Dec. 24, 2025
By Julia Buskirk
VIROQUA, Wis. –– During the last months of her mother’s life, Kathy Doerfer tended to her mother daily in hospice.
“I felt very close to her, closer than I had my whole life,” Doerfer said. “And then she died, and 45 minutes later, her body was gone. It just wasn’t right. I would have liked more time with her body, to help care for her and to have a final good-bye in a more intimate setting than at the funeral home. I see after-death care as an extension of the care we provide while our loved one is still alive.”
Motivated by this experience, Doerfer helped found Threshold Care Circle, formed in Viroqua in 2006 to empower families through education and training to take care of loved ones when they die. Alongside Susan Nesbit, Liz Franklin and Kelly Whited-Ford, Doerfer also started Driftless Green Burial Alliance (DGBA), an initiative of Threshold Care Circle that exists to promote and develop green burial options in Southwestern Wisconsin.
According to the Green Burial Council, a non-profit that helps set national standards, in green or natural burials everything in the grave must be biodegradable, and there is no use of embalming fluids or vaults, which are containers made of concrete or other materials that contain the coffin inside a grave.
“We’ve stepped back further and further from participating in anything around dying and death and it’s all handed over to professionals,” Nesbit said, “and so part of the home funeral movement and part of the green burial movement is to reclaim some of these practices we’ve always done until recently in human history.”
Through DGBA’s advocacy, in 2022 the Viroqua Cemetery became the first public cemetery in Vernon County to offer green burials in a five acre section of their property. There are currently eight cemeteries in Wisconsin now offering this option.
Growing interest nationally in green burials
In 2025, 63.4% of Americans opted for cremations, according to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA). Interest in green burials are on the rise, however. In 2015, 104 cemeteries in the United States officially offered them as an option, and in 2025, that number is up to 434. NFDA found 61.4% of Americans interested in green burials this year, up from 55.7% in 2021.
Growing interest is due in part to green burial’s cost savings––a full service conventional burial in the Midwest, on average, is $8,280, according to NFDA in their 2023 Annual Report, while green burials are around $4,228, with the main cost coming from securing a burial plot. For those who opt to bury at home, the price comes out to around $200 for filing the paperwork.
Others are drawn to green burials out of environmental concern. During cremations, fossil fuels are used to maintain bodies at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours. For conventional burials, each year 22,500 cemeteries in the US put 20 million boards of hardwood into the ground, 1.6 million tons of concrete, 17,000 tons of copper and bronze, and 64,500 tons of steel, according to Mary Woodsen, former Board President of the Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve and member of the Green Burial Council.
“When I think about the amount of concrete and metal that gets buried in the earth, I’m just horrified. It’s awful. What a waste,” said Doerfer.
4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid are also buried each year in the United States, which contain 827,060 gallons of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. Embalmers are at eight times increased risk of Leukemia, and three times risk for ALS.
Reconnecting to death
“If you’re trying to keep the body from decomposing, it doesn’t,” said Susan Nesbit, one of the founders of Driftless Green Burial Alliance.
In modern times, embalming can prevent a body from decomposing anywhere from several weeks to several years, depending on the methods. Embalming became widespread in the United States during the Civil War to prevent deceased soldiers from decomposing before they were sent back home for a funeral. With the rise of embalming at the turn of the century, funeral parlors sprung up across the United States, and by the mid 20th century, death was taken out of the home in most urban centers and put in the hands of professionals.
“We’ve gone a little mad in our attempt to avoid the one thing we know is going to happen,” Nesbit said. “In stepping so far away from it, we’re so disempowered because starting when you’re in the hospital, there’s professionals in charge all the way through until you’re dead.”
Green burials allow people to reclaim their power in these situations, Nesbit said. During her own mother’s death in 2024, her siblings allowed Nesbit to organize a green burial. While her family was skeptical at first, Nesbit described how being able to participate in the digging of the grave and burial of their mother ended up being incredibly moving for all involved.
“I think that green burial allows people more ways to work with grief. It’s not that it’s better or worse, but in my experience, what I have seen is when you’re able to participate in that embodied way with your hands, and not just from a distance, but you’re really participating, it helps you connect and move through the process,” said Nesbit.
Viroqua Cemetery first public green burial option in Vernon County
DGBA first approached the Viroqua Cemetery in 2021 with the idea of a green burial section, and Gail Frie, the President of the Viroqua Cemetery Association at the time, proposed opening up five acres for green burials. In 2022, DGBA hosted a meeting at city hall to bring the idea to the public, and fundraised to hire a lawyer, a surveyor, and a landscape architect to design the section.
“Not everyone has a piece of private land where they can do a home burial, but if you have those principals where you want to return to the earth, then what we need is a resource for those folks, and that’s a green burial section in a cemetery,” said Ashely Kiehnau, a member of DGBA. “For me, it’s also about access. You don’t need to own 40 acres to be buried in a way that aligns with your values.”
In 2022, the Viroqua Cemetery approved a green burial section, becoming the first public cemetery in Southwestern Wisconsin to have this option. The board did not approve hand digging the graves, requiring a machine instead. To date, the Cemetery is not pursuing the landscape architect’s plan for this section.
“I would like to see the cemetery board recruit association and community members to form a Green Burial Committee to fundraise and help develop the green burial section,” said Doerfer. “There is real interest in the community to support green burial here and it would be a wonderful community building project.”
Any person who owns a plot in the Viroqua Cemetery is a member of the Cemetery Association and can vote for trustees to the Association Board at the annual meeting.
Plots have been sold and utilized in the green burial section of the Viroqua Cemetery since its opening. All people interested in having a green burial are able to reach out to the Viroqua Cemetery for more information, and Threshold Care Circle and Driftless Green Burial Alliance for education and support.
“When we can have honest and open discussions with our loved ones about our dying, it’s freeing,” Nesbit said. “It’s not morbid. It allows us to get on with the living.”
Juila Buskirk is a graduate of UW-Madison where she studied conservation biology and journalism. She currently writes, paints, and reports in Southwestern Wisconsin.
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