I started fearing death when I learned my mom was the tooth fairy.
Specifically, the diary entry from April 9, 2015, reads: “I have lost two teeth since the last time I wrote and I also figured out my mom is the tooth fairy. I am not mad. But if the tooth fairy isn’t real, what about Santa? If he is not real Heaven might not either. I don’t want to die to oblivion!”
Yes, I was a 10-year-old who said things like “I don’t want to die to oblivion,” and I’ll be the first to admit that diary entry is hilarious. But it also marks the moment I became a 10-year-old who would lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to imagine what it felt like to die. If there really wasn’t a heaven, and death was like falling asleep, then my memories, my personhood had an expiration date. The thought horrified me, slicking my bones with cold dread.
It may surprise you to hear that, 11 years after that diary entry, I found myself writing a college paper on green burial, entirely on purpose, which involved a visit to a cemetery and a no-details-spared conversation with a funeral director about the embalming process. When I pitched the piece, all I knew was that I wanted to write about death. After losing two family members — my grandmother and aunt — a year apart, my death anxiety could no longer be confined to insomniac mental spirals. I needed to make sense of mortality in some concrete way.
Hunted by death
My grandmother died in January 2025, and while she lived to a respectable 92 years old, the loss was still gut-wrenching. Mary Geraldine “Jerry” Haluck, my mother’s mother, was my first friend other than my parents or sister. She loved TV, audio books, Cheetos and hearing about her granddaughters’ lives. She would babysit us and laugh as we covered our stuffed animals in tissue paper at the “bone hospital,” or pretended to cut her hair at an imaginary salon. Jerry was wise and funny and did not give herself nearly enough credit for how bright she was.
My grandmother did not want to die, and she told us so. She managed (with nearly constant assistance from my mother) to live on her own until a medical mishap prompted what was intended as a temporary stay in the rehab wing of a nursing home.
Instead of recovering, though, the slight hints of dementia we’d noticed turned severe almost overnight. Jerry did not know where she was, and she often resented us for it. The confusion made her angry. She thought we were trying to leave her there, believing that the nurses were throwing her to the ground in the middle of the night. Sometimes, my grandmother would beg us for just a little money so she could catch a taxi back to her home, the tan Cape Cod my grandfather built. It was heartbreaking to watch her suffer and die in such a lonely way.
A year later, in January 2026, my aunt, Lori Murawski, tragically passed away at only 67. We had her funeral luncheon in the same restaurant as my grandmother’s a year earlier. It began to feel like death was hunting me, and I knew I needed to turn around and face my stalker.
The burial park atop a hill
That is how I ended up sitting in a wood-paneled cabin, the main offices of Penn Forest Natural Burial Park.
Penn Forest is the first exclusively green cemetery in Pennsylvania. At a green burial, the body is not traditionally preserved with embalming chemicals or put in a concrete vault. It is placed in a biodegradable shroud or coffin and buried directly in the earth, intended to decompose.
This office is unlike any office I’ve ever been to. I am joined by Manager Laura Faessel, Assistant Manager Deanna Mance, and Operations Assistant Sam Jocuns. We sit at Faessel’s desk, covered with odds and ends like small stones, a bundle of sage and a cup of guinea feathers collected from the birds in a pen just outside. A paperclipped packet reads “The Importance of Fungi” and a pale orange cat, aptly named Ghost, winds around our legs. The windchime song from the deck behind me makes it feel much more like a meditative retreat than a cemetery office. I sit just feet from their hand-drawn caisson which carries bodies to their final resting place, but for once in my life I am not horrified by my proximity to death.
Even as a cemetery, Penn Forest feels different. Jocuns tells me she had her 21st birthday here. There is an annual picnic and an annual winter solstice festival. Instead of the neat lines and chemical-laden grass we may expect from a cemetery, all grave markers are flat to the ground, and burial decorations are natural materials.
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As I walk with Faessel and Jocuns, we stop briefly to look up at a bird chattering somewhere overhead. Staring up at the web of branches is dizzying. Soon, we come to the portion of their meadow most populated by burials. A branch of spruce covers one grave, another is draped in pussywillow. One flat stone marker is studded with seashells. I think of the ceremonies that took place here, out in these woods on top of a hill.
In the research for my paper, I talked to Jesse Busch, whose father Jim passed away in February 2026 and was buried at Penn Forest. While I do not read every marker, I know I am standing near Jim’s final resting place.
Catering to an unexpected wish
Jim never spoke with his children about his green burial wishes. Jesse’s sister, Rachael Morgan, found a note in her father’s phone a week before he died titled, “For When I Die,” dated a few weeks prior. One bullet point read “green burial,” a surprise to the siblings who’d assumed their father would want cremation, like his late wife. By the time Jesse and his sister found their father’s request, they could not ask him about it. He was in and out of lucidity, speaking a great amount of German for someone who didn’t know German. Instead, Jesse is left to make conjecture on the unexpected wish.
During Jim’s frequent hospitalizations after a car accident in March 2025 that started his decline, one of his greatest desires was to return home — a small inherited house that his grandfather built during the Depression out of other, torn-down houses. Jim’s wife, Glenda, passed away from pancreatic cancer during the pandemic in that very home.
“My dad just hated the fact that, you know, he wasn’t gonna die in that house, and he just wanted to go home,” Jesse told me.
A promise of returning home
Jim could not return to the house he grew up in, but he loved the outdoors and the Pennsylvania wilderness. To Jesse, green burial was Jim’s way of returning to his greater home.
Jim’s funeral was different from my grandmother’s Catholic ceremony, which then was all I knew a funeral could be. In my experience, death meant a prayer by the casket before leaving forever. At Jim’s funeral, Jesse and Morgan read poetry and sang a folk song. Jim made them memorize poetry as children, and as Jesse described the poem he read at his father’s ceremony, he choked up. “Good-Bye, Little Cabin” by Robert Service narrates the speaker’s farewell to a place he lived.
Once, in the nursing home as she lost her grip on reality, my grandmother told us that she’d spent all night trekking through the snow, trying to find a cabin. Suddenly, it feels like Jerry and Jim were both just trying to find their way home the best they knew how.
Not once at Penn Forest have I felt any sense of separateness, any sense of loneliness that once made me so fearful of death. Deer run up the hill across from us, and squirrels shuffle through the dead leaves. Despite being a place for the dead, it is so incredibly alive. It feels natural to be buried here, to absorb back into the earth from whence we came. For once, our impermanence doesn’t scare me.
As my tour of the property comes to a close, I cannot help but think that I could have avoided feeling like I was abandoning my grandmother when I left her funeral if she had been buried, wrapped in impermanence, surrounded by dirt, at Penn Forest. If she had been truly returned to our great worldly cabin like Jim.
I linger with Faessel and Jocuns in the parking lot, dragging out the goodbye, looking around me as if I can memorize the place. A small sanctuary on top of a hill, with farm animals and a flower garden and a cabin with an orange cat. A whole world, just as much a gathering place for the living as it is built out of the dead. Somehow, it feels like a promise that we can still come back to our earth, that we can still come home.
When I finally get in my car, there is no overwhelming sadness. One day, I will be back.
Brynn Murawski is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh studying film production and nonfiction writing. She can be contacted at brynnmur@gmail.com.
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