More Americans getting Buried In their Backyard

The Deacon Bench has this interesting story at Death be not cheap: the rise in home burials.

I really wonder if there will be a huge demand for this. This is not like the 1800s where the Family Homestead is passed down from generations to generation. What happens if the family moves. Will the House be difficult to sell. I suppose that the family will have a agreement that the body can't be moved. Can the family visit the grave if new people move in.

This all reminds me of a humorous article dealing with William F Buckley and his son

The next morning I drove from Washington to my parents’ home in Stamford. There’s something to be said for a long, solitary drive — it concentrates the mind. Death presents you with a to-do list, and at the top of the list was the most urgent detail, namely the disposal of the last remains.

Some years before, Pup commissioned a large bronze crucifix from the Connecticut sculptor Jimmy Knowles. It’s a beautiful piece of modern art. He placed it in the middle of the lawn in Stamford, to a distinct grumbling by Mum, who viewed her garden as off-limits to my father’s artistic (and in this case overtly religious) intrusions. Mum’s ashes were now inside the cross, in a heavy brass canister that looked as if it had been designed as a container for enriched plutonium. Pup’s instructions were that he, too, should be cremated and join her in the cross. The idea of Mum, who wasn’t very religious, encased for all eternity inside Pup’s crucifix had afforded her and me a few grim giggles over the years.
“Just sprinkle me in the garden or send me out with the trash,” she told me. “I most certainly do not wish to be inside that object.” But Mum died first, so that was that.
Pup expected me to keep the Stamford house, but beautiful as it was and fond though (most of) my memories were of it, it’s expensive, and after paying all the death taxes, I doubted I’d be able to maintain it. But not wanting to hurt his feelings, I went along with the fiction that I would keep it. This, however, left me with a conundrum: what to do with the cross. One evening during his convalescence I tiptoed into this minefield over our martinis.
“Say, Pup, I know you want your ashes in the cross. . . .”
“I absolutely want them in the cross,” he said, in a pre-emptive, “Firing Line” tone of voice.
“Right. Right. I was only thinking, what if, you know, the house, if I, well, you never know . . . if I ever had to sell it. . . .”
“Your point being?”
“Well, I mean, a new owner . . . surely . . . might, uh. . . .”
“Why wouldn’t a new owner want the cross?”
“Well,” I said, taking a deep swig of my frosty see-through, “they might be, I don’t know, Jewish, or whatever. They might not want an enormous crucifix in their garden.”
“Why not?”
I stared.
“It’s a work of art,” he said.
“It is. It is absolutely that. (Clearing of throat.) Still. . . .”
“I wouldn’t worry about it.” How well I knew this formulation. “I wouldn’t worry about it” was W.F.B.-speak for “The conversation is over.”
Thus I was left with the impression I had committed lèse-majesté by suggesting that a future owner — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Amish, Zoroastrian — might be anything less than honored to have William F. Buckley Jr.’s last remains in his garden, encased in an enormous bronze symbol of the crucified Christ. Certainly it would present the real estate broker with an interesting covenant clause. Now, um, Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum, you do understand that Mr. and Mrs. Buckley’s ashes are to remain in the crucifix, in the garden, in, um, perpetuity?