Don’t bodies need some kind of protection underground?

Photo Credit: Lisa J. Whitmer

Many funeral homes and cemeteries present caskets and vaults as a way of preserving the body. This advice is given more to encourage a certain visual of a sanitary eternal resting place for our bodies, but our bodies really don’t need to be sealed off from the earth. Our bodies are made of borrowed elements that should return to the earth and therefore our efforts to preserve it turns out to be unhelpful for the life of the living. Similarly, the earth does not need protection from our bodies either. At the burial depth of a traditional 3.5’, a body that decomposes is far enough away from the water table that averages around 75’ deep. There have been no reported contaminations of water sources in areas that have natural burial grounds.