(Pedantic Brit here) I think most Brits would say 'with a spade' if asked how to dig a hole and would use a hoe to break up soil, disrupt weeds, harvest roots, etc [0].
Also, here's a free pet peeve: it's only a graveyard if it's next to a church. You're welcome!
That's not correct. A graveyard primarily means a cemetary next to a church, but this is not exclusive. A graveyard can be elsewhere and not next to a church. Any dictionary will show this, websters[1], oxford learners online[2], dictionary.com[3]. Even wikipedia's entry for graveyard shows this. [4]
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/graveyard
[2] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...
Not true. You can have cemeteries with a church or graveyards not. There's a connotation of "graveyards" as older than cemeteries, and most older ones were near churches, but it's never been a strict definition.
While we're on it though, "graveyard" is a recentish word ("grave" and "yard" are both old Germanic words but the compound word only comes from the 1700s). The Old English word was "licburg", meaning "corpse town". ("lic" is the source of the D&D/fantasy game "lich")
From what I think I understand, cremation usually leaves the bones, which are then ground to produce the "ash" that goes into the urn.
Why not just bury the bones in an ossuary? It would be much smaller than a typical grave, and that's what ends up in the vast majority of coffins eventually anyway (certain "incorruptible" bodies notwithstanding), so why not just start there and skip the grinding step?
"Ossuary" sounded like the right word for "bone box," but the context in which I'd heard the idea was an old Jewish custom of reusing tombs. You'd put somebody in there, wait for a couple years until they were just bones, gather the bones in a box (which was what I thought was called an ossuary), and then over time store lots and lots of family members' bones in their separate boxes in one tomb. It made a lot more sense to me than burying each body in its own body-sized casket forever.
I'd heard of early Catholic opposition to cremation and cremulation, but also that some cultures did it to mock the belief in resurrection, sort of a, "Let's see anybody resurrect this!" sentiment. I'm not sure about St. Michael, though. He's not traditionally believed to be directly involved in the raising of the dead.
I made this mistake burying the cat in the back garden. There is now a dent in the lawn where I buried him.
General speaking, you can add top soil loosely over the grass until the ground is level, and the grass will grow through it. This is assuming a depression of only a few inches of course - will be harder to accomplish if it’s more than that. That said - I once tried to smother some lillies by added several feet of dirt on top of them - they grew through anyway.
He had fond memories of the experience - flexible hours, physical activity outside and nobody bothering you for hours on end.
Because people are dying to get in!
Rescue workers, hard at work at the scene, have already recovered 158 bodies so far and expect that number to climb as digging continues into the night.
