Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies

by Caitlin Doughty

In Germany and Belgium, public graves are offered for a set time limit, somewhere between fifteen and thirty years, depending on the city. When your time is up, your family is contacted and given the option of continuing to pay to rent the grave. If they can’t or don’t want to pay, your body will either be moved deeper down into the ground (to make room for new friends), or relocated to a communal grave (lots of new friends). In these countries, you rent a grave; you don’t own one.