In 2017, in a tiny cemetery called St. Mary’s in a tiny Texas town called Frydek, Eric Keyes prepared to bury his mother.
She’d died two days earlier, at 2:30 p.m. on a Monday. It wasn’t a surprise—Keyes’ parents had moved with him to a house in Richardson, a Dallas suburb, five years prior so that he could take care of them as their health declined. When his mother’s dementia worsened and her condition diminished, Keyes, now 51, got ready.
He remembered a trip he and his mother had taken to the Czech Republic, where her family emigrated from, when he was still in college. During the trip, one of their traveling companions purchased a plain wood casket to bring home for when they died, planning to be buried in it—unembalmed and straight to the earth. Keyes was perplexed by what seemed to him an unusual custom; his mother was not. That’s just how they do it here, she’d told him.
