Would you prefer to be cremated or buried in a casket? Washington might give residents an additional option if it becomes the first US state to legalize an unusual end-of-life practice — composting human remains.
“Recomposting” — which advertises as more environmentally friendly than traditional funeral practices — is a process where a human body is quickly decomposed using heat-loving microbes and beneficial bacteria.
The temperature is kept at 131 degrees Fahrenheit (55 Celsius) for 72 consecutive hours. The remains are then added into soil that can be used as mulch for trees, flowers and other plants.
Washington State Sen. Jamie Pedersen, a Democrat, plans to introduce a recomposting bill in January, NBC reports.
If passed, the bill would legalize recomposting in Washington so citizens could choose an alternative to the traditional methods of burial and cremation of human remains.
The Seattle company Recompose would be responsible for the actual composting of human bodies.
In 2017, Pederson introduced a similar bill but says it failed due to opposition from religious groups, according to NBC.
Neither Sen. Pedersen or Recompose, the company that would be responsible for the actual composting of human bodies, responded to a request for comment.
“The transformation of human to soil happens inside our reusable, hexagonal recomposition vessels,” the Recompose website says. “When the process has finished, families will be able to take home some of the soil created, while gardens on-site will remind us that all of life is interconnected.”
During the recomposting process, bodies are screened for non-organic materials like metal teeth fillings, pacemakers and artificial limbs, which are recycled whenever possible.
The entire process takes a month, and can produce a cubic yard of soil per person, according to Recompose.
While this may sound ideal to people wanting an environmental-friendly option to burial, not everyone can go through the recomposting process. Some pathogens (like the bacteria that causes anthrax) may be resistant to the composting process, so people with certain health conditions may be ineligible.
While recomposting has yet to be made legal in the US, “green burials” (bury human bodies without chemicals) are legal in all 50 states. Currently, recomposting a human body is legal in Sweden.
Death is our universal condition, and every culture has ways to deal with bereavement and loved ones’ remains. While these rites vary greatly, it is becoming apparent that many of the world’s traditional burial practices are unsustainable in the face of overpopulation and climate change. All the funerals I have attended have their roots in Christianity, and require that the deceased either be cremated, or buried in a coffin and vault. In America alone, it is estimated that every year traditional burials result in the deposit of: “20 million feet of wood, 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluids, 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete, 17,000 tons of copper and bronze, and 64,500 tons of steel being.” (The New York Times)
It naturally follows that the toxins and heavy-duty materials used to embalm, preserve and contain bodies has a detrimental effect on the environment. While cremation was thought to be an ecologically sound alternative, the procedure actually causes high levels of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere. In light of the somber findings of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report on climate change, it is clear that drastic steps are needed to prevent the environmental collapse. It is not only what we do during our lifetime that can affect change: innovative eco-burials are proving that we can reduce our carbon footprint even in death.
Funeral rituals vary greatly across the globe, from the New Orleans’ Jazz Funeral, which blends West African, French, and African-American traditions, to the Turning of the Bones in Madagascar, where relatives commemorate the diseased by dancing with their bodies. My personal favorite is the sky burial, a tradition that is prevalent in Tibet, amongst other cultures, and which involves depositing bodies at high elevations so that they may be consumed by vultures. Having attended only a handful of funerals in my lifetime—all of which were in Western cultures and did not include an open casket—the notion of seeing a dead body is completely foreign to me, not to mention the inevitable scavenging that follows a sky burial.
However gruesome the ritual may appear to the outsider, it stems from real environmental and spiritual practicalities. Indeed, in many parts of Tibet and Qinghai, a lack of timber and fuel made cremation impossible, just as the sturdy and rocky grounds prevented earth burials. Furthermore, the ritual is considered to be an act of charity on the part of the deceased, who makes a final offering to other sentient beings.
The notions of compassion and impermanence are essential to Vajrayana Buddhism, and sky burials are a reflection of these virtues. In fact, charnel grounds are also cited in the Early Buddhist canon; in the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha encourages his followers to reflect on impermanence by observing dead bodies undergo various stages of decomposition. Unfortunately, with the number of vultures diminishing every year, sky burials are becoming somewhat of a rarity.
With overpopulation rising, funeral practices around the world are facing similar difficulties. In Korea, for example, the lack of burial space has forced many families to dig up the remains of their ancestors and have them cremated. Add to this the imminent threat of climate change, and it is no wonder that funeral practices around the world have to adapt.
Vulture on the Tibetan plateau.
Fortunately, a number of people and organizations are coming up with innovative solutions to this problem. There are now several companies in Korea who specialize in transforming people’s cremated remains into colorful beads (this provides an alternative to the urn, which can appear eerie to some). Others have opted to have their remains turned into reef balls that are then placed in the ocean, creating a natural habitat for marine life.
For those who want to bypass cremation because of its negative effects on the atmosphere, there are now a number of green alternatives that promote the natural decomposition of bodies: allowing remains to seep directly into the earth and provide sustenance for the surrounding flora and fauna.
In order to be environmentally friendly, biodegradable materials are used to make cloths, shrouds and caskets; and artificial markers such as tombstones are replaced by naturally occurring flora, or a GPS system. According to the non-profit organization The Green Burial Council, going green also has its financial benefits, since eco-burials can significantly lower the cost of posthumous arrangements. For example, prices for a complete natural burial at Honey Creek Woodlands (Georgia) start at US$3,400 —approximately half the cost of a typical modern funeral.
For better or for worse, concerns over the future of our planet are forcing us to make changes to age-old traditions. It is perhaps for this reason that the Catholic Church, and many funeral industries, have embraced eco-burials; and in 2015, the Funeral and Memorial Information Council found that 64 percent of adults aged 40 and up would consider having a green burial. Linda Holzbaur, a member of the Greensprings Natural Cemetery board, explains that when she buried her two family members, everyone “chipped in” with digging the grave, making it a very personal experience for all involved. Artist Jae Rhim Lee, who devised a burial suit made of flesh-eating mushrooms, encourages the West to face death head on and address “the actual process and acceptance of decomposition.” (TedBlog)
In this way, natural burials not only help to protect our planet; they also provide us with an opportunity to rethink death and to incorporate lessons of compassion, interconnectedness, and impermanence into our rituals.
The one thing everyone shares in life is that some day it will end. Pāhiki Eco-Caskets wants to shape a final resting place that is environmentally friendly for all.
Like most people, Cortney Gusick never considered the prospect of purchasing a casket until she needed to select one for a family member. Eight years ago, her dad died from pancreatic cancer, and she was thrust into the death-care industry as a consumer. The most difficult part of making the funeral arrangements was finding the right casket. Gusick wanted something that reflected who her father was in his very full life: a Hawai‘i boy who cared about the environment and carried those values with him to Oregon, where he raised his three daughters. Ultimately, Gusick settled on a simple pine box from a small-scale, non-commercial business. “His body was going to biodegrade as it was designed to do, and it would provide some kind of nourishment for the earth,” Gusick says. She reasoned that the receptacle in which he was buried should do the same.
Common caskets are not earth-friendly. Nearly every model found in funeral home catalogs is manufactured with metal, paint, silicone, synthetic polyester fabric, and other non-biodegradable materials. That greener options aren’t readily available in the modern burial industry concerns Gusick, especially in a place like Hawaiʻi, where a reverance for one’s natural surroundings is part of daily life. After her dad’s death, she saw the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel, and she came out the other side a casket builder. “This is what I want to offer for people,” she says. “For someone’s eco-legacy to be, ‘I did right by the earth.’”
Last year, Gusick started Pāhiki Eco-Caskets, a low-impact, environmentally sound casket manufacturer, in the backyard of her Mānoa Valley home. The venture was a 180-degree pivot from her ongoing job at the Silicone Valley-based company UserTesting as a test engineer in the amorphous world of software and mobile applications. “I had zero background,” Gusick admits. But the 37-year-old felt equipped for the intensely tactile field she was about to enter. “My dad taught his girls how to do everything, how to change our own tires, acid-strip a deck, lacquer the house’s wainscotings,” she says. She binged on online tutorials to gain a baseline knowledge of woodworking. “Between Dad and YouTube,” she says, “I felt like, ‘I got this.’”
Three months later, she teamed up with Logan Baggett, a friend she met in Oregon who had previously worked in Hawaiʻi’s solar industry, to help finesse Pāhiki’s offerings of 4- to 6-foot-long, 100 percent biodegradable caskets crafted from untreated, Hawaiʻi-grown wood. Soon after, the company attracted five investors and received a business loan from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which they used to buy hardwoods and build out inventory.
In Hawaiian, the word pāhiki means “to pass quietly, go lightly, touch gently,” a definition the duo strives to embody. Their caskets are made with reclaimed local albizia, monkeypod, mango, avocado, and Norfolk pine provided by Waimānalo Wood, a lumber mill that also houses their workshop. Pāhiki caskets range in price from $1,800 to $2,200 (less than the $2,400 median cost of a standard metal casket). In the circumstance that someone needs a keiki casket, Pāhiki provides it for a dollar.
Gusick considers every dimension of her industry. We’re trapped in a “death-denial culture,” especially in the United States, she says, which is obsessed with indefinitely preserving the deceased in ways that only benefit the living. For Gusick, the more grandiose style of caskets, which can cost upwards of $15,000, are more for the living than the dead. Those caskets “resemble pieces of high-end furniture that belong in this world, that belong in a house, and look like they’re meant to last over time,” she says. But the reality is they go into the ground, never to be seen again.
Pāhiki’s unobtrusive design aesthetic is in direct response to that. The final products—caskets that trade metal, paint, synthetic fabric, and lacquer for wood, non-toxic glue, muslin, and coconut-oil finishes—are crafted to allow the wood grain to shine in its most organic state. The caskets are stripped of sensational flourishes, but not of sentiment. Family members can opt to purchase the “collaborative option,” for which Gusick and Baggett affix biodegradable linen loops around the casket’s perimeter to hold flowers from funeral guests.
Pāhiki also has a keen interest in engaging with communities that have large Native Hawaiian populations on Oʻahu and neighbor islands. During community talk stories, Gusick presents information about Native Hawaiian burial rights and practices—which involve cremating a body in an imu, wrapping the bones in kapa cloth, and burying them in lauhala—and how to perform them legally. As a Native Hawaiian, Gusick feels especially called to apply a Hawaiian understanding of ʻāina to her work. “Hawaiians were the original environmental stewards,” she says. “I can rewind back through so many generations of people where this was always their charge, to take care of the land, and now I can do it in a way that’s modern.”
As long as humans are dying, the death-care industry, which sees profits in the billions of dollars, will remain open for business. Pāhiki’s niche market is a fractional percentage of that, but it is poised to grow as an aging population becomes more informed of greener burial methods. While Pāhiki’s prototypes are evolving, the emotional gravity of the caskets will always be the same. “Isn’t it so crazy that we’re responsible for this thing that is so intimate for a person we’ll never meet?” Gusick often thinks. “We’ll never get to look into their eyes, never get to shake and touch their hand. It’s this very special, unique thing that will only be crafted and given to them once.” It’s a heavy order, but Pāhiki hopes to treat it lightly.
Above Ground
People who work in the death-care industry bring the lessons they learn in the field into their daily lives in quiet but profound ways. Here is what Gusick and Baggett have learned from the dead about how to live better every day.
Be introspective “Most people should contemplate death; it shouldn’t be an afterthought,” Baggett says. “We know it’s coming, we know it’s part of life—it’s just a transition, in my eyes.” Thinking about death and removing its negative connotations can lead to a more present and purposeful approach to life.
Be clear about your wishes “Documentation is an act of love,” Gusick says. “Put it in writing and in thoughtful detail.” The way you live isn’t always enough to let loved ones know how you want to be buried.
Be nice “There are 20 million things I don’t know about a stranger, but there is one thing I can guarantee I know about them and that they know about me,” Gusick says. That is the inevitability of death. “In society, you can quickly and easily dehumanize another person in the way you talk about them off-handedly or the way you treat them, not thinking back to that completely timeless experience you know you share with that person. If you reverse-engineer that awareness when you interact with people, you can use it to make a kinder, more insightful connection with someone. Or, you know, just try to not be a jerk.”
When somebody dies in the Catholic tradition, people generally know what to do. There’s the saying of the Last Rites at a dying person’s bedside, the vigil for the deceased — also known as a wake — and, often, a formal Mass of Christian Burial.
In the Jewish tradition, there’s the practice of sitting shiva: the week-long mourning process during which the family of the deceased remains at home, and friends and relatives call on them to pay their respects.
In the Islamic tradition, the deceased’s body is ritually bathed and shrouded in white cloth before Muslims of the community gather to perform the Salat al-Janazah, the customary prayer for the dead.
But what happens when you die and you don’t follow any faith tradition?
When Iris Explosion — an entertainer and social worker who prefers to go by her stage name — was widowed unexpectedly at age 28, she and her friends had to create the memorial service for her husband, Jon, from scratch.
Explosion and her husband were not conventionally religious — she describes herself as a “lax Jew,” while her husband, a queer man interested in alchemy and other occult practices, often felt alienated from the born-again Christianity of his parents. The memorial service her friends created a few days after his death, she says, contained a blend of traditions and practices individual to Jon.
A Jewish friend recited the Mourners’ Kaddish. The group told stories — some reverential, some “bawdy” — that reflected all aspects of Jon’s personality. They played an orchestral rendition of the theme song to Legend of Zelda, Jon’s favorite video game. Friends from out of town dialed in on Skype to share their stores. Numerous friends gave Explosion rose quartz, a stone associated in some New Age and occult traditions with heart healing, as a gift.
The memorial service — as well as a second funeral service, which took place a few months later, and was similarly eclectic in style — focused on Jon’s personality and interests rather than being constrained by a specific set of traditions.
Explosion is just one person among the 24 percent of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated. For the religious “nones,” the issue of what happens when you die is an open question in more ways than one. According to a 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, the most recent year for which data is available, 29 percent of Americans do not anticipate having a religious funeral, for whatever reason, and given the steady increase in religious “nones” over the past decade, that number will likely only rise.
But what do secular funerals — or death rituals more broadly — look like? What can they provide that religious death rituals can’t? What are the challenges involved in putting them together?
And as secular funerals become increasingly individualistic, tailored to the preferences and needs of the deceased, rather than a given religious or spiritual tradition, what does that mean for the sense of community engendered by ritual?
Secular funerals are part of a wider “unbundling” of religion
It started with weddings.
Scholar and psychologist Philip Zuckerman, author of Living the Secular Life, suggested in a telephone interview that secular funerals are just the latest iteration of the secularization of major life stages overall.
Its genesis, he said, lies in the proliferation of secular weddings in America. In 2017, just 22 percent of American weddings took place in houses of worship, a nearly 20-point drop from 2009, according to data from the wedding website the Knot.
“The first thing we saw was zillions of people going online and registering with the Universal Life Church,” said Zuckerman, referring to an organization that virtually automatically ordains people over the Internet, “so they can perform their own weddings for friends and family, so they can still make it sacred but not under the auspices of religion.”
Different states have different laws about the extent to which Universal Life ordinations are legally valid for performing weddings. Funerals, however, have no such restrictions.
Zuckerman posits that among the people he’s interviewed for his book research, the desire to have a secular funeral isn’t just about not wanting to affirm the existence of a God or an afterlife that the deceased may or may not believe in. Rather, he says, it’s also about wanting to preserve a sense of the deceased’s individuality.
“They just don’t want fairy tales. They don’t want to be told, ‘So-and-so’s in a better place now,’ or, ‘So-and-so is now suckling the bosom of Jesus’ — they can find that talk annoying,” Zuckerman said. “We want to curate our own Facebook page. Why wouldn’t we want to curate our own funeral?”
More and more, Zuckerman said, he sees people choosing their own music and their own speeches that they want to be read after they die. “I think that is part of our growing individual and less of this care of tradition … more and more people want to feel the idiosyncrasies of the dead person and the specialness of the dead person.”
This attitude, he said, is particularly prevalent in the United States. “We all like to think in the United States that we’re special. Why wouldn’t we want our funerals to be special too?”
Certainly, for Iris Explosion, commemorating Jon’s life in a way that felt true to his personality and character was a priority. From sharing Jon’s favorite Spotify playlists with his friends to curate the music selection for the services to working in references to My Little Pony — a show Jon loved — Explosion and the couple’s friends created a memorial for Jon that fit his character.
By contrast, Explosion said, she declined to attend other memorial services, like one hosted by Jon’s family in his home state, that had a more Christian focus, instead circulating an email to attendees of that service asking them to donate to Planned Parenthood, which she felt better reflected her husband’s values.
Explosion’s experience dovetails with a phenomenon called religious “unbundling.” A term coined by Harvard Divinity School researchers Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thomas, who have covered how phenomena like CrossFit and Soulcycle function similarly to religions for their participants, “unbundling” refers to the way both the religiously unaffiliated and the religious alike are increasingly willing to pick and choose elements of spiritual traditions.
Someone might, for example, be a committed Christian but also practice Buddhist meditation or yoga, or be an atheist but attend Jewish family holidays and read tarot cards. In a pluralist landscape, in which people are used to gathering information and ideas from multiple sources (not least through the internet), a more individualized approach to religion and life rituals is all but inevitable.
As a culture, we still haven’t figured out what secular death rituals should look like
Even for those of traditional faiths, death is a phenomenon that defies easy answers. But for the religiously unaffiliated, processing and dealing with death and its aftermath can be an especially loaded task.
Brad Wolfe is trying to help them do that.
Wolfe is the founder of the week-long Reimagine End of Life festival. The singer-songwriter and author was inspired to work in the end-of-life space after watching a close college friend’s struggle with terminal cancer. The festival, which takes place in New York and San Francisco, partners with community centers and artists to curate a 300-strong series of events — from talks to workshops to performances to museum displays — dealing with the subject of death.
“Death is often the central coalescing element around which many religions are formed,” Wolfe told me in a phone interview. “As we’ve become more secular in some communities … there’s an increasing hunger for that space … to come together and explore this topic.”
The New York festival, which took place around Halloween, featured a range of explorations: a class on how to write your own obituary, doctors talking about dealing with their patients’ deaths, live musical performances exploring themes of loss and bereavement.
Participants speak at the the Nocturnists storytelling event where doctors from Mount Sinai, New York University, Columbia, and other local hospitals share their personal experiences with death.
What connects each event is a sense of intentionally: that people are actively setting aside time and space to deal with a weighty topic.
Both Wolfe and Zuckerman identify similar elements of what that “coming together” looks like. Ideally, both say, it involves elements of ritual, community gathering, and a sense of meaning: How do we conceptualize a person’s death as part of a bigger picture?
Wolfe suggested that we might be better off looking at this “coming together” not as a nonreligious event but as an expansion of the definition of what religion means. At least two Reimagine events are, fundamentally, immersive theater performances. In one, participants are invited into a phone booth to have conversations they wish they’d had with somebody who has died.
In another, participants role-play members of a fictional bereavement support group. Speaking about these events, Wolfe argued that the lines between art, ritual, religion, and performance are deeply blurred.
“The boundaries between art and religion are more porous when it becomes a practice explored with intention,” he said. What matters is the sense of significance shared by participants: “Having a practice, a shared system, allows us to connect in ways that give us a sense of comfort and something we know we can turn to.”
The idea or combining artistic creation and end-of-life ritual is far from new to Janie Rakow, president of the International End of Life Doula Association. As a “death doula,” Rakow works in hospices, helping those facing the end of their lives develop rituals and practices around their death. While she works with patients from a wide variety of religious backgrounds through the hospice, she tailors her work and approach to the individual in question.
One of the most important parts of the end-of-life process, she says, is the act of creation. She helps her patients develop what she calls “legacy projects”: individual artistic works, from a memory box to audio letters.
“Everyone has a legacy,” Rakow says. “So [I ask myself] what kind of legacy project could we possibly create with this person to really leave behind a sense of who they are or were?”
Next, she asks patients to help plan their own death — where they would like to be? What music they would like to be listening to?
“There may be some ritual work done around that,” she says, even if it’s “as simple as surrounding their bed, holding hands, saying a prayer or saying poetry, reading something to them, [or] lighting a candle.”
The point is to help dying people take an active, creative role in the story they leave behind.
Doula Craig Phillips pauses before entering the room of a person who is near death at the Gilchrist Hospice in Baltimore on June 6, 2016.
Often, Rakow says, these rituals are tailored to individual passions. She gives the example of one man she worked with, who was dying from ALS, a degenerative neurological condition that prevented him from being able to move. With his wife, Rakow created a series of guided visualizations for the man, who loved hiking, “so we would bring him with his eyes closed on the most detailed and specific hike that we could from the very beginning to hiking all the way through.”
She’d walk him through ”smelling the forest and feeling himself walking up the hills and hearing the birds chirping and looking over at the crystal clear lake. And the more descriptive we could get, we were able to bring him back into his body that he wasn’t able to use through his mind.”
Secular rituals present their own set of challenges
One of the most difficult parts of creating secular death rituals is compensating for the lack of built-in community, or built-in structure, that often accompanies more established religious traditions.
Zuckerman pointed out that the secular bereaved don’t necessarily have a clear road map, or community support, to help them deal with the pragmatic aftermath of a death.
“One of the biggest problems for secular culture [is that] you have to cobble together and make it yourself. If you want your kid to have a bar mitzvah, it’s all taken care of. You want your kid to go through confirmation class in the Episcopal Church? Boom, they’re enrolled. If you want to do a secular version of that? Good luck. You’re on your own. You have to figure it out, explain it to people, rent the space, find people, figure out how to write up your own program. … It’s a lot of effort.”
The lack of intentional secular communities, Zuckerman said, only intensifies this problem. “With religious communities,” he said, “not only is the structure of the funeral in place, but there are going to be people who are going to immediately sign up to cook dinner for your family for a month and they’re going to deliver food to your doorstep and they’re going to help you get your kids to school and they’re going to do a lot for you. And when you’re secular, you don’t have those kinds of resources.”
Pallbearers escort the casket to the altar during the funeral for Watertown firefighter Joseph Toscano at St. Patricks Catholic Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, on March 22, 2017.
For some secular Americans, the idea of having a “chosen family” — a close-knit network of friends — helps fill in the gap. Just as Friendsgiving has become a phenomenon among urban millennials, friendship networks more broadly have become an increasingly vital part of social cohesion, replacing both extended family structures and traditional organized religious communities.
That was certainly the case for Explosion. She cites her friends’ involvement in making the service possible at a time when she didn’t feel capable of planning herself. “I needed camaraderie and community,” she said, and I feel like I had it.”
At the same time, she says, she had less of a blueprint for how to cope with the next stages of grief after about six months.
“People go back to their own lives,” she said. “And it was hard to feel that sense of community. Without a church or synagogue to bind us together, it maybe felt like it dissipated. People missed their friend and their co-worker. But for me, it’s like, I miss my husband who lived with me, and it was hard to feel that sense of community after time had passed.”
The next step forward might be intentional secular communities
Explosion’s story points to a wider tension in the world of secular funerals and the creation of secular culture more broadly. On the one hand, the benefits of the “unbundled” religious landscape, for many secular Americans, lie in the opportunity to create truly new, individualistic rituals and experiences. We have the opportunity to curate our identities and public personae event after death, creating experiences that feel unique to us.
On the other hand, what risks getting lost in the process is precisely that feeling of collective identity that demands subsuming our individuality in a wider whole. Religious rituals and language, from Catholic ceremonial liturgy to the Salat al-Janazah, may not feel fully and uniquely “us,” but they nevertheless define and orient a wider community and give us a sense of shared values.
The 19th-century sociologist Émile Durkheim saw religion primarily as a shared construction of identity; in his seminal 1912 work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he wrote, “The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social.”
As more and more Americans leave organized religion, the next question is whether, and how, many of them will gather together, and how an increasingly individualistic conception of identity can be reconciled with the real, human need for group belonging. As secular funerals and death rituals become the new standard, we may see some of these rituals become more group-centric.
For Explosion, for example, the process of grieving led her to an unexpected new ritual. During her husband’s life, she said, she often played a video game called Destiny with him, looking up the location of objects hidden in-game and giving him hints to find them. While she never particularly got into the game, she said, she enjoyed playing it with him. After his death, she started watching YouTube videos of people playing the game, or its sequel, to remember the time they’d shared. Then she decided to buy the game’s sequel to play it herself.
“I’ve been playing this game I wouldn’t have played if he hadn’t died. And it’s been meditative for me. Finding the little things, like doing these things we used to do, felt like a pilgrimage in a way,” she said.
Sometimes, Explosion communicates with other players in the game online. While she’s only told a few of them about her personal history with the game, she’s nevertheless found a community that can accompany her in a time of grief.
“When we do a big quest or a raid together, there’s always a moment for me of, you know, okay, he would have done this. He did this in the old game. Now it’s me kind of picking up this mantle.”
The secular funeral liturgies we see in the future may transition from being individualistic to being based on other nonreligious elements that bring a community together. They may involve the music of My Little Pony or the playing of video games.
Ultimately, they’ll represent two fundamental human needs. First, to make sense of a beloved’s death. And second — and just as importantly — to not do it alone.
‘They say you’ve got three months to live.” These were the words I spoke to my then-fiancé when I was 23 years old after learning that his cancer – malignant melanoma that spread to his liver, lungs, pancreas and brain – was likely to be fatal.
At the time, my only experience of “the end” was watching my parents disappear into a room where my grandparents were lying, and of seeing an empty rabbit hut at the end of our garden after the loss of a pet.
When I was 17 years old my father was paralysed from Hodgkins Lymphoma but, after a stem cell transplant, he defeated the odds and made a miraculous recovery. So, I had faith in the power of modern medicine over mortality.
However, not this time.
I was practically still a child when a doctor ushered me into a private room, whilst my soon-to-be husband, Eoghan, was in a chemotherapy session, and revealed his prognosis. I asked if I could be the one to tell him, and they readily agreed.
Perhaps, even doctors will do anything to avoid saying the T-word. Terminal.
In the next three months, I had a crash course in end-of-life conversation: the jargon, the euphemisms and the social awkwardness.
I froze with fear when I walked into the chemo ward and heard another patient ask my partner, “Have you ever thought about euthanasia?” But, in a way, that was better than the wall of silence.
After my husband died three weeks after our wedding day, even my closest friends evaporated or became stiff in my company. In the next few months, as I rebelled against my grief – drinking too much and becoming promiscuous – nobody dared challenge me or raise the topics I ached to discuss.
What on earth are you doing?
Do you really think this is helping you?
How does it feel to marry a man who is dying?
…Do you want to die too?
Do you know what to say when a friend’s loved one dies? Have you thought about the day your own parent, partner or best friend may no longer be visible? How would you discuss it, in a way that would be supportive, constructive, and even light-hearted?
If you don’t know the answer, you’re not alone.
A new study from the Royal College of Physicians in the UK has urged medical professionals to improve their bedside manner when it comes to discussing death, after identifying that “timely, honest conversations” about patients’ futures are not happening. However it’s not only doctors who need to become more comfortable with these conversations.
It’s been suggested that millennials are the generation most fearful of death, unlike our grandparents, raised through world wars, who learnt that life can be short. As medicine advances and life expectancy increases, we prefer to think of death as our “future self’s problem”.
But is postponing the inevitable increasing our terror of it?
As psychologists report a rise in young people presenting with anxiety linked to death, it’s time for honest, open, educational conversations about loss of life, and how it can look. Its not enough to be aware of Facebook’s ‘death policy’, warn experts.
“Death is still a certainty even if people are living longer,” says clinical psychologist Renee Mill from Sydney’s Anxiety Solutions CBT.
“When treating anxiety, exposure is what works and avoidance increases the problem. Talking about death or visiting a dying person will decrease your fear of death and make it easier to accept that it is a part of life. Every funeral we attend, no matter how hard, actually helps to reduce anxiety in this way too.”
And, it’s never too early to think about the end. “Planning in life is important,” says Mill. “We plan our careers, we save, we want to buy property – end-of-life is another part we need to plan. It means we get our wishes fulfilled and gives guidance to our loved ones who otherwise have to pick up the pieces.”
In a good way, change is happening. Since 2017, the multimedia project We’re All Going to Die has encouraged people to embrace their immortality and use it to empower their lives, through educational films and festivals.
The award-winning podcast, GriefCast, hosted by comedian Cariad Lloyd whose father died when she was a teenager, sees entertainers speak with startling honesty – and surprising humour – about death, from the logistics of palliative care and funeral plans to the long-term effects of bereavement.
When we can talk openly about death, we may also increase our chances of reducing suicides. To help people to help each other, Lifeline offer an online course in QPR – the equivalent of CPR for people experiencing a suicidal crisis.
As part of the training – which only takes an hour and costs $10 – people are urged not to tiptoe around the conversations. Instead, be direct: “Do you feel like you want to die?”
In our social circles, we need to discuss worst-case-scenarios. Do you have a will? Do you have death insurance? Are you an organ donor? As an Australian immigrant living 16,000 kilometres from my parents, I always have enough money in my bank account for an emergency flight home. Because, nobody lives forever.
It’s confronting but it’s necessary
During my book tour, I cried on stage for the first time whilst discussing my journey from a 23-year-old widow to a 34-year-old wife and mother of two. Because, for the first time in a decade, I have reached a place where I can talk about my experience of death – and really be heard.
I shared the reason I light a candle in my bedroom every evening and say a prayer: help me to act from a place of love, not fear.
“If my dad’s cancer comes back, on that day I will light that candle,” I said, “If my husband, who is here with my newborn, dies and I am widowed again then I will light that candle to remind myself to act from a place of love.”
We need to talk about death to be active participants in the full spectrum of life: so we can decide who to be when a doctor pulls us into a private room, when we answer the phone to bad news, when we say goodbye for the last time.
We are so scared of death, we don’t discuss what an honour it is to watch someone die; to be present – really present – when someone takes their last breath, to lean in and breathe them in, to put your head on their chest as their heart stops beating and kiss their skin as it transforms.
For more than a century, every deceased resident of Long Son Island has been buried in the same coffin.
The residents of Long Son Commune near the Vung Tau port city in southern Vietnam follow the Tran religious teachings set out by the island’s founder, Le Van Muu, early in the 20th century.
Muu was a resistance fighter against French colonialists in the 1800s, but the war forced him to flee his hometown in the Mekong Delta.
He and a small group of people migrated to an unpopulated Ba Trao Hamlet (now Long Son Commune). Muu settled there, built permanent homes, and formed a religious practice on the basis of maintaining human virtues.
His teachings focus on living harmoniously with nature and loving people. Besides that, there are not any rules and books that adherents have to strictly follow. They can get married and have children, but maintain a simple life close to nature.
Adherents wear the ao ba ba, a baggy shirt that is popular among peasants in southern Vietnam, tie their hair in buns, walk bare feet, and keep their head bare, too.
Muu’s followers inside the “Big House.”
Togetherness is a cornerstone of Muu’s philosophy. People in the community work and eat together. There is a lot of bonding, and in an unusual departure from mainstream traditions, this is carried on at death as well.
Muu believed that everyone was the same when they died, so he introduced the practice of sharing the same “Ba Quan” coffin when a person dies.
“Ba Quan” is a standard coffin that is placed in the Nha Lon (Big House) on the island.
Thanh Thi Thanh, a 75-year-old local resident, said that when a family member dies, relatives go to the Big House to ask to use the Ba Quan coffin.
The deceased’s body is washed clean, dressed in new clothes, shrouded in cloth and mats, and placed in the coffin.
At the cemetery, the body is taken out of the coffin and buried directly in the ground. “Ba Quan” is taken back to the Big House to be used by relatives of the next person to depart the world.
“The burial practice does not include the coffin so the corpse can quickly decay and attain liberation,” Thanh said. “This practice also helps family members save costs.”
She added that only those who are 12 years or older will be placed in the Ba Quan coffin when they die.
The dead are buried within 24 hours, instead of waiting for a set day or time. Family members will complete the mourning ceremony at the graveyard and do not invite guests over or perform any other ritual.
Those who visit the deceased will burn incense for the soul of the dead, and relatives will not receive any condolence money.
This tradition has been kept alive by locals for long.
Tran Ba Viet, head of the Culture and Information Department of Vung Tau City, said that the ceremony that Long Son residents have maintained for decades has many advantages since it is very short and expenses are minimized.
But since the coffin is not sealed for reuse, if the deceased had any serious, contagious illness, it could be contagious and affect the environment, Viet said.
He added that he will work with locals and authorities in the health sector to identify better funeral practices to protect the environment while respecting long-standing customs.
Any parent must agree that one of the greatest hardships experienced around the death of a family member is having to explain to children what happened and what happens next? Should you tell them the stark truth; that the fun and games don’t last forever? What sort of words will you use; dead, died, passed away, lost, crossed over, or went to sleep? This is a problem with very, very ancient origins. Ancient death rituals offer up evidence for this.
Since the beginnings of civilization, whenever and wherever, parents have had to teach their children how to grieve, commemorate, and dispose of deceased loved ones. And in the ancient world death was an infinitely more complicated affair, evident in the bizarre death rites practiced from culture to culture around the world. Here are some of the oldest funeral rituals in history, ones that take death to a whole new level of macabre.
Zoroastrian Sky Burials
Zoroastrianism; the ancient pre-Islamic religion of modern-day Iran, was founded about 3500 years ago and still survives today in India, where the descendants of Iranian (Persian) immigrants are known as Parsees. A 2017 article by scholar Catherine Beyer, Zoroastrian Funerals, Zoroastrian Views of Death, describes the first step in Zoroastrian funeral rites, where a specially trained member of the community cleansed the deceased “in unconsecrated bull’s urine.” The corpse was then wrapped in linen and visited twice by ‘Sagdid’ – a spiritually charged dog believed to banish evil spirits – before it was placed on top of the ‘Dhakma’ (Tower of Silence) to be torn apart and finally devoured by vultures.
A 1938 photograph showing the aftermath of a ‘Sky burial’ from the Bundesarchiv.
Tibetan Buddhist Celestial Burials
Similarly to ancient Zoroastrians, today, about 80% of Tibetan Buddhists still choose traditional “sky burials.” This Buddhist ritual has been observed for thousands of years and it differs from the Iranian/Indian rituals because the deceased were/are chopped up into small pieces and fed to birds, rather than being ‘left’ for the birds.
While at first this might seem nothing short of brutal, verging on undignified, a research article published on Buddhist Channel explains that Buddhists have no desire to commemorate dead bodies through preservation, as they are thought of as shells – empty vessels without a soul. What is more, in their doctrines, which promote ‘respect for all life forms’, if one’s final act is to sustain the life of another living creature the ritual is actually a final act of selfless compassion and charity, which are primary concepts in Buddhism.
Drigung Monastery in Maizhokunggar County, Lhasa, Tibet was founded in 1179 AD. Traditionally it has been the chief seat of the Drikung Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and it is famous for its performance of ‘sky burials’.
Native North American Totem Poles
Native cultures in the American Northwest carved wooden Totem poles to symbolize the characters and events in myths and to convey the experiences of living people and recently deceased ancestors. The Haida people from the Southeast Alaskan territories tossed their dead into a mass grave pit to be scavenged by wild animals.
However, Marianne Boelscher tells us in her 1988 book The Curtain Within: Haida Social and Mythical Discourse that the death of a chief, shaman, or warrior, brought with it a complex and bloodthirsty series of rituals. Dead shamans, who were thought to have cured the sick, ensured supplies of fish and game, and influenced the weather, trading expeditions, and warfare, were chopped up and pulped with clubs so that they could be stuffed into suitcase-sized wooden boxes. Once pressed inside, the boxes were set atop mortuary totem poles outside the deceased shamans’ homes to assist their spirits’ journey to the afterlife.
Wooden totem poles at the Skidegate Indian Village of the Haida tribe. Skidegate Inlet, British Columbia, Canada, 1878.
Endocannibalism
Known to anthropologists as “endocannibalism” many ancient cultures disposed of their dead by eating them . Herodotus (3.38) first mentioned ‘funerary cannibalism’ as being practiced among the Indian Callatiae people. Furthermore, the Aghoris of northern India were said to “consume the flesh of the dead floating in the Ganges in pursuit of immortality and supernatural power,” according to an article published on Today.
The ancient Melanesians of Papua New Guinea and the Wari people of Brazil both held “feasts of the dead,” where they attempted to “bond the living with the dead” and to express community fears associated with death. Some specialists believe that endocannibalism is something the dead might have expected as a final gesture of goodwill to the tribe and their direct family.
Painted by Charles E. Gordon Frazer (1863-1899), ‘A cannibal feast on Tanna, Vanuatu, New Hebrides’, c. 1885–1889.
Sati – Burning The Widow
Sati (suttee) is an ancient funeral custom practiced by the Egyptians, Vedic Indians, Goths, Greeks, and Scythians. Banned mostly everywhere today, Sati required widows to be burnt to ashes on their dead husband’s pyres; sometimes voluntary ending their lives, but there are many recorded incidences of women being forced to commit Sati, which is murderous, inconceivable, and beyond any reason.
Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. is Temple Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Government and Asian Studies, The University of Texas at Austin. In his informative book The Representation of Sati: Four Eighteenth Century, the Sati ritual is considered as having maybe originated to “dissuade wives from killing their wealthy husbands” and it was sold to the public as a way for husband and wife to venture to the afterlife together.
A Hindu widow burning herself with the corpse of her husband, 1820s, by English illustrator Frederic Shoberl.
Sacrificial Viking Slaves
While the threat of a Sati ritual must have utterly terrified Hindi women of all ages and creeds, the death of an ancient Scandinavian nobleman, according to Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a 10th century Arab Muslim writer, brought funerary events of an “exceptionally barbaric nature.” After the death of a chieftain, his body was placed in a temporary grave for ten days while a slave girl was ‘selected to volunteer’ to join him on his passage to the afterlife. The sacrificial maiden was forced to drink highly intoxicating, psychedelic mushroom enhanced drinks, and as a way “to transform the chieftain’s life force” she was forced to have sex with every man in the village who would all say to her, “Tell your master that I did this because of my love for him.”
A 2015 Ancient Origins article written by contributor Mark Miller titled The 10th century chronicle of the violent, orgiastic funeral of a Viking chieftain explored these rites in detail and explained that after what amounts to constitutionalized ‘rape’, the girl was taken to another tent where she had sex with six Viking men. The last man strangled the girl with a rope while the settlement’s matriarch ritually stabbed her to death. The chieftain and his slave girl were finally placed on a wooden ship to take them to the afterlife.
The deceased chieftain and slave girl were sometimes incinerated within a symbolic stone built ship. This example is situated at Badelunda, near Västerås, Sweden.
Somewhere Between The Above And The Below
In 1573 AD, the Bo people of southern China’s Gongxian County were massacred by the Ming Dynasty and are today all but completely forgotten, if not for their mysterious 160 hanging coffin baskets located almost 300 feet (91 meters) high on cliffs and in natural caves above the Crab Stream. A China.org article informs that locals refer to the ancient Bo people as the “Sons of the Cliffs” and “Subjugators of the Sky”, and murals surround the coffins that were executed with bright cinnabar red colors illustrating the lifestyles of the ancient slaughtered people.
One of the hanging tombs of the Ku People at Bainitang ( 白泥塘), Qiubei county, Wenshan prefecture, Yunnan province, China.
What Can We Learn from Ancient Death Rituals?
Having skirted over some of the ancient world’s death rituals, we are now hopefully better equipped to answer those questions that our children will inevitably ask us. You might be well served to offer your child the words of author Robert Fulghum: “I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”
Pāhiki’s unobtrusive design aesthetic is in direct response to that. The final products—caskets that trade metal, paint, synthetic fabric, and lacquer for wood, non-toxic glue, muslin, and coconut-oil finishes—are crafted to allow the wood grain to shine in its most organic state. The caskets are stripped of sensational flourishes, but not of sentiment. Family members can opt to purchase the “collaborative option,” for which Gusick and Baggett affix biodegradable linen loops around the casket’s perimeter to hold flowers from funeral guests.
