the essential
Three questions for Élia Conte Douette, founder of the cinerary forests in France and head of the funeral company Cime-tree, is at the initiative of the first cinerary forest in the Arbas forest in Haute-Garonne.
How did the desire to create cinerary forests come about?
In 2015, I started to become interested in this type of practice. They are deployed in Anglo-Saxon and German countries. I have been working for several years on the themes of sustainable development, I have a particular affinity with this type of activity and the transition to death. I find it relevant and it speaks to me inside. In 2017, I trained to be a funeral planner and opened my own company. The objective was above all to understand the world of funerals with the desire to develop cinerary forests in France. I submitted the concept in 2019.
How many places of contemplation in France?
Little. There is the commune of Arbas in Haute-Garonne, with which we have worked together with the town hall since 2017, it is a concept which clashes with regulations, practices which cannot be duplicated from one country to another. The concern with Arbas and the public authorities was about the law and its interpretation, because it was a pilot project. In Alsace, a similar project saw the light of day last year. There is a legal vacuum. In Arbas, there are already around thirty people buried.
What is meditation like for the family in a cinerary forest?
The urn with the ashes of the deceased is placed in a cavity, dug in the ground near a tree. Whatever cinerary forest you are in, it is an isolated cinerary site, with regulations that apply, in particular the identification of concessions. This can be numbers, GPS coordinates, etc. The funeral cannot take place without a funeral attendant. What is obligatory is a plaque with the first and last name, or even the dates of birth and death. In fact, people who make this choice do not necessarily recognize themselves in a cemetery, based on the mineral aspect. People are more and more nomadic, we no longer live where we die and we no longer die where we live, this belonging to the territory is more diluted than before.
France
