Cemeteries adjust to diversity

Burial sites are allowing more grave offerings and hosting a variety of rites.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- For years, Stephen Lai sought the perfect spot to bury himself, his wife and his parents. One beautiful mountaintop cemetery was "too windy, too foggy," he said. Another was worse: It had no mountain at all.
He found what he was looking for at Hillside Gardens in Colma, Calif., which employs the Asian practice of feng shui to place objects for optimal spiritual energy. Here a fountain gurgles out front, ancestors sleep between San Bruno Mountain and a newly constructed lake, and monuments face a setting sun. This spring Lai, 42, bought four plots.
In California's Bay Area, where whites are no longer the majority, diversity is redefining communities for the dead as well as the living.
Cultural practices
Funeral homes are building rooms where Indian families can wash their deceased with honey and yogurt before cremations, and supplying special pots so Vietnamese families can safely burn the paper money their ancestors may need in the afterlife.
Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, which opened Hillside Gardens last year, doesn't stop at providing facilities to meet different cultural needs. It also hosts elaborate ceremonies for Memorial Day and Dia de los Muertos and recently welcomed thousands of people for Ching Ming, the Chinese ancestor-worshipping day.
Some cemeteries are also changing policies that once prized tidy -- and easily maintained -- lawns so visitors can leave stones on Jewish grave sites and tangerines on Chinese ones. Accommodating different cultures is a trend sprouting across America, said Bob Fells, external chief operating officer with the International Cemetery and Funeral Association.
"The cemeteries have become more sensitive and say: These aren't just rocks; they have meaning," Fells said.
But celebrating diversity is not just a matter of evolving cultural sensitivities; it's also smart business. White families that once preferred plots and mausoleums are increasingly opting for the simpler option of cremation, which can cost less than $2,000. Today it's families of other cultures who often choose the more lavish arrangements, which can start at $10,000.
Careful design
Cypress Lawn president Kenneth Varner, who has been in the cemetery business 15 years, said white families are still the majority of his business -- 60 percent these days -- with the remainder split mainly among Latinos, Filipinos and Chinese. Cypress Lawn was mindful of that mix when it designed its new cemetery areas. It created one space for the flat monuments preferred by Latino and Filipino families, and another for the columbaria favored by white families who want to bury cremation urns.
However, the Chinese influence is big at Cypress Lawn.
Because of their ancestral reverence and belief that how they treat their dead affects their own fates, Asians, especially Chinese-Americans, spend the most per burial. "If you look at a dollar basis, they're our best customers," Varner said. Asians now make up 19 percent of the Bay Area population.
Other sites
Other local cemeteries reflect the trend. Rolling Hills Memorial Park in Richmond, once a predominantly black cemetery, changed its flat-monuments-only policy to allow upright ones -- which Asians consider more traditional and respectful -- in three gardens. Managers there say those gardens are now 80 percent Asian.
In Palo Alto, Alta Mesa Memorial Park now offers special pots so before Hindu families cremate a body, they can burn items the deceased may need in the afterlife. And to accommodate the South Bay's growing Asian community, Oak Hill Memorial Park in San Jose is building a new Asian Chapel this summer, complete with strong ventilators to shoo away incense smoke.
The accommodations at Cypress Lawn are quite a shift for a cemetery that as recently as the 1950s buried only whites.
But legal and cultural restrictions have eased -- for schools, neighborhoods and cemeteries.
"I know a lot of Chinese people, whether new immigrants or old Chinese people here, they don't go bury in the homeland anymore," said Dennis Wan, president of the South Bay Historic Chinese American Cemetery Corporation.
Culture clashes?
With so many cultures coming together, cemeteries are careful to avoid clashes.
At Alta Mesa, officials have learned that often Asians bring fruit, Pacific Islanders bring pork and Russian Jews burn heavy incense throughout the cemetery. They let most tokens linger a few days before maintenance crews toss them. But once in a while, they make an exception.
"Once someone left a pig's head with an apple in its mouth," said general manager Marilyn Talbot, referring to a Pacific Islander family. "We removed it the very next day."
Alex Zhan of Milipitas recently visited his grandmother's grave for Ching Ming and was surprised by the cemetery's elaborate ceremony.
It had hired calligraphers to write family names on yellow strips and supplied stacks of paper money to burn. There was an offering table for the dead and a buffet for the living. Members of a Buddhist temple, dressed in yellow robes, held a chanting ceremony.
Zhan, 31, was impressed.
"I don't see anything outside of China or Asia that they do this," he said.