Can a person request to be buried in his backyard rather than a cemetery? A guy in West Virginia said in June that he planned to be buried in his yard; the city council had to pass a new law to prevent it. I say a person (in California, where I live) can be buried anywhere he wants as long as he complies with health department laws, even if it is in his yard (front, back, or side). –Barry, via e-mail
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You’d think a state as out-there as California wouldn’t get twitchy over a little thing like backyard burials, but you’d be wrong. California prohibits disposal of human remains (except cremated ashes) anywhere other than in a cemetery, making it one of the most restrictive jurisdictions in the country. This may disappoint those looking forward to interment under the swing set, but don’t despair–there’s a loophole. In California law one definition of a cemetery is “a place where six or more human bodies are buried,” full stop. A construction like that invites enterprise. I suggest nothing; I merely point out that the state is going to be looking for six bodies. How they get there is up to you.
At the time Carlson wrote her book California imposed an unusual restriction on cremation: you could scatter ashes at sea or inter them on land within the state, but you couldn’t scatter them on land–a consequence of a 1980s scandal in which a scatter-at-sea outfit was found to be dumping its dusty cargo on somebody’s back lot rather than in the ocean. No other state had such a rule. (The law has since been relaxed to permit the scattering of ashes on private land with the owner’s permission.)
