I'm only 39 and in good health, but I already have mine planned. I will be cremated and my ashes spread at my favorite spot on earth. A beautiful location that anyone who wished to "visit me" would enjoy. Cremation only costs about $600 and no funeral home involved. My feelings are that after a generation or two, no one would be coming to visit my headstone in a field of headstones. Cemeteries have never seemed like an enjoyable experience to me. In reality, after I'm dead it doesn't really matter, but I certainly wouldn't want anyone to spend thousands of dollars putting my body in a hole in the ground. I'd rather them use that money to enjoy life.
Cemeteries may look a bit spooky but death is just part of life - neither will exist without the other. I have always liked the feeling of knowing where my grandparents are and go there to say a prayer every now and then. If my parents leave before me I would like to have a place to go and think of them instead of any ethereal spot anywhere in the World.
Some weeks ago I had to attend a sad burial of a relative who died from cancer and left two little girls and a husband. It was in the biggest Madrid cemetery, you probably won't believe the size of it, there are buses to go to places inside it. Well, the cemetery is reusing the old graves that hasn't been renewed. They are sold for 99 years and cost like $8000, and if you want to renew it you have 99 years more for that sum.
Long story short, the burial was in that area so I had the chance to see many graves with engravings from the early 1920's. Sadly enough, it was the area used for kids. It was sad to see so many sad farewells from parents and to feel how many sad stories etched in stone from kids who died even before they could walk.
Many of the graves looked to have been unattended for decades. As you say, after two generations nobody cares. It is like my great-grandparents. I didn't know them so I don't feel no need to remember them. In one of the graves there was an enameled sign hanging by just one of the four screws. It dated from the 1920's. I thought it would look cool in my shop, so with my bare hands I removed the sign. The faintest wind would have made it fall over the grave, the last standing screw was rusted. Then I felt terribly bad. It was true nobody have cared for that little boy for decades. Nobody would miss that sign. But I felt like a tomb raider. If I took that sign with me nobody will ever know the name of the boy buried over there. It could be in the cemetary register, but I felt that the kid deserved the right to leave a token of his existence at least until the grave concession expires.
So I left the sign over the grave and plan to go this week to glue it to the cross so it holds tight until 2019, when it will be sent to the scrap yard.
