In Berlin, Germany, many graves are only for a certain number of years (10?) before they simply bury someone over you and put a new stone on top. Your family can, I believe, buy an “extention” of time, but it is only another 5 years or so.
Also, regarding French bone stacks mentioned above, there are also some bone stacks in Vienna, Austria under the main church in the center of town. Tours are creepy, as you have very narrow walkways with bones stacked high on both sides. Puts your mortality into perspective very quickly.
The idea of sending ashes into space is sounding better all the time…who knows, maybe in 2 million years some other life form will fiddle with your DNA and you will be cloned for the Intergalactic Zoo.
A few years back, we went on a family road trip (ugh) to the far north of Australia… the place my grand parents, and great grandparents came from. For a variety of reasons, one of them being to visit the grave of my grandmothers great grandmother or some such rubbish.
I was only 12-14 at the time, so the memory is a little hazy. Apparently we needed to get there before 19XX (I forget exactly) because after this date, the headstone was legally allowed to be removed, and someone else buried there…
IIRC, the limit was 50 years and they could rebury someone else, and after 75 years the ground can be used for something other than a cemetery. I believe there was a danger of my great(x3) grandmother becoming a soccer field or some such non-cemetery thing.
That could also have been a vicious lie cooked up by my mother to get us to agree to go there for a holiday
