Alaskans begin burying winter's dead as spring softens ground

FAIRBANKS, Alaska -- As the spring thaw softens ground that has been frozen hard as granite by the long Alaska winter, cemeteries start burying people who died during the past seven months.

Since October, when digging became next to impossible, many of Alaska's dead have been in storage. Now, families are finally able to inter their loved ones in a somber Far North rite of spring.

"It's around Memorial Day when we go down 6 feet," said David Erickson, cemetery manager of Northern Lights Mortuary and Memorial Park in Fairbanks. "We'll start earlier for infants and urns." Burials started May 3 at Birch Hill cemetery, said Dave Jacoby, public works director for the city, which operates the cemetery. Birch Hill had 22 delayed burials to perform.

Northern Lights, which stored about 15 bodies this winter, begins its burials near the latter part of May because it's at a higher elevation where the soil gets less exposure to the sun.

Winter temperatures can fall to 40 below zero or lower at Fairbanks, in Alaska's interior.

"The ground is so hard we'd be digging a grave for three days," Jacoby said.

Even in places with milder climates, such as Anchorage, many cemeteries close in the fall because of freezing ground.

Delayed burials occur in other frigid climes across the North, including some parts of New England and northern Minnesota.

But in Canada, winter burials are the norm, said Roger Yador, director of Heritage North Funeral Home in the Yukon Territory city of Whitehorse.

And even in Alaska winter burials are still common outside the bigger cities.

"Why wait? We live in the cold and snow and ice. It seems barbaric to store them above ground and wait until springtime," said Shirley Demientieff, an Athabascan who buried her grandmother, Mary, in the village of Nenana in January.

After clearing the snow from her grandmother's grave site, fires were used to slowly thaw the ground, Demientieff said.

Erickson said Northern Lights once tried using steam to thaw a grave site, but it cost more than most families could afford.

Another time, cemetery workers tried digging graves in advance, before the ground froze. "It turned out nobody wanted those graves. They wanted to be by their relatives or in another spot," Erickson said.

'Thin veneer of feeling'

The Rev. Scott Fisher, of the 1,200-member St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Fairbanks, said he disagrees with the practice of storing bodies over the winter because the flow of a service from church to graveside is psychologically important for grieving families.

"The sound of the earth on the casket -- ka-thud -- breaks through some of the shock and the grief," he said.

"Say somebody dies and nothing happens for seven months. By that amount of time -- five months, six months, seven months -- a thin veneer of feeling has begun and it gets ripped off," he said.

Fisher will hold services at two spring burials this year. Other members of his congregation who died during the winter already have been buried in villages outside Fairbanks.

Fisher said he holds a special graveside service because of the time that's passed.

"You've got to go back into the moment. We have to pull ourselves where we were when the funeral service ended," Fisher said.

Jacoby said some families choose not to have graveside services in the spring, but ask the cemetery to notify them when a loved one is buried.

"I've seen people worse at the interment than at the actual service, because they relive it twice," he said.