Secondhand graves, never used, a real bargain

By Brendan Buhler

Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008 | 2 a.m.

You cannot, famously, take it with you, but there has always been one exception to that rule, one piece of property that can be yours forever.

Your grave.

But it’s what happens after you buy your grave but before you buy the farm that’s interesting.

What happens, sometimes, is life. Not in any affirming, spiritual way, not in any wisdom-granting way, but life in the unpredictable and messy way, life in the usual way.

You can buy your grave in advance, and cemeteries are more than happy to sell it to you before you need it, family-size if you want, so your nearest and dearest can join you for an infinite and underground Thanksgiving.

It makes a certain amount of sense: Cemetery plots, like all forms of real estate, become more expensive over time, and you may not wish to burden your loved ones with the cost of putting you in what is, after all, a hole in the ground. At any rate, for people who buy in advance, it sounds good at the time.

It did to Val Berg and her husband in 1986, when they bought side-by-side graves in the Palm Mortuary on Eastern Avenue, near the airport.

“At the time, my husband was working and we figured that was one expense we could save our kids,” Berg said.

That was then.

This is now: The Bergs are selling the graves on Craigslist.

The couple didn’t move, which is a common reason for selling a grave site. Rather, Berg said there wasn’t a free cemetery for veterans in Las Vegas 22 years ago, when her husband retired from the Air Force. Now there is.

So they are selling their plot for $5,000, which is more than what Val Berg paid for it but $1,000 less than what new plots are being sold for.

“It’s not a greedy thing, do you think? It’s still less than what we could get,” Berg said.

(Note: all plots are new and unoccupied. It’s not as if the Bergs or anyone else is selling used graves. The only difference is that the plot is being sold not by the cemetery, but by the person who previously staked it out.)

Or take Luke Mostoller, a 27-year-old agent with the Internal Revenue Service selling a family plot that his parents bought in 1978. It was “kind of like a rack ’em, stack ’em deal,” he says. But then, in the mid-’80s, his parents divorced.

As for the plot, well, they sort of forgot about it until last year. They asked Luke to sell it. He put it on Craigslist for $3,500 or the best offer.

It is not the policy of Palm Mortuary to buy back burial plots, said Ned Phillips, its vice president of community relations. A plot owners who has second thoughts about an eternal resting place can donate the grave site to charity, transfer the title to relative or, Phillips allows, sell it themselves.

Or, he says, if you move out of state and wish to relocate your resting place, Palm and other (but not all) cemeteries participate in a lot exchange program. The first cemetery of choice will send to your new cemetery the amount you paid for your original plot.

(This might not be a good deal if you have had the site through years of inflation.)

But, Phillips said, of the 20 percent to 30 percent of Palm customers who buy their grave sites before their final necessity, he estimates “99.44 percent” don’t have to resell their lots.

And now is as good a time as any to note that Nevada has the second-highest cremation rate in the nation, just behind Hawaii. According to the most recent statistics available from the Cremation Association of North America, in 2005, 65 percent of departed Nevadans were cremated.

“My opinion is that we’re a melting pot of cultures from all over the world,” Phillips said. “And the people who are choosing cremation may not be tied to any particular tradition.”

And, Phillips said, of course that’s fine. The mortuary sells spots in its columbariums, which are sort of cubbyholes for urns. (These spots, too, can be resold.)

The important thing, Phillips said, is to have “the death talk” as early as possible. Why, he remembers when his then-13-year-old daughter told him what her final wishes would be.

“And while it would have been devastating to lose her,” Phillips said, “at least I would have known what she wanted.”