People who live in Toronto and want to die there had best start making plans now. Because the city is rapidly running out of places for burial, as Inori Roy recounts in the Local. The situation is about to escalate, as advocates have been warning for years. Only 23 of the 206 registered cemeteries in the city are now in use, and all 23 will run out of room over the next ten to thirty years. "In a matter of decades," Roy says, "anyone hoping to bury a loved one will have to drive three to four hours north of the city to find a spot."
However, this issue also aligns with a broader trend toward cremation, and the aforementioned factors have been subtly changing Toronto's "booming bereavement industry." The "McDonald's-ization" of the area is a major theme of the narrative, especially in reference to the city's expanding Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries.
While small funeral homes and cemeteries used to work together amicably in the past, cemetery goliaths like Mount Pleasant now want to manage every facet of grief, from memorial ceremonies to burial or cremation. The narrative examines the moral and practical concerns involved, as well as the unique and intricate public-private structure of Mount Pleasant.
And the broader picture stays the same: "It strikes me that, within my lifetime, Mount Pleasant Cemetery and the group's other properties in the city will likely fill up, becoming frozen in perpetuity as monuments to the dead who made it in under the wire," Roy says. "Two people buried by the same trust in the same cemetery, in completely different worlds," is how the author imagines someone from today nestled next to someone from the 19th century.
However, this issue also aligns with a broader trend toward cremation, and the aforementioned factors have been subtly changing Toronto's "booming bereavement industry." The "McDonald's-ization" of the area is a major theme of the narrative, especially in reference to the city's expanding Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries.
While small funeral homes and cemeteries used to work together amicably in the past, cemetery goliaths like Mount Pleasant now want to manage every facet of grief, from memorial ceremonies to burial or cremation. The narrative examines the moral and practical concerns involved, as well as the unique and intricate public-private structure of Mount Pleasant.
And the broader picture stays the same: "It strikes me that, within my lifetime, Mount Pleasant Cemetery and the group's other properties in the city will likely fill up, becoming frozen in perpetuity as monuments to the dead who made it in under the wire," Roy says. "Two people buried by the same trust in the same cemetery, in completely different worlds," is how the author imagines someone from today nestled next to someone from the 19th century.
