Archaeologists found the charred bones of a young adult in the ancient Israeli village of Beisamoun
The charred shoulder blade of a young adult who was cremated in northern Israel some 9,000 years ago. The bone contains the embedded point of a flint projectile.
Some 9,000 years ago, a young adult in what is now Israel survived a spear or arrow to the back, recovering from the injury only to die under unknown circumstances some months or years later. Shortly after the individual’s death, their body was arranged into a sitting position and burned in a pit at Beisamoun in Israel’s northern Jordan Valley.
Now, reports Ruth Schuster for Haaretz, archaeologists have identified traces of this ancient funerary rite as the Near East’s earliest evidence of cremation. The researchers’ analysis of the remains, which date to between 7031 and 6700 B.C., are published in the journal PLOS One.
Burying the deceased underground was the dominant funerary practice for millennia, says Fanny Bocquentin, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, to Michael Marshall of New Scientist. Prior research suggests Neanderthals buried their dead as early as 70,000 years ago.
The advent of cremation may have signaled a shift away from ancestor worship, which encouraged the living to care for “the dead for a long time,” according to Bocquentin, and house their remains nearby. Comparatively, cremation was a faster, less involved process.
“This is a redefinition of the place of the dead in the village and in society,” says the archaeologist in a statement.
Bocquentin and her colleagues excavated the U-shaped burial pit, which measures 32 inches across and 24 inches deep, in 2013. They unearthed 355 bone fragments, the majority of which were charred, reports Laura Geggel for Live Science. Per the team’s analysis, the cremation reached temperatures of around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.
The shards of scorched bone all appeared to come from a young adult whose sex and cause of death could not be determined. A half-inch-long sliver of flint, likely the point of a spear or projectile, was embedded in the skeleton’s left shoulder blade. It would have caused “severe pain but not necessarily impaired function,” according to the study.
The researchers found ash from the wood that fueled the funeral pyre but couldn’t ascertain whether the body had been placed beneath, on top of or inside the stack of wood, per New Scientist.
As Bocquentin tells Brooks Hays of United Press International (UPI), the emergence of cremation in Beisamoun is indicative of a cultural shift.
“In the periods prior to our discovery, funeral practices are often spread out over time, the deceased is buried, waited to decompose and then the grave is reopened, the bones are reorganized, the skull is removed, sometimes a face is plastered with lime on the dry skull, then the skull is re-buried in another grave with other people,” she explains.
Cremation, on the other hand, is quite efficient. “You don’t even wait for the decay process,” Bocquentin tells New Scientist. Reducing the time invested in interring the dead “could reveal a new relationship of the living with their dead, [and] of the living with mourning, too,” she says to UPI.
The archaeologists plan on continuing excavations at Beisamoun in hopes of better understanding this cultural evolution. To date, they have found 33 additional burials at the site. According to Live Science, some of the graves predate the remains detailed in the current paper. They showcase an array of interment styles, including single and double burials and “secondary” cremations that occurred after the corpse was dried out. Comparatively, the cremated young adult was burned before their body had begun to desiccate and decompose.
Beisamoun is the oldest known instance of cremation in the Near East, but evidence of the practice predates the newly cataloged site by some 2,500 years. In 2014, researchers detailed an ancient cremation in Alaska, where a dead child was lit aflame around 11,500 years ago.
After your heart beats one last time, but before your body begins to decay, your life will come to an end. Strange as it seems, physicians around the world can’t agree on the exact moment death finally occurs.
A project aiming to find consensus on human mortality has now published its recommendations on what should constitute minimum clinical standards qualifying an individual as officially deceased.
Given the sheer diversity of legal, religious, and moral values different cultures use to frame perspectives on death, it’s unlikely that any single report will unite conflicting opinions.
It’s not the first time researchers have sought a universal definition of death founded in medical science, either.
But the World Brain Death Project’s senior author, University of Southern California medical director Gene Sung, argues the contents of his team’s report are a good place to start.
“This is an important, complex subject. Reaching this kind of consensus across so many organisations is a first,” says Sung.
“With this paper and its 17 supplements – virtually a textbook – it’s a foundation that we hope will minimise diagnostic errors and build trust.”
The recommendations aren’t so much a single column of boxes to step through, or a concise definition, but rather a way for medical communities from diverse backgrounds to find clear lines of agreement.
Through a mix of flow charts, check lists, and decision trees, the report categorises the observations necessary in weighing up whether a patient’s condition is potentially reversible.
Many of these are recognisable to most medical professionals, and include looking for an absence of facial reactions to uncomfortable stimulations, fixed pupils, no gag reflexes, and no spontaneous breaths when blood acidity drops far enough.
There are also some sensible suggestions, such as checking for existing conditions that could mask or mimic brain death – say, the neurological disease Guillain-Barré syndrome, or drugs or treatments that might confuse a diagnosis.
Children, the paper advises, should receive a second neurological exam, given their young brains can recover from some conditions differently to adults.
The paper also takes resource availability into account, as well as the legal and cultural differences various medical communities will be subjected to.
As an expert on brain death and a physician intimately familiar with the impact traumatic brain injuries can have on his patients and their loved ones, Sung understands too well the importance of having clear guidelines on when to call it final.
“That’s why I started this project – we still have some difficulty in dealing with and understanding these problems,” says Sung.
In days long gone, death was the long, eerie silence of a still chest. Unable to feel a pulse or witness a breath, a doctor could gamble that an unconscious body was ready for the grave.
Of course, mistakes happened. And still do happen. A lot. More often than we might want to admit. So the search has continued for criteria that could prevent the nightmarish error of sending a living person to the morgue.
What’s more, with the advent of ventilators and improved methods for resuscitation helping us bring ‘the recently dead’ back to life, the medical world was desperate for a better way to distinguish a point of no return.
By the 1960s French neurophysiologists expanded on definitions of comas to include what would come to be seen as brain death. The first official criteria for diagnosing a relative lack of neurological function were published in 1968, commonly known as the Harvard Brain Death Criteria.
Medical communities around the world have since prioritised their own subtle differences in involuntary movements, blood flow, brain wave patterns and locations of residual electrical activity, leading to a number of very different sets of brain death criteria.
Religious sensitivities on how long to wait for mortuary preparations weigh in on decisions around the world. Legal precedents also make a difference in the rights of the dead and dying.
Trust in the medical system is paramount, with complex views on the timing and prioritisation of organ donation affecting how we see a doctor’s decisions around diagnosing an end to a life.
With so many variables to take into consideration, Sung and his team saw they needed to rely on more than medical literature and clinical experiments for finding a consensus.
Taking into account the advice of medical experts across disciplines and from different cultures around the world, their report has been endorsed by dozens of eminent medical societies.
Not without a hint of irony, a universal definition on death needs to be embedded in a living document, one that evolves not just with advances in scientific knowledge, but with an awareness of the communities who need to put their trust in it.
“Goodbye, my friend,” said a deer named Gwen, holding me close in a final embrace as we sailed into the blood red waters of the River Styx. Despite the intense color of the sea, and the intensity of the moment, I felt calm. Flower petals drifted on the surface of the water, and white, lush trees swayed in a tranquil way. Gwen disappeared into thin air.
“Spiritfarer,” a game releasing later this year (on several platforms including Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Stadia), is about guiding spirits to the afterlife. It hopes to make the subject of death comfortable, even cozy, by focusing on relationships and care in people’s last moments while guiding them to the other side. After playing for an hour, I came away feeling hopeful and uplifted, even after experiencing its somber themes.
You play as Stella (or Daffodil, her accompanying cat, if you’re player-two via local or online co-op), a young girl who becomes a new spirit guide to the dead after Charon, inspired by the ferryman of Hades in Greek mythology, retires from that same position. You sail a fantastical world, gathering spirits and convincing them to board your ship. You help them through their problems and encourage them to accept their fates. For creative director Nicolas Guérin, building a death-positive game was cathartic; a way to cope with his own mortality as well as the passing of loved ones.
“I’m terrified of dying,” Guérin told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “I’m terrified of leaving my daughter behind me. I’m terrified of losing my friends and my family.”
His whole team drew inspiration from their experiences with losing someone. The characters in the game are each inspired by grandparents, uncles and friends who died. They’re not “carbon copies,” Guérin said, but composite characters; a mix of traits, personalities, feelings and anecdotes derived from connections they’ve had with deceased loved ones.
Guérin and his colleagues at indie studio Thunder Lotus Games had “no idea at first” if they could pull off themes of death positivity in a management sim, saying he “lucked out” with how it all came together. He said it was important to combine normal, mundane tasks with the “extraordinarily, terribly gruesome moment we face when we know we’re going to die.”
In “Spiritfarer,” your ship evolves over time as you build different structures on top of one another like eclectic towers. Some of these are temporary homes for the spirits you gather, and others are stations for cooking, harvesting, gardening and more. Each character wrestles with something. A lion couple, for example, struggles to find happiness together when one of them is unfaithful. Others, like Stanley, a talking and walking mushroom with childlike traits, just wants to be cared for, so I made him his favorite meal: french fries. Some just want to be hugged. You spend time on and off the ship, completing quests for these spirits and finding out more about Stella along the way, too.
It isn’t just through mechanics that “Spiritfarer” achieves a sense of serenity. The game has a calming atmosphere, with a striking art style inspired by Japanese painter Hiroshi Yoshida and from whimsical Hayao Miyazaki films like “My Neighbor Totoro.” This world about death is bright and colorful, rather than dark and morbid.
Having spent 15 years in the games industry, much of that time at Ubisoft working on franchises like “Assassin’s Creed,” Guérin wanted to explore death in a way that forces the player to think about it outside the bounds of a game. Instead of a fail state mechanic, death in “Spiritfarer” is the key to progress. Every time a character dies, they leave behind a room filled with beautiful, overgrown flowers. It’s a symbol of heritage, Guérin explained.
“You need to actually gather some of these flowers that are used as a token to pay a shark, to build upgrades on the ship,” Guérin said. “And those upgrades will allow you to go across specific barriers like ice or rocks.”
Guérin’s brother is the chief of staff for a geriatric ward in southern France. During early development for the game, Guérin spent a significant amount of time “documenting and understanding” what people think and feel during their final moments by meeting patients in hospice and end-of-life care facilities. As he visited the terminally ill, he noticed their drive to experience human connection or enjoy a peaceful moment. He wanted to convey this in “Spiritfarer,” rather than have characters give grand speeches or make sweeping life changes as they faced death.
“They just want to still wake up in the morning, brew themselves some coffee and spend time with their family, relatives and friends. And that’s it,” he said.
The coronavirus pandemic has drawn new business to start-ups that provide end-of-life services, from estate planning to a final tweet.
By Jennifer Miller
One day in April, as the coronavirus ravaged New York City, 24-year-old Isabelle Rodriguez composed a tweet she would send from the grave.
She wasn’t dying. She wasn’t even sick. In fact, her risk of contracting Covid-19 had been reduced after she was furloughed from her job at a Manhattan bookseller and retreated to her rural hometown, Callahan, Fla. But when she came across the poem “Lady Lazarus,” by Sylvia Plath, Ms. Rodriguez knew she had found the perfect words to mark her digital legacy:
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Ms. Rodriguez logged on to Cake, a free service that catalogs users’ end-of-life wishes, instructions and documents, and specified that she wanted the verse sent from her Twitter account after her death. “Any of my friends know I’m obsessed with Sylvia Plath,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “That was the best way to put my personality out there one last time.”
Through Cake, Ms. Rodriguez also filled out a “trusted decision maker” form, appointing her younger sister to call the shots should she end up incapacitated. She was still debating other important details: Did she want to be buried or cremated? If the latter, would her ashes be scattered, pressurized into a diamond, composted into tree food? Also, how much would it annoy the guests at her funeral if she requested that her favorite album, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” be played on loop?
Ms. Rodriguez conceded that it might seem a little weird to be considering all of this in her mid-20s. On the other hand, young people around the world were getting incredibly sick, incredibly fast.
End-of-life decisions can be overwhelming, but making those choices when she was healthy gave her more control. Knowing that she’d ease the burden on her family if the worst happened also gave her peace of mind. “It would be easier for people around me to know what I want,” she said.
Before the pandemic, end-of-life start-ups — companies that help clients plan funerals, dispose of remains and process grief — had experienced steady to moderate growth. Their founders were mostly women who hoped a mix of technology, customization and fresh thinking could take on the fusty and predominantly male funeral and estate-planning industries.
Still, selling death to people in their 20s and 30s wasn’t easy. Cake’s team sometimes received emails from young adults, wondering if the site wasn’t a tad morbid. Since Covid-19, this has changed. Millennials are newly anxious about their mortality, increasingly comfortable talking about it and more likely to be grieving or know someone who is.
“The stigma and taboos around talking about death have been way reduced,” Cake’s co-founder Suelin Chen, 38, said. This has driven conversation across social media, spurred interest in deathfluencers (they will discuss how funeral homes are responding to the coronavirus but also whether your pet will eat your eyeballs) and increased traffic to end-of-life platforms. From February to June, people signed up with Cake at five times the normal rate.
Another new company, Lantern, which calls itself “the single source of guidance for navigating life before and after a death,” saw a 123 percent increase in users, most of them under 45.
Lantern’s tone is soothing and earnest, but not everyone takes that tack. Cake skews playful. It features a tombstone generator and suggestions like “Viking funeral” and “shoot my ashes into outer space.” New Narrative, an event-planning company for funerals and memorials, introduces itself with a wink: “We’re not your grandma’s funeral (… unless it’s your grandma’s funeral).”
It’s a tricky opportunity for these start-ups to navigate. “When you have a brand that’s directly interfacing with people in the throes of loss and grief, you have to walk a fine line,” said Liz Eddy, 30, Lantern’s co-founder and chief executive.
All these founders stress they’re not trying to capitalize on the coronavirus. But this hasn’t stopped anyone from pivoting hard toward Covid-19. The companies have created new forums and content on how to plan for death, honor the newly dead and grieve virtually. They have initiatives with major health care providers to disseminate their products more widely and formed new partnerships with influencers. The start-ups have even begun to coordinate with one another, sharing tips in a cross-company Slack channel called “Death & Co.”
They are all hoping the pandemic will be the event that turns end-of-life planning — from designing a funeral to writing a will and final tweet — into a common part of adulthood.
The Obituary Game
In 2012, a friend invited Ms. Chen and her fiancé to dinner and suggested they play an unusual party game: Write and share their own obituaries. “It’ll be fun!” the friend said. “They do it at Stanford Business School.”
At first, Ms. Chen was delighted by the exercise: Both she and her fiancé wrote, in the imagined past tense, about a music album they hoped to one day record. But when Ms. Chen started reading what she had written about her career, she was seized with panic and started bawling at the table.
“I just lost it,” she recalled. “It was confusing to me, because I loved my job. I was happy in the most obvious ways, but there was part of me …” She wasn’t sure how to describe the upswell of emotion.
Around this time, Ms. Chen was advising health care companies in commercial strategy. While interviewing last-line cancer physicians, she would constantly run a calculation in the back of her head: “If this treatment extends life by three months, how much money is it worth?” And yet she’d wonder: But at what quality of life? The system of prolonging life at all costs seemed out of whack.
Ms. Chen had also recently lost her grandfather, who died at 95 after a long period of suffering. He lived in Taiwan, where death in very old age is treated as a celebration, Ms. Chen said. And yet there had been a lot of family conflict around the experience.
Amid the pain and relief of her grandfather’s being at rest and the joyful commemoration of his life, Ms. Chen understood that she needed a new path. She didn’t yet know what it would be, but a few years later she met Mark Zhang, a palliative care physician and technologist, at an M.I.T. health care “hackathon.” The pair won first place at the event and went on to found Cake. The platform now includes resources and templates to help users write their obituaries along with guidance for how to get them published.
The venture-backed company makes money through partnerships and will eventually add fee-based services. The pandemic has been especially busy. Cake’s services, for example, soon will be integrated into the website of the British bank RBS/NatWest.
In April, Ms. Chen learned that Partners HealthCare, a large health care system in Massachusetts, was recommending Cake to all its members. Ariadne Labs, run out of the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, also came calling. They wanted help distributing their end-of-life conversation guide beyond a relatively small audience of doctors and patients. They also wanted real-time feedback from a young and healthy audience like Cake’s.
Cake also teamed up with Providence Health System, a network of 51 hospitals and 1,000 clinics in seven states, to share Cake’s “trusted decision maker” form, the document specifying an individual’s medical preferences if the person becomes incapacitated. Through Cake, individuals could submit the form to their doctor without needing a notary and two nonfamily witnesses, which are often required but difficult to get under quarantine.
The next step is offering premium services, tailored to different types of users. “Are you here because you just lost someone, or because you just had a kid, or have an aging parent, or because a celebrity just died and you had an existential crisis?” Ms. Chen said. “We’re trying to automate based on what we know about the person.”
The Pandemic Hits
In April, Ms. Chen learned that her head of product’s grandfather had died from Covid-19. She had heard of people texting and messaging their condolences, but even email seemed inappropriate, overly impersonal. Unsure of what to do, she turned to Cake. Following an article from the site, Ms. Chen shipped her colleague soup, rolls and cookies with a note: If and when you’re ready, I’d love to hear more about your grandfather.
“In the modern age, the norms around supporting people who are grieving are not super clear,” Ms. Chen said. “It used to be that you belonged to a religious community or lived in a small town, but now we’re far away from where we grew up. We’re more secular.”
During the pandemic, condolence-related traffic on Cake doubled. To address the need, the company started a forum where users can crowdsource their questions and concerns.
Lantern provides its own grief and condolence content, including a “pandemic-proof” guide to “inclusively addressing grief at work.” In recent months, more people are grieving on the job, where the emotional distress for people of color over high Black and Latino rates of coronavirus infection is compounded by anguish over police brutality.
“Especially during Covid, it’s how can you incorporate the grieving process into 9-to-5 and day-to-day work?” said Alica Forneret, 31, who runs grief workshops and just started a namesake consulting agency to help companies address this question. “Employers, managers and H.R. need to understand there’s an extra burden on people of color and especially Black people when they sit down at their computer in the morning and are expected to engage and perform.”
For Ms. Forneret and other millennial founders, preparing for death and navigating grief during the pandemic has become a form of self-care. That has created new opportunities and partnerships. When Ms. Eddy pitched funders, she situated Lantern’s end-of-life services as an untapped market in the $4.5 trillion global wellness industry.
“We’ve been called a niche market,” she said. “But death and dying is possibly the least niche market out there.”
Corporations are rethinking the wellness programs they’re offering employees, Ms. Eddy said. They’re no longer just gym memberships and kombucha on tap. Studies have found that being able to talk about your mortality makes you a happier person and improves your relationships. The thinking, for employers perhaps, is that access to end-of-life services can make people happier (and more productive) at work.
This market potential is also why Near, a start-up that connects users with grief and end-of-life support services, like death doulas and art, sound, music and massage therapists, recently decided to seek investment. The company also moved its debut from September to June and is expanding its offerings to even more unconventional end-care providers like end-of-life photographers.
“Before Covid, we were looking at being a smaller platform. We’d be able to keep up with need through bootstrapping,” a Near co-founder, Christy Knutson, 36, said. “But the demand is far greater.”
This spring, a beauty writer and skin-care company chief executive, Charlotte Palermino, approached Lantern about co-hosting an Instagram Live. She had been watching her friends “panic post” death rates and was feeling increasingly anxious.
“I know people who got really sick, were suddenly on ventilators in their 30s,” Ms. Palermino, 33, said. She received such an overwhelming response from her followers that in June, she filmed a similar video for her Generation Z audience on TikTok.
Death & Co.
In May, a large senior care company asked Ms. Eddy about a partnership. Ms. Eddy, who declined to identify the company, was intrigued but skeptical. In search of guidance, she did something that would normally be unexpected. She reached out to Ms. Chen at Cake, Lantern’s closest competitor.
Ms. Chen wasn’t surprised to hear from Ms. Eddy. In fact, she said, this kind of collaboration is frequent among end-of-life chief executives. “There’s a lot of texting and calling all the time: who are the good investors, the partners, give me the lowdown on these people,” she said.
The most common means of communication among end-of-life founders — and where Ms. Eddy went to reach Ms. Chen — is the cheekily titled Death & Co. channel on Slack. It was born in December during End Well, a conference about improving the culture, products and policy around end of life.
After one of the sessions, a handful of female founders gathered for an impromptu happy hour. They bonded over the rarity of having so many women running companies in the same industry, all them, in one way or another, trying to challenge the corporate, predominantly male funeral industry.
They discussed the difficulties of securing funding as womenand the challenges of trying to make a distinctly unsexy product accessible and affordable. Ms. Chen said a male founder had told her: “No one thinks about death. I don’t. I’m immortal.” Ms. Eddy said another had told her that he thought she’d be more successful if she created the “Tesla” of end-of-life services.
The women decided to start a WhatsApp group, which one of them named “Death Chicks.” A couple of months later, with more people wanting to join, including a handful of men, Ms. Eddy moved everything to Slack and renamed it Death & Co. For some months, the group was largely dormant. That changed in March.
“At the beginning of coronavirus, we came together and said this can all be reimagined with alternative, more modern solutions,” said Christina Andreola, 31, the founder of New Narrative, who joined the Slack channel in March. “My colleagues were asking: How can we team up to be competitive?”
The channel has around 70 members. They have worked together on a white paper about the funeral industry and Covid-19, raised funds for personal protective equipment for funeral directors and created short video guides for health care workers to talk about end-of-life options with their patients. Eterneva, a company that turns ashes into diamond jewelry, used the group to start a series of Instagram Lives about collective grief. LifeWeb360, which creates multimedia memorial scrapbooks, teamed up with New Narrative to create resource guides for planning virtual memorials.
The women have also freely shared connections and leads. Ms. Knutson of Near joined Death & Co. in March. She used the group to meet end-of-life photographers, a small and elusive set, and expand her provider list of death doulas, caregivers who help dying individuals navigate the end-of-life process.
“Overnight I walked into a virtual room with loads of smart, driven leaders who are building things that it would have taken me months if not years to hear about otherwise,” she said.
Not everyone is finding what he or she needs at Death & Co. Ms. Forneret, one of the few Black members, left after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. She said that the channel had done a lot of good for the industry and that she worked closely with Ms. Eddy and other members. But at this moment, she wants to align herself with other founders of color, she said.
In mid-June, Ms. Forneret participated in a Zoom panel featuring five Black entrepreneurs. The topic: how to have a “good death” in a racist society. The event was organized by Alua Arthur, 42, who runs a death doula training company, Going With Grace.
Ms. Arthur serves as an adviser to Cake and Near and has become a de facto spokeswoman for Black-owned death care businesses, especially in the last couple of months. She has become exhausted in this role and said end-of-life start-ups should be working harder to reach communities of color, which are largely underserved in the industry.
Even so, all of these founders share a mission: to democratize end-of-life planning and care. Ms. Arthur said the searchable database and broad collection of providers on Near were a step in the right direction.
Trust and Will, a company that bills itself as Turbo Tax for estate planning, charges a small fraction of what most lawyers do. Eterneva, the company that turns your loved one’s body into bling, just rolled out financing. Cake’s and Lantern’s basic preplanning services are free. Given that the average cost of a funeral in 2019 was $7,640, this kind of foresight could reduce the cost of dying. Because maybe you don’t want to languish on a ventilator or need a fancy coffin.
At the very least, when we can personalize our deaths the way we do our weddings and our wardrobes, we can feel a little more control over life’s greatest uncertainty. It’s something of a silver lining to this very scary moment.
“We’re never going back to the way it was,” Ms. Chen said. “That’s a positive thing — to accept the reality that we’re not immortal.”
Jennifer Miller is the author most recently of the novel “Mr. Nice Guy.” Her next book follows a year in the lives of first-generation college students.
For centuries Bali’s Trunyanese people have left their dead to decompose in the open, the bodies placed in bamboo cages until only the skeletons remain.
It is a ritual they haven’t given up — even as the COVID-19 pandemic upends burial practices worldwide with religious leaders in protective gear, cemetary workers in hazmat suits, and mourners banned or unable to comfort each other because of social-distancing rules.
Across Indonesia funeral workers are now required to wear protective equipment and bodies are laid to rest quickly, all in a bid to prevent the spread of the deadly respiratory disease.
But in Bali local officials claim the novel coronavirus, which has infected at least eight million and killed more than 430,000 globally, has yet to reach the remote north east where the Trunyan live.
“The funeral process remains the same but now we have to wear masks,” explained village head Wayan Arjuna.
Tourists are temporarily banned from visiting for fear of them bringing in the disease, he adds.
“We’re afraid of getting COVID-19,” said Arjuna, but added there was no suggestion of stopping the open-air burial process.
Unlike many in the rest of Hindu-majority Bali, the Trunyanese — who fuse animist beliefs and traditional village customs with their own interpretation of Hinduism — do not bury or cremate their dead.
Instead they let nature take its course as the corpses decay in the open, believing it to be a way to keep a link with the deceased.
“This makes us feel connected to our loved ones,” Arjuna said.
“Like when my grandmother died, I felt like she was close”, he added.
– Skull Island –
It is a short boat ride to their open-air cemetery from tiny Trunyan village, overlooked by volcano Mount Batur and a sprawling Hindu temple carved out of volcanic rock.
There are 11 cages for the corpses — placed close to a fragrant banyan tree that hides the putrid smell of death, locals say.
In one cage, a recently deceased woman could almost have been mistaken for someone sleeping, but her waxy greying complexion revealed the truth.
Nearby, a flesh-less foot poked out of clothing left on the bodies, while a skeletal jaw lay agape in another cage.
“I used to be a little scared working here, but it’s been so long now that I’m used to it,” said veteran guide Wayan Sukarmin, who was spent 20 years showing people the custom on what outsiders have dubbed “Skull Island”.
When AFP visited in February before the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic and travel restrictions were put in place, signs warned visitors to wear appropriate clothing and refrain from using bad language.
Rubber sandals, cigarette packages, toothpaste tubes and pots and pans were scattered around the site, along with baskets filled with coins and crumpled money — all left by mourners for dead relatives to use in the afterlife.
“Locals won’t take anything because it belongs to the dead. That’s our belief,” Sukarmin said.
“I don’t know what the consequences would be if you took something but I believe in karma,” he added.
– Millennia-old custom –
If the cages become full then older corpses are moved to an open ossuary, to make way for new ones.
Then when there is no flesh left, the skulls of the long dead are placed upon a stone altar, until they too crumble back into nature.
Nearby, there is a second cemetery for the unmarried and children, while a third location is for those who died unnatural deaths like murder or passed away from acute illness.
The Bali Aga — or mountain people — who live in these isolated villages, claim to be descendents of the original Balinese and the main temple in Trunyan village dates back to the 10th century according to historical records.
The origin of the custom of open-air burials is subject to debate.
One legend has it that the area’s early inhabitants fought over the prized Banyan tree, so to keep the peace, leaders decided to place the dead there, believing the smell from the corpses would make the spot less attractive.
Another story suggests that the ritual was adopted to avoid angering the rumbling volcano nearby by cremating people.
“There are several versions of the legend so I can’t decide which one is correct,” Arjuna said.
But these open-air burials are now so rooted in the culture that few expect much to change in Trunyan, even as the pandemic ravages the world.
“It’s relatively easier to prevent infections in isolated and faraway places,” said Bali’s virus taskforce chief Dewa Made Indra.
“There aren’t any reported cases in Trunyan. But if that happens then we’ll handle it with special procedures and I think the villagers will understand.”
On a recent Monday in a New Jersey cemetery, social worker Jane Blumenstein held a laptop with the screen facing a gravesite. A funeral was being held over Zoom, for a woman who died of COVID-19. It was a brilliantly sunny day, so a funeral worker held an umbrella over Blumenstein to shield the laptop from any glare, as synagogue members and family members of the deceased sang and said prayers.
The experience was a “surreal” one for Blumenstein, who is a synagogue liaison at Dorot, a social-services organization that works with the elderly in the New York City area. “I felt really privileged that I could be there and be the person who was allowing this to be transmitted.”
The roughly 20-minute ceremony was one of countless funerals that have taken place over Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. As authorities limit the size of gatherings — and hospitals limit visitors in order to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus — loved ones have been unable to gather for traditional mourning rituals in the aftermath of a death, so it has become the norm for those who die to do so without their families by their sides, able to say goodbye only virtually, if at all.
The rising death toll has overwhelmed funeral homes and cemeteries, further limiting what is possible. Across religions and around the world, end-of-life traditions have been rendered impossible: stay-at-home orders have stopped Jewish people from sitting shiva together; overwhelmed funeral services have meant Islam’s ritual washing of the body has been skipped; Catholic priests may have had to settle for drive-through funerals, in which the coffin is blessed in front of just a few immediate family members.
The effects of COVID-19 will be felt for many years to come, but those who have lost loved ones are feeling those effects immediately — and, for many, their pain has been exacerbated by the inability to say goodbye. The horror of these rushed goodbyes may be looked back on as a defining feature of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, as the tragic history of pandemics reveals, it is something that disease has forced human beings to struggle with throughout history.
For example, during a 1713 plague epidemic in Prague, a shortage of burial supplies heightened the pain of rushed burials. The emotional toll is evident in a Yiddish poem written shortly after the outbreak, translated for TIME by Joshua Teplitsky, professor of History at Stony Brook University, who is writing a book about this period. At the sight of the dead being carried away day and night, “all weep and wail!,” the poem says. “Who ever heard of such a thing in all his life?” The poem describes people working around the clock and through the Sabbath to saw planks for coffins and sew shrouds.
In one 1719 book, a rabbi recalls counseling a man who was anxious about burying his plague-stricken father in the local cemetery because of a government requirement to coat the body in a chemical to accelerate decomposition. He asked the rabbi if it would be more respectful to bury his father in a forest far outside of the city. The rabbi told the man to follow the rules, likely thinking that “if the body gets buried in the woods, in a very short time, it will be lost, and if it’s in the cemetery, the rabbi is expecting that when this plague passes, visitors will go pray and pay their respects,” says Teplitsky.
Indeed, Teplitsky found a prayer printed circa 1718-1719 that he believes women may have recited while walking around a cemetery years after the epidemic, asking the dead for forgiveness for the lack of a traditional funeral and burial five years earlier.
Centuries later, during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, Italians were likewise thrust into a world in which funerals had to take place quickly, without ceremonies or religious rites. According to research by Eugenia Tognotti, an expert in public health and quarantine, and a professor of history of medicine and human sciences at the University of Sassari, Italy, many expressed horror at hurried burials in letters to friends and relatives, which are preserved at the Central State Archive in Rome. “The more common lamentations are: ‘Not priests, nor crosses, nor bells’ and ‘one dies like an animal without the consolation of family and friends,’” Tognotti told TIME. Another woman wrote to a relative in Topsfield, Mass., “Here [in Italy] there is a mortal disease named Spanish flu: the sick die in four or more days, a bucket of lime is thrown over the dead bodies, and then four workers take them to the graves like dogs.”
The horror was similar in the U.S., especially in Philadelphia, an epicenter of the pandemic. Columba Voltz was an 8-year-old daughter of a tailor back then, who said that funeral bells tolled all day long as coffins were carried into a local church for a quick blessing and then carried out a few minutes later, according to Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History. “I was very scared and depressed. I thought the world was coming to an end,” Voltz recounted.
Inside one such house, Anna Milani’s parents laid her 2-year-old brother Harry to rest with what they had on hand:
There were no embalmers, so my parents covered Harry with ice. There were no coffins, just boxes painted white. My parents put Harry in a box. My mother wanted him dressed in white — it had to be white. So she dressed him in a little white suit and put him in the box. You’d think he was sleeping. We all said a little prayer. The priest came over and blessed him. I remember my mother putting in a white piece of cloth over his face; then they closed the box. They put Harry in a little wagon, drawn by a horse. Only my father and uncle were allowed to go to the cemetery. When they got there, two soldiers lowered Harry into a hole.
The same concerns that would have limited attendance at the cemetery when Harry Milani was buried reared their heads more recently during the 2014-2016 epidemic of Ebola, a disease that can be spread through contact with the remains of those it kills. More than 300 cases came from one Sierra Leone funeral, and 60% of Guinea cases came from burial practices, according to the World Health Organization. In Liberia, mass cremations ran counter to traditional burial practices that include close contact with bodies. In Sierra Leone, the dead were put in body bags, sprayed with chlorine and buried in a separate cemetery designated for these victims. As traditional burial practices were curbed in an attempt to stop the spread, the dismay caused by this situation, Tognotti notes, was the same feeling experienced by those Italians of the early 20th century who wrote of the pain of the flu pandemic.
Sometimes, however, victims of epidemics who knew the end was near were actually hoping for a departure from the usual norms of burial and mourning: they wanted their deaths to be used to remind authorities to take these crises seriously.
This idea of the political funeral is particularly associated with the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. The activist group ACT UP spread the ashes of victims over the White House lawn, and staged political funerals—open-casket processions, such as the one that brought Mark Lowe Fisher’s body to the Republican National Committee’s NYC headquarters ahead of the 1992 presidential election. “I have decided that when I die I want my fellow AIDS activists to execute my wishes for my political funeral,” Fisher wrote, in a statement entitled Bury Me Furiously. “We are not just spiraling statistics; we are people who have lives, who have purpose, who have lovers, friends and families. And we are dying of a disease maintained by a degree of criminal neglect so enormous that it amounts to genocide.”
The inability to give loved ones proper send-offs is often a hidden cost of these pandemics, Tognotti says, and should not be ignored by officials. Even with modern knowledge about disease transmission, awareness of the reasons for public-health guidance doesn’t lessen the desire to participate in rituals. “The emotional strain of not being able to dispose of the dead promptly, and in accordance with cultural and religious customs, has the power to create social distress and unrest and needs to be considered in contemporary pandemic preparedness planning,” she says.
In this pandemic, a new openness about talking about mental health issues could help. For example, New York state launched a hotline so residents can talk to a therapist for free, and some sites host virtual sessions to discuss grief. Mourners can opt for live-streaming and video conferencing and include more people virtually than before.
For others, these virtual gatherings and brief blessings at the cemetery are placeholders. In March, after Alfredo Visioli, 83, was buried in a cemetery near Cremona in northern Italy, with no relatives allowed to attend and a brief blessing from a priest, his grand-daughter Marta Manfredi told Reuters that, “When all this is over, we will give him a real funeral.”
It starts from the moment you pass. Your organs begin to shut down. Hair stops growing, skin recedes. Some parts of the body take longer than others, but eventually, as with all things, it all starts to break down.
If you opt for a traditional burial, your remains will spend years nestled within a casket underground, progressing into a deeper state of decomposition. If you opt for a traditional flame-based cremation, you eliminate any further decomposition by burning it to a halt.
But there’s also another alternative — one designed to accelerate the decomposition process through the medium of water. It’s known as alkaline hydrolysis, or water cremation. One part spa, one part chemical blend, a few hours of a swirling soak, and your earthly remains are no longer.
“It’s basic chemistry,” explains Anas Ghadouani, leader of the research group Aquatic Ecology and Ecosystem Studies. “You have organic matter and you add a base to it and it just decomposes. You can write the equation to it. It’s very simple.”
Despite this, alkaline hydrolysis remains one of the most divisive and misunderstood practices in contemporary funeral technology.
The machine
Alkaline hydrolysis is a form of cremation that uses water and chemicals to break down the human body to its bare minimum. Salts, amino acids, peptides. Like flame-based cremation, it produces ash that can be taken home. Unlike flame-based cremation, it’s illegal for use on human bodies in almost 30 states in America.
The concept itself isn’t new. Amos Herbert Hobson of Middlesex, England, patented the first alkaline hydrolysis machine all the way back in 1888. He used it to dispose of animal carcasses.
In the century and a half since, the technology has evolved, and it has the potential to shake up the death industry.
The process is straightforward. Bodies are placed in a machine containing a chemical mixture of water and alkali. The mixture is then heated and cycled. Over the course of hours, the body is accelerated through its natural decomposition process, resulting in a residual liquid made up of amino acids, peptides, salt, soap and bones — the last of which is broken down into white ash.
Joseph Wilson, now founder and CEO of leading alkaline hydrolysis manufacturer Bio-Response Solutions, helped design the first commercial-use human alkaline hydrolysis unit in 2005.
“I was stunned that there was a way to dispose of tissue without burning,” said Wilson. “You don’t have any external pumps or tanks or chemicals. It’s all there at the machine.”
There are undeniable benefits to this process. In 2011, a study from the University of Groningen compared conventional burial, cremation, alkaline hydrolysis and cryomation and found that alkaline hydrolysis had the lowest overall environmental footprint.
The low temperature also means pacemakers and joint replacements can remain inside the body. In flame-based cremation, these are extracted to prevent a reaction — pacemakers, especially, are incredibly volatile when subjected to extreme heat.
Yet despite the fact that flame-based cremation subjects the remains to intense fire, alkaline hydrolysis is seen as the more graphic option for potential funerals, when both are just as valid. Legal roadblocks and cultural concerns have plagued water cremation since its inception.
And there’s a simple reason for that: Alkaline hydrolysis has a reputation shaped by years of misrepresentation. Nobody wants to feel like they’re disrespecting their loved ones.
Media, morals and the mafia
Most people’s first experience of alkaline hydrolysis is through popular culture.
In the second episode of Breaking Bad, audiences sees drug dealer Jesse Pinkman dissolve a dead body in his apartment’s bathtub using hydrofluoric acid he’d sourced from his high school’s chemical stores. He returns the next day only to find the acid had eaten through the bathtub itself and floorboards beneath, before finally falling through to the floor below.
Despite the effective cinematics, Breaking Bad is far from realistic. Hydrofluoric acid, while highly corrosive, doesn’t have the capacity to completely liquefy remains overnight — it’s at the wrong end of the pH scale. It certainly doesn’t have the capacity to eat through a bath and the floor.
Whether it’s a question of gulping down Soylent Green or shunting bodies into acid barrels, television and film haven’t been kind to the practice of alkaline hydrolysis.
Outside of television, urban legends have tarred alkaline hydrolysis with further negativity. In 2011, researchers had to debunk claims the Sicilian mafia disposed of human remains in a process called lupara bianca, or white shotgun. Just like in Breaking Bad, the mafia supposedly used acid — an entirely different, cruder chemical process.
Mafia urban legends and shows like Breaking Bad create a sense of violence surrounding water cremation that simply doesn’t hold up. Water cremation, at its core, is no more than the acceleration of a natural process.
The reality: As with almost all aspects of the death industry, there is a level of respect and dignity. You don’t see what happens in the retort of a flame-based cremator, but you won’t see what happens inside an alkaline hydrolysis machine either.
Waste not
What remains to be dealt with, however, is what comes out the other side. Ashes are one thing — you can pop them on the mantle in a decorative urn, sprinkle them at sea or even have them launched into space — but what about the residual liquid?
One of the biggest roadblocks to the acceptance of alkaline hydrolysis technology is the issue of wastewater. Because of its association with death, the liquid is perceived as too unsanitary to be processed normally. Say it goes through the same recycling plants that supply residential areas, the idea of drinking the essence of a dead body sounds abhorrent. It’s hard enough swallowing the idea of recycled sewage water. Remains? Inconceivable.
But technology already exists to tackle almost any kind of wastewater.
Sewage water is filtered for reuse in municipal treatment plants. Organic material is broken down in anaerobic digesters, which convert the material into methane or “biogas.” Specially designed ultrafiltration systems can even tackle aqueous nuclear waste.
“Any liquid waste that we have, we can deal with,” says Ghadouani.
Yet in Australia, residual liquid from water cremation isn’t permitted to be treated via the municipal water treatment facilities or digesters. More worryingly, there’s a disconnect here — and it’s one that, for the most part, is behind the closed doors of the funeral industry.
“One of the most common things the public doesn’t know,” says leading US thanatologist and death educator Cole Imperi, “is that when someone is embalmed, all the blood that comes out of your body, where does that go? It goes down the drain.”
In fact, almost all the human waste that comes from hospitals and funeral homes as a result of the embalming process is permitted to be processed through these official channels.
“So if you’re allowing byproducts from funeral homes to go into the municipal water system for treatment, why are you discriminating against one particular disposition method?” Imperi asks. “It’s an interesting kind of cognitive dissonance.”
Thanatologist Cole Imperi beside one of Bio-Response Solutions’ alkaline hydrolysis machines.
Nevertheless, in the few states that allow alkaline hydrolysis — for animals — practicing venues must provide their own wastewater filtration treatments and submit them for regular testing. It’s expensive and demanding. Venues are scarce.
Jonathan Hopkins, owner and operator of Resting Pets Cremations in New South Wales, Australia, is an alkaline hydrolysis advocate. He and his late wife opened their practice after the pain of a family pet’s death opened their eyes to the process as a cremation alternative.
“My wife was always an animal lover and she just had a really bad experience with the [cremation] company that was serving this area,” he said. “So we approached the local council for a pet cremation system.” They landed on alkaline hydrolysis.
To ensure the wastewater passed council and environmental regulations, Hopkins created his own treatment system. He began by increasing the machine’s existing filtration capacity, with any overflow going into a separate tank. Here, microorganisms remove any remaining bacteria — much like a septic system.
“With our system, they can see what chemicals are going in, and they can see the effluent coming out. They can test it, they know where it’s going,” he said.
Reframing the narrative
Some will always struggle with the concept of alkaline hydrolysis. Certain cultures or religions might always register a stronger connection to conventional burial and cremation methods.
But our human instinct to process death isn’t incompatible with water cremation. We could use residual liquid from the hydrolysis process to help nurture the earth. A gardener, for example, could live on in the plants and flowers they once nurtured.
Conceptually, it’s not out of the question. “If the liquid waste stream were to be applied to soil as a fertilizer, there could be a role for this as a soil improver.” explains Michael Short, a senior research fellow of the Future Industries Institute at the University of South Australia.
On a larger scale, this could even benefit the wider agricultural industry.
“The wastewater stream [would be] a relatively high strength organic waste solution,” Short says. “Soils in some Australian regions are generally low in natural organic matter, so adding organics from such waste streams could help to improve overall soil quality and soil carbon stocks.”
It may sound strange on first pass, but why not? If it gives someone peace of mind that our loved ones will “live on,” the transmutation of alkaline hydrolysis liquid to fertilizer may just be the PR dream the technology has been waiting for.
Alkaline hydrolysis may not be accepted anytime soon. It may take years of building up a more positive association. Maybe even decades.
It all comes down to whether states and countries are willing to test the waters.
