his whole life. At a grave dug by one of the brothers, they'd have then toasted the "ornery old cuss" with a Bloody Mary, the drink Buster downed at breakfast every morning. "Anything," says Champion, "to make it more authentic."

At some point in Champion's musings, an idea formed: Why not help others arrange for the kind of authentic sendoff her family hadn't been able to give her dad? In March of 2016, Champion, a sixty-four-year-old retiree, turned that notion into a second career, opening the first freestanding natural cemetery in Alabama. Situated on five acres in farm country north of Huntsville, The Good Earth Burial Ground--named for the classic Pearl S. Buck novel--seeks to bring death back down to earth, says Champion. Thus, there is no embalming, no metal caskets, no burial vaults.

"Just the body going into the ground," she says, "to decompose in a manner more in line with what nature has in mind." At $1,800 on average for a plot, and far fewer fees than the typical funeral and burial, a natural return here is also more in line with a family's bottom line.

In the end, The Good Earth seeks to bring families into closer engagement with both the dead and the natural cycle of life. When Champion and I talked this spring, she was still anticipating her first burial, but already had a vision for how it would go.

From the entrance, family members might carry the casket to the grave, and afterward all help lower it into the earth. Anyone could take a turn with a shovel and fill the grave. Funerals could be held beforehand at home. Certain rituals would develop over time. Whatever they are, Champion says, they won't be the "expensive, sterile, one-size fits all rituals," like the ones she observed with her father. "I'll tell...