Tag: After Death

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The Newly Legal Process for Turning Human Corpses to Soil

Reusable eight-by-four-foot steel cylinders, packed with wood chips, straw, and alfalfa, present an eco-friendly alternative to traditional burial

By Corinne Purtill

There’s an empty warehouse 20 miles south of Seattle that, if everything goes as planned, will soon be full of dead people.

The facility belongs to Recompose, the first U.S. company to compost human bodies indoors, through a process known officially as natural organic reduction. Washington state became the first — and so far, only — U.S. state to legalize the practice in May 2019. Recompose opens in November. It’s designed to hold the bodies of up to 10 recently deceased people at a time, each of them quietly decomposing into a loamy, nutritious soil, just as their previous owners wanted.

At the most basic level, decomposition is not a new technology; microbes have been doing it extremely well for just about as long as organic matter has existed. But it’s a part of death that Western funeral practices have traditionally gone to great lengths to evade: Embalming a corpse in chemicals with the goal of preserving a “natural” (that is, not dead) look; hawking expensive caskets that claim to seal out nature’s corrupting forces.

Recompose takes the opposite approach.

Against an attractive millennial pink background, the company’s website plainly explains the eco-friendly setting in which clients will decay. Instead of in a single-use casket, bodies rest temporarily in a reusable eight-by-four-foot steel cylinder, packed snugly in a cocoon of wood chips, straw, and alfalfa. For 30 days the dead human and living microbes stay in the vessel together, lying alongside fellow Recomposers in the warehouse’s hexagonal wooden frame, while the microorganisms slowly break down the corpse. At the end, after a brief turn in a curing bin to cool and dry out excess moisture, what once was a human body is now about a cubic yard of fertile, nutrient-rich soil, which can be returned to loved ones or scattered according to the decedent’ wishes. (The company will deliver all or part of the soil free of charge to Bells Mountain, a protected wilderness in southern Washington.) The service costs $5,500 — more than a typical cremation and service costs in the U.S., but about half the cost of burial. Some 275 people have already signed up for the service since reservations opened a month ago, said customer and communications manager Anna Swenson.

“There are a lot of signs and signals that are somewhat apocalyptic that kind of turn you back to your mortality.”

Why hack death? Cremation releases more than 500,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually in the U.S. alone, along with significant levels of mercury emissions. Traditional burial shoves truckfuls worth of metal, concrete, wood, and formaldehyde beneath the ground each year. Cities around the world are running out of traditional cemetery space, and preserving any unmolested open space is hard, even if you’re not trying to get permission to plant corpses in it. Human composting and its kindred green death technologies distill the body from a large, unwieldy, decomposition-prone state to one that is smaller, shelf-stable, and portable, with negligible environmental cost along the way.

There are existential reasons as well. As a pandemic rages and wildfires burn and a general feeling of doom pervades the air, “there are a lot of signs and signals that are somewhat apocalyptic that kind of turn you back to your mortality,” said Jeff Jorgenson, who owns green funeral homes in Seattle and Los Angeles.

“We look at what we’re doing and how disconnected we are from the earth and realizing that we’ve created this mess. We’ve allowed this to happen. And I think that informs decisions and perspectives on death.”

Recompose founder and CEO Katrina Spade was raised in a family of doctors “where it was fairly normal to talk about death and dying at the dinner table,” as she explained in a 2016 TED Talk. That frank approach to life and its end followed her to architecture school, where she became fascinated by a particular design question: How to dispose of her own physical body when she was no longer living in it, without — as she put it — “destroy[ing] the possibility of giving back after we die.”

She admired the example of green cemeteries, where nonembalmed bodies are wrapped in biodegradable materials and buried in a grave about three or four feet deep in which, over the course of about two years, tissues decompose into matter that nourishes the surrounding soil. (Bones can take up to 20 years more to fully disintegrate, according to the Green Burial Council.)

Green cemeteries are lovely places, with trees and plants growing freely without the austere manicuring of a traditional cemetery. There just aren’t very many of them. Only a few hundred of the thousands of cemeteries in the U.S. offer any green burial option, including many Jewish and Muslim cemeteries, whose burial practices traditionally forgo embalming and nonbiodegradable caskets. With composting, the body can go through the same process as it would beneath the soil of a green cemetery, even if there’s no open space for miles.

There’s also the question of one’s final resting place. A body placed in a green cemetery becomes, effectively, a part of that particular expanse of earth. One of the benefits of cremation is that the deceased or their survivors can dispose of the resulting “ashes” however they see fit: scattered in a meaningful spot, divided amongst children, even shot out of a cannon if that feels most appropriate.

Wouldn’t it be nice, Spade thought, to rot closer to home, to turn back into something that feeds the earth instead of takes from it, and to have a say in where the soil made from you goes?

Agriculture has been using natural organic reduction for decades to dispose of dead cows and other livestock on farms. For her master’s thesis in architecture, Spade laid out the idea for a facility where humans could be composted this way, indoors, in a setting that would be both dignified and sanitary.

Upon graduation, she began in earnest to make the business a reality. In 2018 she partnered with the Washington State University Soil Science Department for a study using six donor bodies to confirm that soil produced from human composting would be pathogen-free. The heat produced by the composting process kills almost all pathogens; the only people who will not be eligible for composting at Recompose are those who die with prion conditions, like Creutzfeldt–Jakob (“mad cow”) disease, as the proteins that cause those conditions can remain toxic in soil for years.

Recompose’s vessel is not the only relatively new advance in the disposal of human corpses. The law that made Washington the first (and so far only) state in the U.S. to legalize human composting also explicitly legalized alkaline hydrolysis, also known as chemical cremation.

The novelty of Recompose got more attention, as alkaline hydrolysis was already legal in more than a dozen U.S. states. But because the technology fits so easily into existing crematoriums, chemical cremation, which was also originally developed to dispose of dead cattle, may be the more accessible option at the moment for people without access to a green cemetery or reduction facility.

More than half of the people who die in the U.S. each year are cremated, a process that emits more than 500 estimated pounds of carbon dioxide per body. In alkaline hydrolysis, a body is placed inside a vessel containing a solution of water and the caustic base potassium hydroxide that’s then heated and pressurized. Over about three hours, the pressurized liquid dissolves the body’s soft tissues as fire does in a traditional crematorium. Because there’s no combustion, there are also no greenhouse gas emissions.

The end result of both processes is the same: Bones that are then pulverized into what are typically referred to as the “ashes” of the deceased. Traditional cremains are the color of gray sand. The remains of a chemically cremated body are the pure white of seashells.

Green death tech also expands to engineered materials that line coffins and wrap corpses, and that sell themselves as accelerating the conversion of the former, resource-consuming you into matter that feeds other life forms, the ideological opposite of traditional burial marketing.

“People want their deaths to mean something. They want their bodies to be useful in some way.”

These include the offerings of designer Jae Rhim Lee’s company Coeio, which sells burial garments laced with a mixture of mushrooms and other organic matter that claim to speed decomposition and break down the toxic compounds the body releases. (According to his wishes, actor Luke Perry was buried in one after his 2019 death from a stroke at age 52.) The Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel created Capsula Mundi, a biodegradable, egg-shaped urn whose creators say should be buried in the ground, with a tree as a grave marker.

New technologies for disposing of bodies allow new ways of mourning the dead. Even before Covid-19 disrupted the ability to gather in mourning, it was a challenge to convene dispersed loved ones and choose a specific place to lay to rest a person who lived their life in multiple cities or countries. The share of people who identify with organized religion has fallen. Secular services that fill the need for mourning rituals have grown in their place.

Recompose is also a funeral home, and eventually, the business hopes to move to a facility large enough to allow for memorial services where loved ones can participate in the process of placing the body in the vessel. The company also plans to offer franchising opportunities in a few years. While patents are pending on the specific design of their vessels, composting itself is not a proprietary idea. In the future, rather than calling the church to organize a service, one may call the closest organic reduction facility.

“People want their deaths to mean something. They want their bodies to be useful in some way,” said Nora Menkin, executive director of the People’s Memorial Association, a Seattle-based nonprofit cooperative funeral home. Over the last six months, there’s been a jump in calls to the organization from people contemplating their mortality while riding out the pandemic at home. They want options, she said, so that “your last act on earth isn’t polluting it.”

The way we dispose of bodies says more about how we live. Embalming became popular in the Civil War, the first episode in U.S. history where people died en masse far from their homes and needed to be transported for burial. Cremation rates rose as the country became more mobile, and scattered families could not be convened fast enough for a burial. Today, more people seek options that don’t contribute to the environmental destruction we see around us, that allows our earthly remains to be shared by the people we loved or disposed of altogether. To embrace our final obligation, which is to return to the earth the substance that let us be ourselves.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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This ‘Living’ Coffin Uses Mushrooms to Compost Dead Bodies

This ‘Living’ Coffin Uses Mushrooms to Compost Dead Bodies

Hendrikx with the ‘Living Cocoon’ coffins.

by Becky Ferreira

For tens of thousands of years, humans have developed funeral rites and burial practices that reflected the attitudes of their particular time and place. These traditions of honoring the dead continue to evolve into the 21st century, as people seek “green burials” that are more environmentally friendly than standard coffins. 

One of the newest examples comes from Loop, a Dutch biotech company that recently unveiled a biodegradable coffin made of fungus, microbes and plant roots. Called the “Living Cocoon,” the coffin is designed to hasten bodily decomposition while also enriching soil around the plot.

“Normally, what we do as humans is we take something out of nature, we kill it, and we use it,” said Bob Hendrikx, founder of Loop, in a call. “So I thought: what if we humans start moving from working with dead materials toward a world in which we work with living materials?”

“We would not only become less of a parasite, but we could also start exploring super-cool material properties, like living lights, walls that are self-healing, and that kind of stuff,” he added.

Hendrikx was inspired to develop the Living Cocoon while presenting a living home concept at last year’s Dutch Design Week. While houses are obviously for the living, Hendrikx got to thinking about adapting the concept into a coffin powered by mushroom mycelium, which is the filamentary vegetative part of the fungus.

“Mycelium is nature’s biggest recycler,” Hendrikx said. “It is continuously looking for dead organic matter to transform into key nutrients.”

Developed in collaboration with Delft University of Technology and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Living Cocoon contains a moss bed packed with mycelium, plant roots, and a lush ecosystem of microorganisms. It is already on the market in the Netherlands, and has been used for a burial at the Hague.

Initial tests of the coffin indicate that it degrades in soil over about 30 to 45 days, and the Loop team estimates that bodies within coffins should be composted after three years. Mushrooms can also remove contaminants from soil, so the researchers have a “bigger vision” to use the coffins to purify dirty environments.

“We have a dream of having super-new natural funeral-based concepts in which we go to different cities and search for the most dirty soil and start cleaning that up,” Hendrikx said.

“We already have this product launched on the market, but what we want to really know is how long does [decomposition] take exactly, what does the decomposition phase look like, and also—this is super-important—what kind of chemicals can it absorb and in what amounts,” he added.

The Living Cocoon is one of many emerging concepts that aim to reduce the environmental tolls of current mortuary norms. Right now, both caskets and cadavers are treated with chemicals that leach into soil over time, potentially contaminating groundwater.

Green burials are exactly not a new phenomenon, as Indigenous cultures around the world have practiced environmentally friendly mortuary practices for thousands of years. For instance, “sky burials” that expose bodies to high altitudes where they can be scavenged by birds and animals, are still practiced in the Himalayas today.

But more novel funeral technologies such as “water cremation,” in which bodies are broken down in water and potassium hydroxide, are attracting the interest of people who want to tread lightly on the planet, even after they no longer live on it.

To that point, the Loop team thinks that the Living Cocoon will help people access the right end-of-life experience for them.

“I think people are ready for this,” Hendrikx said.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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‘Confirmation of Death’©️

Dr Cathy Welch

The argument about who can or should be responsible for confirmation of death has escalated and evolved over the past few years, alongside changing opinions and legislation regarding CPR and end of life care planning, etc.

But the rise of the Covid-19 crisis has taken the issue to another level. And so, the argument rages on about who owns the rights to use the title ‘Confirmation of Death’©️.

Should death be a medical diagnosis? Are nurses capable of diagnosing death?

And now arise the questions ‘does it have to be a healthcare professional?’; ‘does the healthcare professional have to be there in person?’; and ‘can undertakers confirm death?’

The law has not significantly changed – it still remains that any competent person can confirm death. It‘s only by convention that ‘person’ has been historically replaced (to varying extent by postcode lottery) with ‘healthcare professional’.

Unfortunately, Pulse’s article ‘DHSC says GPs can provide ‘remote clinical support’ for death verification’ earlier this year continues to use language that perpetuates the unnecessary dogma that this is ultimately a medical role.

Within Dr David Church’s relatively recent blog ‘The stormy night that shaped my views on death verification’, and the following responses, all I see are attempts to justify the status quo based purely on anecdote and modern medical cultural convention. We all want to believe that the days of healthcare policy being based on anecdote are gone, but in reality this is all based on personal bias, hearsay, and myth.

Let’s stop trying to insist that ‘confirmation of death’ is some kind of healthcare copyright issue

So, in the discussions and comments, out come the historical tales of live burials – should we then advocate having a bell system installed in all graves again, as in the 19th Century? And the hypothermic resurrections from the dead – should then every cold body be warmed up, as in the Resus Council hypothermia guidelines (not dead until warm and dead)? Good luck convincing all the hospitals and mortuaries to warm all bodies to normal temperatures before confirming death – they’d be stinking fly pits!

Yes, errors do happen, but extremely rarely. Healthcare-only verification of death is a modern phenomena, driven by persisting attempts to use medical ‘knowledge’ to run away from the inevitable. It’s time to grow up and stop using rare ‘errors’ in verification to cling to current imperfect, unsustainable and inhumane dogmatic ‘rules’ governing ownership of death. How will western society finally grow some cultural wisdom and accept that death is a normal part of life? That death is not failure, not an error, but is an absolute fact of existence, with a 100% lifetime prevalence?

It won’t, as long as the medical/healthcare world continues to grasp at and peddle the concept that death is a medical diagnosis, and can only be confirmed by someone with a five-year degree and however-many years’ apprenticeship. As long as the Grand Guild of Medical Magicians continues to promote the myths that life and death are under our mysterious control, people will continue to live in the shadows of mortal fear, beholden to us to rescue them, and so keep expressing the very same unrealistic expectations that GP mages complain about every day.

My opinion on confirmation of death… the bodies of those who have died will all be dealt with by either an undertaker (mostly), or a pathology morgue. Undertakers are the experts in management of death – handling, dressing, caring for and disposing of the bodies of the deceased. Surely then, they are best placed to be trained in recognition and confirmation of death in the community, as a standard part of their normal procedures?

Death is not a medical ‘condition’ or ‘diagnosis’ to warrant its control by medical/healthcare workers, any more than birth or taxes. Hand back normality to the people. Then, we may find other unrealistic expectations ‘imposed’ on us from our patients start to dissolve away too, because we‘ve been the ones clinging to their ‘need’ for us all the time.

Let’s stop trying to insist that ‘confirmation of death’ is some kind of healthcare copyright issue.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Medieval pandemics spawned fears of the undead, burials reveal

A 16th-century drawing by Hand Baldung Grien depicts a German mercenary speaking with Death. As pandemics swept Europe, stories of hungry and vengeful undead grew in German-speaking lands and may be reflected in burial practices.

By Andrew Curry

In 2014, Swiss anthropologist Amelie Alterauge was just a few days into her new job at Bern University’s Institute of Forensic Medicine in Switzerland when she was called to investigate an odd burial in a centuries-old cemetery that was being excavated ahead of a construction project. Of some 340 burials in the cemetery, one stood out: a middle-aged man, interred face-down in a neglected corner of the churchyard. “I had never seen such a burial in real life before,” says Alterauge.

Excavators found an iron knife and purse full of coins in the crook of his arm, positioned as though they had once been concealed under his clothes. The coins helped archaeologists date the body to between 1630 and 1650, around the time a series of plagues swept through that region of Switzerland. “It was like the family or the undertaker didn’t want to search the body,” Alterauge says. “Maybe he was already badly decomposed when he was buried—or maybe he had an infectious disease and nobody wanted to get too close.”

The discovery set Alterauge off on a search for more examples of face-down, or prone, burials in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Though extremely rare, such burials have been documented elsewhere—particularly in Slavic areas of Eastern Europe. They are often compared to other practices, such as mutilation or weighing bodies down with stones, that were believed to thwart vampires and the undead by preventing them from escaping their graves. But Alterauge says no one had looked systematically at the phenomenon of prone burials in medieval German-speaking areas that now constitute modern Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.

Now, in a new study published in the journal PLOS One, Alterauge’s research team reveals their analysis of nearly 100 prone burials over the course of 900 years that have been documented by archaeologists in German-speaking Europe. The data suggest a major shift in burial practices that the researchers link to deaths from plagues and a belief among survivors that victims might come back to haunt the living.

A medieval burial in a Berlin churchyard reveals a man buried face down. Prone burials increased in the later Middle Ages and may be a reaction to deaths resulting from the plague.

During the early and high Middle Ages in Europe (ca 950 to 1300), the few bodies that were buried face-down in regional graveyards were often placed at the center of church cemeteries, or even inside the holy structures. Some of them were buried with jewelry, fine clothes and writing implements, suggesting that high-ranking nobles and priests may have chosen to be buried that way as a display of humility before God. One historical example is Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s father, who reportedly asked to be buried face-down in front of a cathedral in 768 as penance for his father’s sins.

Archaeologists begin to see an increase in face-down burials in Europe by the early 1300s, however, including some on the outskirts of consecrated Christian burial grounds. This shift coincided with devastating plagues that swept across Europe beginning in 1347, killing millions across the continent.

“Something changes,” says Alterauge, who is also a doctoral student at the University of Heidelberg.

As diseases killed people faster than communities could cope, the sight and sound of decomposing bodies became a familiar, unsettling presence. Corpses would bloat and shift, and gas-filled intestines of the dead made disturbing, unexpected noises. Flesh decayed and desiccated in inexplicable ways, making hair and nails seem to grow as the flesh around them shriveled.

Decaying “bodies move, they make smacking sounds. It might seem as if they’re eating themselves and their burial shrouds,” Alterauge says.

A 14th-century drawing depicts the burial of plague victims. German tales tell of nachzehrer (loosely translated as corpse devourers), and wiedergänger (“those who walk again”), which may have been inspired by mass deaths resulting from the plague.

As medieval Europeans tried to explain what they were seeing and hearing, they might have seized on ideas about the undead already circulating in Slavic communities of Eastern Europe: “We don’t have [the concept of] vampires in Germany,” Alterauge says, “but there’s this idea of corpses which move around” that is imported into western Europe from Slavic areas to the east not long after the first plague outbreaks take place in the mid-1300s.

A logic behind the undead

Before the 1300s, medieval stories in German-speaking Europe described helpful ghosts returning to warn or help their loved ones. But in an age of epidemics they took on a different shape: revenants, or the walking dead.

“This shift to evil spirits takes place around 1300 or 1400,” says Matthias Toplak, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who was not involved with the study.

Turning to medieval folklore for clues, Alterauge and her co-authors found tales of nachzehrer, loosely translated as corpse devourers: restless, hungry corpses that consumed themselves and their burial shrouds, and drained the life force from their surviving relatives in the process.

“Historical sources say nachzehrer resulted from unusual or unexpected death,” Alterauge says. “There was a theory someone became a nachzehrer if he was the first of the community to die during an epidemic.”

In pandemic-era Europe, the legend had a compelling logic: As the victim’s close relatives began developing symptoms and collapsing within days of the funeral, it must have seemed as if they were being cursed from the grave.

“The background of all these supernatural beliefs must be the sudden deaths of several individuals from one society,” says Toplak. “It makes sense that people blamed supernatural spirits and took measures to prevent the dead from returning.”

Equally feared at the time were wiedergänger, or “those who walk again”—corpses capable of emerging from the grave to stalk their communities. “When you did something wrong, couldn’t finish your business in life because of an unexpected death, or have to atone or avenge something you might become a wiedergänger,” Alterauge explains.

The new study reveals an increase in the number of bodies placed face-down on the edges of Christian cemeteries between the 14th and 17th centuries. The researchers argue that, in this part of Europe at least, burying people face-down was the preferred way to prevent malevolent corpses from returning to do harm.

Other archaeologists say there could be other explanations. In a world ravaged by deadly pandemics, burying the community’s first victim face-down might have been symbolic, a desperate attempt to ward off further calamity.

“If someone got really sick, it must have seemed like a punishment from God,” says Petar Parvanov, an archaeologist at Central European University in Budapest who was not involved in the study. “Prone burials were a way to point out something to the people at the funeral—somehow the society allowed too much sin, so they want to show penance.”

The next step, says archaeologist Sandra Lösch, co-author of the paper and head of the department of physical anthropology at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Bern University, would be to look at the face-down burials to find if there are clearer links with disease outbreaks. By analyzing the ancient DNA of individuals in prone burials, for example, it might be possible to sequence specific plague microbes, while isotopic analysis of victims’ bones and teeth “might show traces of a diet or geographic origin different from the rest of the population,” offering another explanation for their out-of-the-ordinary burials.

Because local excavation records are often unpublished, Alterauge hopes more evidence will emerge in the years to come as archaeologists re-examine old evidence or look at unusual medieval burials with a fresh perspective. “I definitely think there are more examples out there,” she says.

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Pa’s Smile

Jaimal Yogis’s dad explained his final wishes: “I’ve gotten so much from Buddhism for good living, I’m not going to pass up their tips for good dying.”

by

The first and only time I bought dry ice, the grocery store clerk asked if I was going camping. “No,” I muttered, then managed to stop myself from saying it was for a body. The ice really was to lay my father’s corpse on.

An air force colonel who was skeptical of organized religion, my father, who we call Pa, wasn’t sure the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of leaving the dead undisturbed for three days was necessary. But, as he said after being diagnosed with late stage lung cancer, “I’ve gotten so much from Buddhism for good living, I’m not going to pass up their tips for good dying.”

As if summarizing Socrates in his famous pre-execution speech, Pa often said he had no idea where he was going. ‘If the lights go out, it’ll be a good rest,’ he’d say. ‘And if there’s more, it’ll be a great adventure.’

These three days are not unique to Tibetan, or more accurately, Vajrayana Buddhism. Irish wakes often last two or three days while a soul departs, and Jewish Midrashic texts say a soul hovers over the body for three days (or seven) until the body is buried. The idea behind the three days in Vajrayana Buddhism is that as the breath and heart stop, our gross level of consciousness dissolves but more subtle levels of consciousness remain in the body for up to about seventy-two hours. During that time the subtlest stream of consciousness is said to leave, a transition known to go more smoothly if the body can chill—in Pa’s case literally since under California law dead bodies have to be kept on ice.

“Otherwise they tend to smell like dead bodies,” our hospice nurse informed us.

“Right,” I nodded. “And where do we get the ice?”

“Grocery store.”

“Of course.”

As if summarizing Socrates in his famous pre-execution speech, Pa often said he had no idea where he was going. “If the lights go out, it’ll be a good rest,” he’d say. “And if there’s more, it’ll be a great adventure.” Still, he’d reasoned his way toward the three-day death plan. In addition to reading up on how Vajrayana Buddhists use strict tests to prove they’ve found reincarnations of former teachers, he’d read the work of doctors like Sam Parnia of NYU Langone Health. Dr. Parnia has meticulously catalogued data on people who’ve died clinically, sometimes for hours, before being resuscitated. These briefly dead folks often report vivid dreams after waking, sometimes ones in which they correctly recount what doctors had been saying—“Going to the game later?”—when the patients had no heartbeat. “That’s enough evidence for me,” Pa said. “Don’t poke or prod me for a few days.”

As the actual death part of the three-day death plan approached, we—his family—wondered if having Pa’s cold body steaming on carbon dioxide in the bedroom might intensify our grief. And might it be a little creepy? It turned out to be just the opposite.

Death leaves you in a dreamy shock. You don’t know if you should wail or drive all night to Mexico or finally get to writing your own will. When Pa stopped breathing on a warm summer evening, dressing him in his aloha shirt and favorite Christmas socks, then adorning his room with flowers, was just the beautiful busy work our reeling minds needed. Reading Jane Hirshfield’s “It Was Like This: You Were Happy,” a special request from Pa, while he was actually there in the room felt more heart opening than reading it again while scattering his ashes. And as we sat with Pa each of the three mornings while reading him The Tibetan Book of The Dead—a text meant to help us navigate the space between lives—it felt as if we were on a kind of spiritual tour bus with him, visiting the realms where awakened beings are born from lotuses and truths are whispered on the breeze.

Perhaps most surprising was how much the three-day death plan helped before death. As Pa was starting to show signs of getting close to the end, my sister Ciel and I asked if he would like to hear a Medicine Buddha ceremony that is often done for the sick and dying. “You don’t have to bother with that,” Pa said, continuing his usual stubborn quest to keep us from doting. But we argued that the ceremony would be a good warm-up for when he was down for the count and we were reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Tibetans actually call The Great Liberation for Hearing in the Bardo. Since this made it sound like the reading was for us, Pa agreed.

We sat around his bed, switching back and forth between botching the Tibetan chanting and reading the English translation. The ceremony took about an hour, and we thought ­­Pa had slept through it. But at the end, he sat up with tears in his eyes. “I am so honored you did that for me,” he said. “And now I’m going to get up and see the sky one more time.”

“We’ll get the wheelchair,” Pa’s wife, Margaret, said reasonably.

“No,” he said, “I’m going to walk.”

Pa had already fallen behind the toilet in such a precarious position we’d needed the fire department to come dislodge him, and he’d been bedridden for days now. But charged up by the chanting, Pa managed to lumber slowly to the back porch, rasping with every breath.

We opened the door. Pa turned his face up bracingly to the blue. He looked so pale, I half expected him to croak right there. Instead, he then looked down at a few small stairs he would have to navigate in order to be fully outside. “Take me back,” he whispered. “I want an easy death. Not to fall off the damn steps.”

We laughed. Finding humor in the face of hardship was one of Pa’s great gifts. But we hadn’t heard zingers with gusto like this for a few weeks. And I think, in addition to the power of the ceremony itself, knowing that his family would be there for three full days—botching more Tibetan chants around him—was a great comfort, a lightening.

Philosophical aspects of the plan were helpful too. In hospice Pa occasionally felt unsure of where—even who—he was. One day he called himself King Henry and my aunt the queen. “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening,” he told me. “It’s like I’m disappearing.” This was scary, but Buddhist wisdom for conscious dying gave Pa a place to put his fears.

According to Vajrayana Buddhists, our gross consciousness is where we construct our version of reality through our senses. This construction is like a video game in our heads in which we are the most important character, the one whose suffering matters most, the one who should win all the gold coins because, as our senses (falsely) tell us, we exist separately from the rest of reality. The more we let go of this illusory separation from others, the more room there is to experience our true blissful and compassionate nature. Vajrayana Buddhist teachers say this true nature is most easily accessible at death because, as opposed to meditative glimpses beyond the veil, in death the gross levels of consciousness drop away automatically. So, when Pa was scared or disoriented, we could remind him that losing a mere idea of himself was not just natural, it was part of spiritual awakening.

In his last hours, Pa’s brow was furrowed and his body appeared tense. He looked like he was trying desperately to remember something. Ciel, Margaret, and I were taking turns sitting with him, and fittingly it was just when Margaret was singing him Nat King Cole’s, “When I Fall in Love,” a song they’d danced to on West Cliff Drive above the sea, that Pa finally let go. As he did, his brow smoothed completely, making him look instantly younger. A distinct half-smile appeared on his lips. A Buddha smile. And whether it was Pa’s newfound bliss, rigor mortis, or some combination of both, that smile remained perfectly serene for all three days.

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Orphaned in adulthood —

“Losing both your parents doesn’t get any easier”

There are painful and sometimes unexpected feelings associated with losing both parents in adulthood.

By Caron Kemp

If it’s possible to have a good death, that’s how I’d describe my mum’s. Within the unlikely surroundings of a quietly attentive intensive care unit, she went peacefully, flanked by her family. It was a mere five months after her cancer diagnosis and none of us believed that the Large B-Cell Lymphoma coursing through her blood, lungs and chest would beat her. But the chemotherapy regime was gruelling, rendering her weak and even more ill at every dose and the final bout of pneumonia proved too much.

I was just 33 and juggling three young children of my own, yet as I sat vigil at her bedside in her final hours, all I wanted was to be scooped up into the arms that once cradled me, to be looked after.

A mummy’s girl to my core, I looked like her, shared many of her quirks and, in her latter years, doted on her as she endured more than her fair share of poor health. Yes, we bickered and, yes, she drove me mad regularly – but my mum was my biggest cheerleader. Even when I failed my driving test over and over again, or felt like I was falling apart at university, she was on hand to remind me of my worth.

Her death hit me hard. However long we’d lived with the realities of hospital visits and hushed conversations, living without her wasn’t an option. The funeral passed in a daze and once everyone else’s world carried on turning, I was left fumbling in the dark for a way to carry on.

Stoic to the end – I’ll never forget the final thumbs-up sign my mum gave as she was put into an induced coma – here was my lead. She never lamented her situation, and neither would I. Her greatest riches in life were her family and I knew all she’d want was for myself and my sister to rally around my dad; her soulmate of more than 35 years, himself bereft and broken-hearted.

“I was left fumbling in the dark for a way to carry on”

So, I poured all my energy into him. I sobbed until I physically hurt, I sought her out in the feathers that landed at my feet, and I got my first tattoo in a big ‘screw you’ to the world. But my dad gave me purpose. Thus, when he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer exactly two years after my mum died, the cruelty of the situation wasn’t lost on me.

In the seven months that followed, I watched the wisest man I knew become reduced to a shadow of himself; frail, dependant and scared. In the last four weeks – played out from a small, clinical hospital room – life existed in a vacuum, where fear was palpable.

My dad’s death was not a good one. Riddled too with pneumonia and sepsis, I was woken in the middle of the night to news that he’d had a heart attack. He died before we could get to him. It was Mother’s Day.

It was my sister who first helped me try on the title of ‘orphan’ for size. But a fully-fledged adult, juggling a career and motherhood, I felt like the proverbial square peg. Yet here I was, without the greatest anchor in my life, and somehow the shoe began to fit.

Losing both parents is not the same as losing one, twice over. When my dad died, I didn’t just lose him. I lost my identity as someone’s daughter, I lost the family and friends only connected to me through them, and I lost anything standing in the pecking order between me and my own demise.

Plus, without my dad to anaesthetise my pain, I found the wound of my mum’s death finally laid bare too. It was all too much and for weeks I couldn’t muster a tear; numb to the earthquake that had ruptured my world as I knew it.

Life since has been punctuated with plenty of difficult days, but my first birthday without either parent was the toughest yet. However hard it was receiving a card signed solely from my dad, receiving nothing stung so much more. I spent the day at home in my pyjamas, because some things can’t be fixed and at times it’s ok to feel crushed.

Before my dad died, I’d always found camaraderie in others walking a similar path. But this was unchartered territory and it was a very lonely place to be. People tried to empathise. Like the friend of my dad’s – himself in his 70s – who told me he ‘knew exactly how I felt’ having recently lost his second parent. Grief is not a competition, but I can tell you – comparing two completely different experiences hurts.

“There are so many questions that now have no answer and so much I wish I could still weave into our family tapestry”

As someone who struggles with vulnerability, being honest about my feelings is a constant work in progress, yet opening up to the rare few individuals who don’t wipe away my tears, who hear what I say and what I don’t and who share my newfound dark and often inappropriate sense of humour, has been fantastically medicinal.

There are so many questions that now have no answer and so much I wish I could still weave into our family tapestry. But no one leads a perfectly curated life; it’s what we do with our pain that makes the difference.

Losing my parents has been an incalculable, lasting blow, but it’s also been surprisingly freeing. Without anyone to be my guide, I’ve emerged into a new stage of adulthood; finding out who my truest, deepest self is, what serves me well and what really matters. At times it’s been ugly, I’ve been very angry and I’ve lost and found many relationships along the way.

I am also, though, acutely aware of how short and precious life is and I’m more motivated than ever to live mine fully – with my parents’ values and spirit carried with me in my heart.

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I visited a ‘green cemetery’ in California,

and it made me question everything about American funerals

By Isabella Jibilian

  • A small network of cemeteries across the country are looking to shake up American burial practices and make them eco-friendly by offering “green burials.”
  • Green burial rejects cremation, embalming, and concrete-lined graves to reduce the carbon footprint of death.
  • A national survey found that over half of respondents were interested in exploring green funeral options because of potential environmental and cost-saving benefits.

Cindy Barath is the steward of a 32-acre property in the hills of Mill Valley, California, and all the bodies that come with it.

She spends her days planning ceremonies, receiving the bereaved, and caring for the dead. She’s honest at dinner parties about her job, and when people are surprised to hear that she personally dresses the corpses, she tells them, “Well, they don’t dress themselves.”

I met Cindy Barath on a cool October morning. I was a graduate student hoping to write an article about rocketing property prices putting pressure on the cost of a grave. My tentative headline was: “The cost of living is rising. Is the cost of dying, too?”

I arrived at Fernwood Cemetery looking for a story about real estate. But I found something different, and in my opinion, more interesting: a small movement looking to shake up American burial practices and make them environmentally friendly.

In a traditional American burial, a body is embalmed, then placed in a coffin and laid to rest in a concrete-lined grave. The custom is resource intensive. Each year, it uses 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid, 20 million board feet of hardwood, and 1.6 million tons of concrete, according to the Green Burial Council.

The “green burial” movement looks to change that.

Barath offered me a tour of the property via her shiny black golf cart. We hop in and she hits the gas. We whip by eucalyptus trees, wood-chip trails, and the mounds of fresh graves.

Barath is not the funeral director I imagined. She has a warm, folksy demeanor, and wears her auburn hair in short curls that are closely cropped to her head. Her wardrobe reminds me of my high school home economics teacher — long, warm sweaters and a chunky gemstone necklace.

We pull up to a spot overlooking the hills, which are patched with light and shadow by the misty clouds overhead. It’s quiet, but if you listen closely, you can hear the distant chatter of recess from an elementary school a few miles away. “Sure beats the office,” said Barath with a chuckle, dismounting from the driver’s seat.

Green burials are generally defined by what they don’t do. They don’t cremate, which burns through gallons of fuel to turn the body to ash. They don’t embalm, which pumps formaldehyde into the body to preserve it. And they don’t line a grave with concrete, which slows decomposition.

But from there, the details vary. Customers can choose biodegradable containers that range from a pine box to a hand-sewn silk shroud. Some cemeteries offer flat stone markers, others record grave locations with a GPS tracking system. Fernwood even offers a mushroom suit, a shroud of fungal spores that aid in decomposition and detoxification.

Beyond Fernwood Cemetery, options abound for the late nature-lover. A Canadian design firm created an urn called “ROOTS,” made from coffee grounds and lime that will germinate a tree. A company called Better Place Forests is conserving hundreds of acres of land in California and Arizona where families can reserve a memorial tree to spread ashes. And an organization called Eternal Reefs can inturn your cremated ash into a concrete “reef ball” that restores ocean habitats.

A new name for an old practice

Although green burial is marketed as an eco-friendly choice, its customs existed long before the environmental movement. A simple burial without the frills of chemicals and concrete is ancient. Green burial is, essentially, a new word for an old practice.

Take Jewish burial traditions, for example.

“Jewish burial traditions and customs have been green for the last 3,000 years,” said Glenn Easton, executive Funeral Director at The Garden of Remembrance Memorial Park in Maryland. “In Israel, they don’t use caskets. They don’t embalm. They don’t use concrete liners. They use a shroud and put people in the ground.”

Easton says his Orthodox Jewish customers are especially green, since they prioritize letting a body decompose quickly. They even have a workaround called “butterdishing” for cemeteries that require concrete liners: they line the sides and top of the grave, and leave the bottom open to the earth.

Green burial isn’t too different from the way we bury the indigent, either. At potter’s fields across the country, governments bury those who are too poor to afford funeral services, or bodies that are unclaimed, in simple graves without coffins, concrete, or chemicals. The only difference: rather than a shroud or pine box, they are often buried in plastic body bags.

Unlike coffee-ground urns and “reefballs,” green burial is old technology. But while it doesn’t contribute much in terms of innovation, it does spark an important conversation. Green burial prompts us to ask why our rituals of death default to using formaldehyde and concrete.

In America, embalming can be traced back to the Civil War. The soldiers who died fighting on the battlefields of North Carolina needed to have their bodies transported back north to be buried. Preservation became a necessity.

Meanwhile, concrete liners can be traced to America’s obsession with the perfect lawn. Funeral directors say that they are useful for landscaping: they prevent the ground above a grave from sinking or collapsing. Many cemeteries require the concrete. It keeps things smooth for their industrial mowers.

The difference is apparent at Fernwood’s Green Cemetery. Rather than neat rows of gravestones and uniformly-trimmed fescue, the cemetery’s green burial sections are dotted with native grasses and shrubs. In parts, the landscape is steeply sloped. A lawnmower would have a tough time.

Changing times

The movement is still in its early days. There are at least 287 cemeteries in the US and Canada that offer green burial services, according to New Hampshire Funeral Resources. And at some of those cemeteries, like Wooster Cemetery in Connecticut, traditional burials vastly outnumber their green counterparts.

The cadre is small, but Ed Bixby, president of the Green Burial Council, which certifies green cemeteries, is hopeful. A national survey found that over half of respondents were interested in exploring green funeral options because of potential environmental and cost-saving benefits.

And Bixby says that end-of-life customs are more changeable than they seem.

Take cremation, for example. In 1975, only 6% of Americans chose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America. Traditional burial with embalming was standard.

Funeral directors considered cremation to be no more than “a flash in the pan,” said Bixby.

But it wasn’t. Cremation was a fraction of the price of traditional burial, and it was adopted widely.

Today, cremation is king. More than half of all Americans choose cremation, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. It surpassed traditional burial as the most popular end-of-life solution back in 2015.

Direct cremation, which forgoes a viewing or other ceremony, can cost as little as $750. But since green burial is less expensive than traditional burial, Bixby believes it could gain traction as the “official third option.”

Traditional burials, with a vault, cost a median of $9,135 in 2019, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. By forgoing embalming ($750), a cement vault ($1495), and opting for a simple shroud or pine box over a wood casket ($3,000), or metal burial casket ($2,500), those choosing green burial can save thousands.

Still, Glenn Easton emphasizes that at his cemetery, “green burials are not influenced or determined by financial decisions.” Instead, “they’re a philosophical preference.”

And Cindy Barath says that the simplicity of a green burial service, and emphasis its emphasis on nature, helps the bereaved. “I try to cut through all the red tape and make it easy and simple. Just help them make this transition. I know if they come in crying and come out laughing, something has taken place.”

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