Kate’s Way was wet and spongy underfoot as Michelle Acciavatti hiked the mulch-covered footpath to a natural clearing in the woods. Beneath a canopy of birch, spruce and towering white pines sprouted a bloom of small white surveyor’s flags, a temporary placeholder on a carpet of ferns, fallen leaves and decomposing logs.
One day soon, Acciavatti will bury a body here. She’ll dig a hole only a foot wider and longer than the biodegradable casket or shroud. She’ll record the gravesite on a map, but no tombstone or monument will mark its location. Family and friends may decorate the spot with a flat rock or other organic material — or let time, nature and the elements heal the modest scar in the ground.
This 56-acre woodland, bisected by the Third Branch of the White River in Roxbury, is Vermont Forest Cemetery. The state’s first forest conservation cemetery, it opens on Saturday, October 7, with a mission to provide an eco-friendly and affordable alternative to conventional burials. Here, the dead will return to the earth and nurture the living in a multitude of ways.
“As a conservation cemetery, we have a strong desire to always do what’s best for the forest,” explained Acciavatti, 40, the founder, head cemeterian and board president of the nonprofit cemetery. “But if we aren’t also keeping in mind the needs of the mourners, the visitors and the other people coming here … then we’re really letting those people down.”
For centuries, Vermont cemeteries looked a specific way and abided by burial customs brought from Europe that were later codified into state law. Until 2015, all cemeteries had to be fenced and platted in grids of clearly marked, well-maintained graves.
“We’ve now interpreted ‘well maintained’ as looking like a golf course,” Acciavatti said.
Vermont Forest Cemetery will function very differently. In conventional cemeteries, bodies are typically buried six feet deep, often in concrete or steel burial vaults. The forest cemetery will not use vaults, and graves will be no deeper than four feet. At that shallower depth, the body touches the living layers of the soil, where oxygen, moisture, bacteria and the sun’s warmth decompose it aerobically. This also enables the ground’s mycorrhizal network of fungi to absorb, filter and transport the body’s nutrients to plants and trees throughout the forest.
“Natural burial offers people a chance to feel like they’ve done something good with their final act.” Michelle Acciavatti
Those who choose green burials do so, in part, to reduce the huge environmental footprint of modern American burials. Each year, U.S. cemeteries bury more than 30 million board feet of hardwood, 90,000 tons of steel in caskets and 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete in burial vaults, according to the Funeral Consumers Alliance.
Additionally, conventionally buried bodies often contain embalming fluid with formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. This largely unnecessary funeral practice contributes more than 5.3 million gallons of toxic chemicals to the environment annually.
Even cremation, which many consider to be a more eco-friendly alternative — and one now chosen by nearly 75 percent of Vermonters — burns fossil fuels at high temperatures, emitting millions of tons of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants.
Acciavatti never shames families for their end-of-life decisions. In fact, the forest cemetery includes an area designated for cremated remains. Acciavatti worked with Vermont Compost Company to create a soil amendment that reduces the ashes’ high pH.
Ultimately, though, her goal is to make a body’s final disposition as earth-friendly as possible. As she put it, “Natural burial offers people a chance to feel like they’ve done something good with their final act.”
Kirsten Isgro and her partner, Tom Schicker, have lived in the shadow of death longer than most. Sylvie, one of the Burlington couple’s twin daughters, was born with Krabbe disease, a rare and fatal degenerative disorder. Though 80 to 90 percent of children with Krabbe don’t live past their third birthday, Sylvie and her sister, Uma, celebrated their 17th birthdays in January.
Sylvie has been close to death many times before. But in April, after she got extremely sick, it seemed like the end was near. Isgro and Schicker had a woven willow casket made by Mary Lauren Fraser, an artisan in Turners Falls, Mass., whom Acciavatti had recommended. Schicker and Uma then visited Vermont Forest Cemetery as a possible burial site.
“I love the whole idea of green burials,” Isgro said, “and Michelle’s philosophy totally lines up with ours in terms of low impact.”
Creating the forest conservation cemetery has been part Acciavatti’s broader mission to make the death and dying process more sustainable and rewarding for the living. She coined the term “natural death care worker” to encompass the many hats she wears, including end-of-life specialist, death doula, pregnancy loss guide, licensed mortician and cemeterian.
“The list is really long at this point,” she said with a laugh, “but it’s all around: How do we die well?”
Acciavatti’s path to natural death work actually started with her interest in the beginning of life. The 40-year-old San Diego native grew up in New England, attended Bennington College and trained as a neuroscientist. Initially, she planned to study cognitive and motor development in infants, especially those born with genetic disorders. She took a job as a research assistant in the Office of Ethics at Boston Children’s Hospital, where much of her work involved helping families decide whether to start or discontinue medical care that was keeping a child alive.
“I was watching people go through these decisions and just be absolutely miserable,” Acciavatti recalled. “Obviously, their children were dying. But there was something missing for them.”
A friend of Acciavatti’s, who was studying to be a birth midwife at the time, suggested that she become a death midwife, or death doula. It was a light-bulb moment for her. One of Acciavatti’s first clients was her aunt, Kate Van Demark — namesake of the Kate’s Way cemetery path. Acciavatti helped her die at home, then held a natural burial for her in Rochester, N.Y.
In 2015, Vermont enacted the Natural Burial Ground Act, which exempted natural cemeteries from the aesthetic rules that govern conventional cemeteries. Nevertheless, the new law didn’t change the mandate that bodies be interred at least five feet deep — a practice that dates back to the 1800s to accommodate burial vaults, which prevented grave robbing. Today, many cemeteries still require that depth as a way to prevent graves from settling, thus keeping the ground level for lawn mowing and other maintenance.
The problem is, deep burials aren’t very earth-friendly. So Acciavatti got involved, consulting experts in soil science, geology, wildlife biology and even septic system design to write a new bill that would allow for more ecological interments. That bill passed and took effect in 2017.
Initially, Acciavatti assumed that Vermont cemeteries would embrace a hybrid model, setting aside portions of their grounds for natural burials. By 2020, only seven of Vermont’s more than 2,000 cemeteries had done so.
After creating a conservation-minded cemetery in Essex, N.Y., Acciavatti and her husband, Paul, used money they inherited after his mother died to buy the Roxbury property in 2021. The couple then partnered with the White River Natural Resources Conservation District to turn the forest, which had been farmed and logged decades earlier, into a conservation cemetery.
“For me, the environmental impact is really, really important,” Isgro said. “Michelle’s been awesome in terms of debunking many of the myths around green burial and death.”
Indeed, it’s been a long and at times frustrating process for Acciavatti to educate the public about green burials, especially those who are unfamiliar with and leery of them. She’s often asked whether a shallower grave leaves a body vulnerable to scavengers. It doesn’t, she explained, as long as the burial is at least two feet deep.
Another fear is that decomposing human remains will contaminate nearby bodies of water. They don’t, she assures skeptics, as long as the grave is at least 150 feet from the shore.
“I’ve even been asked about trees falling over that fling bodies through the air,” Acciavatti said. But according to several green burial groups, catapulted corpses have never been an issue.
Another motivator for Acciavatti is the economics. Simply put, funerals and burials are pricey. In New England, the median cost of a funeral with burial was $7,881 in 2021, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Acciavatti said natural burial can reduce that cost to less than $5,000. Recognizing that even that figure will be a financial hardship for some Vermonters, she hopes to eventually establish burial societies that defer the costs, perhaps by allowing members to pay over time or earn sweat equity by working in the forest.
In fact, Acciavatti envisions Vermont Forest Cemetery as a place for the living as well as the dead. The property will be open for public use from dawn ’til dusk, allowing people to hike, picnic, ski, snowshoe or walk their dogs. While some activities are prohibited — Acciavatti and her husband worked with the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers to reroute a snowmobile trail that previously crossed their property — she hopes that the forest will be used by school groups, researchers, even artists and writers. Acciavatti wants to create an artist-in-residence program at a yet-to-be-built sanctuary at the cemetery’s entrance.
“I want everybody to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of stewardship [and] a sense of responsibility for this land,” she said. “The more people get invested in this space, in the entirety of the forest and what it offers, the more they can take comfort in this whole experience.”
As for Isgro, she doesn’t know yet when or where Sylvie will be buried, as she’s been in hospice since the spring. But Isgro said it’s only a matter of time before the family needs the woven casket, which for now waits in their toolshed.
The idea of a natural burial in the woods, one where death isn’t sanitized, brings her a sense of comfort and peace. As she put, “It’s literally going back into the earth, dust to dust.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Back to the Land | A new cemetery in Roxbury lets the dead give to the living and preserve a forest”
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This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2023.
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