Bill seeks to clarify grave contracts

OLYMPIA – Prompted by a family who was stunned to discover their deceased son was sharing a grave with another young man, a Washington lawmaker wants to require cemeteries to explicitly tell people when they’ve booked a “multiple-depth grave.”

“They were quite distraught when they found out,” said Sen. Rosa Franklin, D-Tacoma.

The practice is perfectly legal and fairly common, particularly for husbands and wives, said Jon Donnellan, administrator of the state Funeral and Cemetery licensing boards.

It’s done for the obvious reason: to save space.

“Mostly in your larger city cemeteries, they will have some multiple-depth graves,” Donnellan said. “It’s usually double-depth, which means two burial chambers, one on top of the other.”

Sometimes, he said, a grave will be three or four people deep. The fact that it’s a multiple-person grave must be disclosed on cemetery maps and on sales contracts to people buying graves.

Sometimes, however, that message apparently doesn’t get across.

In March, a family contacted Franklin. They’d buried their teenaged son recently in a cemetery in Kent. In an odd coincidence, a family friend attending another graveside service realized that the burial spot was exactly the same. She told the first family.

“They were shocked,” Franklin said. “They thought they had a single spot.”

That family told Franklin they’d never been told that someone else would be buried on top of their son’s grave.

“They were grieving, and at a time of grief they signed the contract,” she said. “There’s no clear law to prohibit the layering. What we’re trying to do is to make it explicit that when the contract is signed, it’s explicitly mentioned.”

Donnellan said the state gets few complaints about such situations. Under state law, caskets must be enclosed in a grave liner or vault. These big boxes are typically made of concrete, or sometimes steel or fiberglass. Exhuming a body for an autopsy or investigation, Donnellan said, is as simple as lifting out the layers of grave liners.

The Senate plans to hold a hearing on Franklin’s bill Thursday morning.

“I don’t think people would really object to layering if they know it’s in the contract,” she said. “It’s a matter of knowing what you’re getting.”