Chrysta Bell Zucht, who is 46, is a recording artist and co-owner of a green-burial cemetery near San Antonio that uses only biodegradable materials.
My dad incorporated Countryside Memorial Park in 1982. About three years before he died in 2009, he said to me, “Honey, I think I want the cemetery to be exclusively green burial.” He was the first to be buried naturally. But it wasn’t until COVID-19 that I moved home from California and started running the cemetery with my mom, Sunny Markham. My singer-songwriter career was suddenly on hold, and there was a high need for burials.
The neat thing is, the most coverage that the cemetery has received has been a result of my musical career. I did an album called We Dissolve, and the title song was inspired by the process of natural burial. I work with the filmmaker David Lynch, and he’s offered to do a commercial for the cemetery. He loves the natural aspect of it and just that the job is great for me. And unless I go on tour, there’s no way to support myself with music, so it’s nice to have this additional venture.
Green burial means everything that goes in the ground is biodegradable. Millions of gallons of toxic embalming fluid are buried each year—we don’t use any of that. Bodies are typically wrapped in a shroud or placed in a wicker or bamboo coffin. Many people are cocooned in quilts or family heirlooms. We bury them at about three feet deep, because at that level the microbes are still active and the body can properly decompose, but it’s below the smell barrier.
The day before a burial, we have an excavator open the grave. The ceremony begins when the funeral director shows up with the body in his chariot, which is a Cadillac hearse. My mom figured out that if you bring bubble solution for children during a ceremony, they will blow bubbles and it’s this fanciful, wonderful thing. She also had a great idea to paint our shovels gold. The families use them to put earth on their loved ones and it ends up being this beautiful ritual. We also have little bitty shovels for kids.
We haven’t had much rain recently, so the land is a bit brown, but there are spots of green where the bodies are adding the most deluxe organic compost. The body decomposes and it feeds the trees, and then the bones are caressed and cradled by the roots.
Mystical things sometimes happen. A man and his mom had been estranged, and he ended up caring for her in her final two weeks. At the burial, as we lowered the body, a hummingbird appeared just over the grave. So he asked my mom to engrave a hummingbird on his mother’s headstone. He bought a plot next to hers, and eventually they’ll be buried together, under twin oaks.
One person buried here was a transgender man who took his own life. A lot of times when a trans person dies, their family holds a funeral using their birth name. Maybe they dress them up as their “darling daughter.” This young man didn’t want that, and his parents came to terms with it before he died. In his suicide note, he told his mother, “Call Sunny Markham.”
When people come to the cemetery, they ask, Where will our loved one be buried? We tell them that when they are standing in the right spot, they will know it.
This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Chrysta Bell Zucht, Natural-Burial Cemetery Steward.” Subscribe today.
