Valencia County cemetery allows only ‘green’ burials

TIERRA GRANDE—There’s a place in southern Valencia County where the dead are kept company by the to and fro of freight trains.

Set on 40 acres is La Puerta Natural Burial Ground, an interment option for those wanting to use simpler, more natural methods, according to Dr. Donal Key. The cemetery is adjacent to 14,000 acres of designated open space in the Tierra Grande subdivision.

Owning and operating a cemetery might seem like an unusual vocation, but Key said that for him and his wife, Linda Canyon, it was a natural progression of their professional lives.

“We both worked extensively in hospice care,” Key said. “In that, we saw a lot of end-of-life situations, where often a person and family had depleted their resources and didn’t have a way to lay their loved one to rest.”

Key said resources and choices for simple, inexpensive burials were in short supply, so it seemed natural for them to create one.

After retirement, they began looking for an ideal location for what is known as a “green” cemetery, which follows interment practices that have been described as more environmentally sound than what has become the traditional way of burying someone. To be considered a “green” or natural burial, bodies are interred without embalming in biodegradable pine caskets or wrapped in a natural fiber shroud, said Key. Underground concrete vaults are not allowed.

“If you think about it, that is the traditional way to bury someone,” he said. “It wasn’t until the Civil War, when families wanted the soldiers who died to be brought home for burial, that embalming became commonplace.”

If a family wishes to do a natural burial, they are required to inter the deceased within 24 hours, Key said, unless the body is kept cold at a facility, such as a funeral home.

The staff of La Puerta works directly with families or with funeral homes for green burials, but the family is ultimately responsible for the body.

“We are not a funeral home. We are just a cemetery and we will let families know their options and responsibilities,” Key said.

Burial sites cost $450, of which $225 is donated to a nonprofit, environmental cause, church, temple, synagogue or mosque of the purchaser’s choice.

There are fewer than a dozen graves at the cemetery, but Key and Canyon plan to take their places there some day.