burial or cremation, how to decide during your lifetime?

“Where would I be buried? The question has never been in doubt for me: with my parents. But it was when my mother died, four years ago, that it really took root,” recalls Françoise, 71 years old. There is in fact no more room in the vault where his mother joined his father, buried twenty-five years previously. “My sister took over the concession from my father’s parents, and I took over from my mother’s parents. We have already reserved our places,” continues the former teacher. His family will have no questions to ask when the time comes.

A relief: when death occurs, the loved ones of the deceased, immersed in the emotion of mourning, absorbed by the organization of the funeral, must quickly make practical, meaningful decisions: burial, but where? Incineration? So what to do with the ashes? However, these decisions are subject to a legal framework: you cannot be buried where you want and the fate of the ashes follows rules.

It is better to anticipate as much as possible choices that strongly involve those around you. In fact, although funeral directors support the bereaved, their primary mission is to sell coffins and associated services. A “business of death” exists, of which the recent investigation by journalists Brianne Huguerre-Cousin and Matthieu Slisse describes certain excesses (The Scavengers, Ed. Threshold, October 2025).

How we treat our dead defines humanity, anthropologists say. Homo sapiens, still nomadic, digs graves and sometimes places objects in the graves, a probable indicator of beliefs in an afterlife. When it became sedentary, around ten thousand years ago, it first buried its dead inside or near houses.

Gradually, the deceased are separated from their living space and grouped together (1). Sometimes, he cremates them: the cremation of the deceased, whose ashes are grouped in necropolises, constitutes “an almost exclusive practice between the years 900 and 475 BC in western Languedoc and Midi-Pyrénées”, observed the paleoanthropologist Sandrine Lenorzer in her doctoral thesis (2006).

Family tomb or adoption grave

Then as today, being close to one’s loved ones motivates many funeral practices. Michelle, 66 years old, Malagasy, has lived in France for a long time. Planning the place of one’s burial involves a powerful cultural heritage. In his family, the tomb, in the shape of a small house, is located on the family property in Madagascar, a little far from the home. “With my brothers and my sister, we are going to build a tomb. We are going to remove my father and my mother from their tombs and put them there,” she predicts.

Although she left the country years ago and doesn’t have “many friends” there anymore, Michelle is planning there, whatever the cost: “My husband is buried there. It’s the minimum to join him. But it also depends on each person’s means,” she concedes.

Also far from his native land, Jean-François, a soon-to-be retired Guadeloupean, chose: “I would have liked to be buried on my island, where I grew up, but my children were born in mainland France. I don’t want to put the burden of repatriating my body on them.”

United in death

The powerful desire to be closer to one’s loved ones in death can work in depth, neither seen nor known. Christophe, 60, surprised himself by buying a small country house in the village of his childhood, in Perche, where he had not set foot for around thirty years, estranged from his mother. While attending her funeral, he revisits old acquaintances. Something moves inside him. “Unconsciously, I found myself installed in this village. Recently, I thought that I would be buried there, near “my” dead, and not cremated, as I first envisioned. But closer to my grandmother than to my mother,” he adds with a touch of humor.

Obviously, the gathering of mortal remains has an impact on the living. For Fabienne, 61, it seemed obvious that she would one day take her place in the flower-filled family tomb visited regularly in the Parisian cemetery of Montmartre: “I saw myself there, with the people I knew and loved.” But the available places found themselves occupied by the generation above. It was then that the administration of the Père-Lachaise cemetery informed him of the existence of another family grave. Fabienne, a professional psychologist, reacted intensely: “This tomb was without affect for me, since I had never hugged those who rested there.

However, this news made me happy for weeks! I saw myself there, freed from a set path. It’s so weird!” Surprising? Less so, when Fabienne continues: “My father, whom I knew little, is buried in Père-Lachaise, in a third grave. This makes sense: the link that could not be made during our lifetime will be able to be made beyond our death…” The story does not end there. “A reduction of the bodies (2) was carried out in the tomb of Montmartre, and there is therefore room again. But I stand by my decision,” she confirms.

Involve loved ones

Inevitably, wondering about one’s place in the cemetery refers to one’s place in the family lineage, deceased and living. Organizing her father’s funeral was a key moment in the lives of her siblings, appreciates Suzanne3, 60 years old: “Ask me and my two brothers about his last wishes – had he left instructions? -, finding a burial place – administrative constraints made us give up on a first, then a second cemetery -, choosing a coffin, flowers, while respecting everyone’s sensitivity, was revealing. And even founder. » Rich from this experience, Suzanne, who saw herself buried in the cemetery of her village, where a childhood friend who died at the age of 15 rests, reassessed her wishes: “I leave it to my children to choose my burial, depending on where they will be.”

What if Suzanne’s children chose cremation for her rather than a traditional burial? In France, a Latin country, 42% of the dead are cremated, a figure that is constantly increasing, still far from the practice of the Nordic countries, or Switzerland, European champion with 90% of remains reduced to ashes. Holding the funeral urn of a loved one in your hands, leaving the crematorium, removes many questions. Of course, it is possible to place it in a grave or in the cemetery columbarium. The dispersal of ashes in natural space calls upon other representations of existence, other beliefs, possibly. What form does the duty of memory towards the deceased take? In Japan, a country of Buddhist and Shinto traditions, cremation, which is obligatory, is accompanied by highly developed funeral rites, from death until the urn is placed in the family vault forty-nine days later.

Maintain a grave or pray

In countries with a Christian tradition, rites honoring the memory of the deceased are built around the body buried in the hope of resurrection. The de-Christianization of society at the same time as the rise of cremation led to the adaptation, even the invention of new rituals. “A grave doesn’t help me remember my deceased,” notes Pascal, 59 years old. I don’t want to impose the maintenance on my children. They will choose a place that suits them, that speaks to them about me, where they will scatter my ashes: the sea, a forest… To those who love me, I say: “When you pass by a church, you will remember to put up a light for me.”

For 75% of French people, according to a Crédoc study (March 2025), cemeteries remain essential for carrying out the work of mourning. Half of them entered there during the last twelve months “for a reason other than a funeral, the maintenance of a grave or contemplation”. This shows the metaphysical function of these places which lead to meditation.

As All Saints’ Day approaches, visitors flock with pots of chrysanthemums and even small cleaning equipment to scrape, weed and wash the tiles. Françoise, like every year, intends to take her grandchildren there who will browse the aisles, spot the children’s graves, read some epitaphs. Even if the decrepit and abandoned tombs expose the volatility of human memory, it will be an opportunity to pray and pass on the family memory – that of Françoise’s great-grandmother, who lived to be 101 years old, passionate about reading – and to bear witness, as a Christian, to her hope in future reunions. As an echo of this promise of Saint Paul in the Letter to the Hebrews: our true homeland is in Heaven, whatever the place of our earthly burial. “It was in faith (…) that they all died (…) on earth, they were strangers and travelers. (…) In fact, they aspired to a better homeland, that of heaven.”

1) National Museum of Natural History.

2) Gathering in a small box what remains of the bones of one or more deceased people to free up space for a coffin in a vault.

3) The first name has been changed.