Cemetery juggles rising demands
By Joe Holley
Washington Post
WASHINGTON — In a stylish black suit, muted red tie and white shirt, Keith Barnes resembles a dignified funeral director as he sits down at his desk in the administration building of Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., and notices the blinking red light on his phone. "Four in the queue," he calls out to fellow cemetery representatives. They're sitting at two rows of desks in the large, glass-walled office that looks out on the cemetery, just now emerging into spring.
"Four in the queue" means that four calls are waiting; as he does 60 or 70 times a day, the 40-year-old former Army chaplain's assistant picks up the phone to take one of them. The office, a total of 16 people when they're all at their desks, handles about 300 calls daily from across the country.
On the line with Barnes on this weekday morning is a Newark funeral home representative requesting burial within the next couple of days for the spouse of a World War II veteran who died in 1956 and is buried at Arlington. It is Barnes' duty, as it is frequently, to explain that the next couple of days won't be possible.
"All she wants is a date," he says to a visitor when his caller puts him on hold, "but there's more to it than that."
Because there's much more involved with being buried at the 612-acre cemetery than a mere date, families of veterans or veterans' spouses requesting burial or inurnment, for cremated remains, may end up waiting weeks, occasionally months. Once Barnes and his colleagues verify eligibility, a relatively simple matter, they must work to line up a veritable Rubik's Cube of factors that determine when the burial service will be held.
It's a process they must repeat for about 3,000 ceremonies and 6,000 funerals annually, about 26 a day. At the current rate, the cemetery is projected to have enough space to accommodate ground burials until 2060.
These days, three factors — the growing number of deaths of World War II veterans, military branches' additional responsibilities since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the increasing popularity of cremation — are exacerbating the delay. Family preference on such matters as time of day, season and type of funeral are contributing factors.
"It's a bell curve," said John C. Metzler Jr., who has been the cemetery's superintendent since 1990. Metzler, 57, succeeded his father, superintendent from 1951 to 1972. "We will peak between now and 2008," he said.
The cemetery held 2,740 funerals the year the elder Metzler stepped down, about 11 a day, five days a week. This year, the average has been 26 a day. In 2008, if the numbers peak as expected, Arlington will host 7,400 funerals, or close to 30 a day.
Metzler said men and women who die while on active duty get first priority. Their services usually are held within days.
World War II veterans are dying at the rate of 1,056 a day, says Jose Llamas, a spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
"If the most important thing to me is to bury the family member tomorrow, yes, I can do it," Metzler said. "The actual act of burying someone, we can do that immediately. What I can't do is to produce a chaplain or have an honor guard or make all the other arrangements that certain funerals require."
Standard military honors include pallbearers, a firing party and a bugler. The family may also request a military chaplain.
Metzler has an assistant bring him a light-green folder stuffed with memorandums from the various military branches; they contain information about when a band or a bugler or a caisson escort would be available in coming weeks.
Cremation, the third factor in the scheduling puzzle, gives families the option of scheduling funerals at their convenience but creates peak demand periods.
"Fifty years ago, (cremation) was a very rare item, maybe one or two a week," Metzler said. "Today, it's 62 percent of our workload. ... Cremation affords the family the time to get themselves back together again."
It allows some families to wait weeks, even months, for a date that suits them best; the most requested period is the weeks in June just after schools let out. And some families delay as long as a decade, waiting until the spouse dies so the two can be buried at the same time.
On the phone with the representative of the New Jersey funeral home, Barnes is explaining politely that it's not possible for a service to be arranged immediately at Arlington.
"Generally, our cemetery is booked solid for three weeks out," he explains.
But this service turns out to be relatively easy to schedule. Barnes checks his computer for a time slot and finds one that's less than a week away. The family says yes.
