John Christian Phifer at a gravesite
In seventh grade, John Christian Phifer told his parents that he wanted to be a mortician.
“I didn’t really know what that was, other than someone who helped people when they died,” Phifer tells the Scene during a tour of natural burial site Larkspur Conservation at Taylor Hollow, where he serves as executive director.
Phifer is cordial and well-spoken. He sports a neat beard, and his dark-brown curls are tucked beneath a baseball cap. For someone who has worked as closely with death as he has for the past two decades, his demeanor is surprisingly bright and cheerful. Phifer grew up on a farm in the small West Tennessee town of Camden, where he experienced and embraced death from a young age, performing burial rituals for various insects whose small, fragile carcasses he’d happen across.
“I always just had this really deep, keen love and respect for nature when I would see, firsthand on a farm, death — which you do more so there than anywhere else,” says Phifer. “You learn to participate in a way. And that’s what I was doing with grasshoppers, or if there was a calf that died on the farm, you know — there was just this moment of, ‘Wow, what a gift life is, look at this opportunity to remember and celebrate.’ ”
After receiving a full scholarship to mortuary college from the Tennessee Funeral Directors Association, Phifer spent 15 years in the conventional funeral industry working as a licensed funeral director and embalmer. He says he excelled at what he calls the “art and skill” of caring for someone’s body after death, as well as the human element — helping guide the living through the experience of a loved one’s death. (He’s also a certified end-of-life doula, a practice you can read more about here.)
Phifer eventually became the manager of Spring Hill Funeral Home and Cemetery in Madison, where he was overseeing a 150-acre burial site and hundreds of funerals every year. But something was nagging at him. He didn’t want to continue doing what he calls “the same cookie-cutter service over and over and over again.”
“The metal caskets and embalming and cosmetics and special lighting,” says Phifer. “It creates an illusion, and it’s like an invisible fence that prevents us from being with the loss, and being in the loss.”
Phifer says he presented his colleagues with the idea of a section for green burials — i.e., those without the use of chemicals, plastic, metal and concrete. “They thought that it was a noble idea,” he says, “but it went no further than that.” And so Phifer made what he calls a leap of faith, submitting a letter of resignation without another job lined up.
That leap of faith would prove fruitful. Larkspur Conservation was formed as a nonprofit in 2013, thanks in part to the work of some folks whose names are well-known in Nashville’s philanthropic community — Room In The Inn founder Father Charles Strobel is on the board, and the Rev. Becca Stevens, founder and president of Thistle Farms, is the board’s chair. Eventually Larkspur found 112 acres adjacent to the Taylor Hollow State Natural Area, closed on it, and opened in September of last year. The land — which sits on the Western Highland Rim in Sumner County, about a 50-minute drive northeast of downtown Nashville — is forever protected by a conservation easement held by The Nature Conservancy. Since opening, Larkspur has buried 31 people.
The grounds at Larkspur, which are open to the general public from dawn until dusk, are beautiful and serene, bursting with myriad native species. During our tour, we see a young deer dash through the woods below a bluff toward the edge of the property. One massive, towering oak at Larkspur, which Phifer & Co. have named the Founders Oak, is thought to be about 260 years old. Early on in our tour, Phifer informs us that we’ve already passed a couple of gravesites — some blend so inconspicuously with their surroundings that, by design, you’d never see them were they not pointed out to you. Others have small headstones or markers. Still others are marked by saplings planted at the time of burial. Each burial is different, says Phifer, who helps families demystify the process and decide how they want to see their loved one off, even allowing them to fill in the dirt of the gravesite themselves.
“Part of doing natural burials is that people get to have ownership and agency in the process,” says David Ponoroff, who started as Larkspur’s assistant director in September of this year.
“Those places feel stale,” says Ponoroff of conventional cemeteries. “It’s rows of stone. Being out here, you can see this place is alive.”
Phifer points to a faint trail worn down among some tall grass. That’s where one widower comes to visit his wife’s burial site. The man lives in Florida, but he’ll drive up to sit with his wife’s memory in this space. The woman — who picked out her own burial site shortly before she died from cancer — was buried Dec. 23 of last year.
While more and more conventional burial grounds are setting aside space for natural burial, Larkspur is one of only 10 organizations in the country — and the only one in the state — that also incorporates land conservation. Phifer notes that although most folks don’t know it, relatives can go to the hospital to retrieve the bodies of loved ones and bring them home. Embalming isn’t required in any state, nor are vaults. “Those are just rules created by an industry,” he says, noting that modern embalming and interment practices really only gained popularity after the Civil War. What’s more, it’s an industry that creates a great deal of waste.
“A lot of people end up thinking about cremation and sort of leaning toward that because it feels simpler, and it feels like there’s less of an environmental impact to it,” says Ponoroff. “But in reality, there’s a huge environmental impact to each cremation. The carbon output alone is similar to driving 500 miles.”
He points out that about 2,000 pounds of mercury from dental fillings go into the atmosphere each year as a result of cremation.
“So when you can do something local to your area,” Ponoroff continues, “where the casket or shroud is something that’s made locally, if you’re using a funeral home it’s local, and you’re doing it in a conservation area, you’ve dramatically limited the transportation elements, the products that you’re using are all local. … A lot of folks are sometimes worried about the land-use aspect of cemeteries, but when you’re partnering it with land-conservation efforts, you’re really doing your community a favor.”
Phifer compares the conventional burial process to ordering at a chain restaurant like O’Charley’s. “People just order what’s on the menu, and they are moved right through the process, and they sometimes leave with a bellyache. And it’s like, ‘What just happened? That was three days, and Dad’s gone, we spent $15,000-$20,000 — huh?’ And people don’t understand that they’re not required to do any of that.”
The process of burying a loved one at Larkspur is $3,700 all told, and a portion of the funds from each burial is set aside for the future acquisition of more land for conservation. Phifer already has some adjacent parcels in mind for expansion, and hopes to ultimately grow the property to a total of about 200 acres.
“Because we do not talk about it as a society, when death occurs, we haven’t — as an industry or a culture — had time to think of a better way to do it,” says Phifer. “So it’s just perpetuated, and that’s how we are where we are.”
But as Larkspur Conservation makes clear, it doesn’t have to be that way.
