Large Fierce Mammal

Annapolis Valley Burial Ground (Mrs. LFM photo – click to enbiggen)

I once convinced a small group of idiots that my birth certificate had an expiry date stamped on it. Don’t try this yourselves though, because my powers of persuasion exceed that of mere mortals, and I’d hate to be responsible for any of you hurting yourselves; at least if I’m not there to watch.

Good news for everyone reading this – if you’re alive you’re going to get dead. Every life comes with a death, no assembly required. ~ Dark Sentiments 2013 – Day 13: Whither Thou Goest?

With those words, I first introduced my loyal and noble Readers to the lovely and talented Caitlin Doughty, and her wondrous creation, The Order of the Good Death. Its mission, as stated on the organization’s website:

The Order is about making death a part of your life. That means committing to staring down your death fears – whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above.  Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety and terror of modern culture are not.

The members of the Order believe there is a revolution afoot in the way our society handles death. Throughout human history there have always been specific religious, cultural, and regional rules for what has to be done to our dead and for our dead: the ancient Egyptians embalmed and mummified, the Romans cremated, the Wari’ of Brazil consumed.

The Order of the Good Death web page contains a compelling plea to reason titled Natural Burial & Embracing Decay. It begins –

Matter cannot be created.

Matter cannot be destroyed.

So physics tells us.

There is only a finite amount of matter to go around.  At this very moment, dear living person, some of it belongs to you.  The atoms that make up your body— your liver, your hair, your brain, your fingernails— are all on loan from the universe.  While you are alive, the atoms have come together to make you.  As soon as you are dead, they begin their dispersal back into the wide world.

That is what decomposition is.  It is the science of sending back everything the universe loaned you.  The universe will reuse it as it sees fit.  Perhaps to help make an eggplant or an aardvark or perhaps even to make other, new humans.

And concludes –

Natural burial is horribly out of place in our modern death system, where we are sold $10,000 caskets with titanium plating and a vacuum seal, sold the idea that they will preserve us— protect us from the vile, natural elements.  Then we take those expensive caskets and bury them with a concrete or metal burial vault surrounding them, another layer of protection.  Then it’s only a matter of a gravestone, like a cherry atop the death denial sundae.  It is a false promise of everlasting preservation that we’ve been terrified into embracing.

When making choices about what to do with your body, be creative.  Spend your life dreaming big dreams of being set alight on a Viking ship, having your ashes scattered in the Alps, or being suspended from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel— you yourself can be the art of mortality.  If you can make it happen, live that death dream and be a hero to us all.  But if those dreams do not come true, please consider choosing to decompose.  It’s what your dead body so clearly wants to do.  Give it what it wants, won’t you?

This stepping outside of societal comfort zones is catching on, and in some circles is assuming a form that is less emotional and spiritual than it is pragmatic. On 4 May 2015, the CBC Radio show The Current aired a segment titled Corpse to compost, Urban Death Project redefines death. Its introduction –

Today our project By Design looks at  death, and the way we as a society, handle our dead. And if the thought of departing from a traditional burial or cremation strikes you as sacrilege, then you may not be alone.

Our guest Katrina Spade would like to challenge those attitudes. She says those options don’t only have a heavy financial cost to families, but impose a heavy cost on the environment as well.

Which is why Katrina Spade, an architect-turned-urban designer, is proposing that we consider placing our dead in a compost facility. There would be no casket, no embalming fluid, no cemetery plot and no greenhouse gas emissions from a crematorium.

• Katrina Spade is the Founder and Executive Director of what she calls the Urban Death Project. She joined us from Seattle.
• Grace Seidel is a supporter of the project and has paid for her body to be composted when she dies.

But this isn’t at all new. Returning the body respectfully to the Universe is a recurring theme throughout human history. To provide a very recent example by which the concept was rebooted in the public consciousness, in the first part of his book, Journey to Ixtlan, published in 1972, Carlos Cataneda wrote –

Self-importance is another thing that must be dropped, just like personal history. The world around us is very mysterious. It doesn’t yield its secrets easily. Now we are concerned with losing self-importance. As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world you cannot really appreciate the world around you. You are like a horse with blinders, all you see is yourself apart from everything else.

To help you lose self-importance talk to little plants. It doesn’t matter what you say to a plant, what’s important is the feeling of liking it, and treating it as an equal.

A man who gathers plants must apologize every time for taking them and must assure them that someday his own body will serve as food for them. So, all in all, the plants and ourselves are even. Neither we nor they are more or less important. From now on talk to the little plants, talk until you lose all sense of importance. Talk to them until you can do it in front of others. You must talk to them in a loud and clear voice if you want them to answer you.

So now, with all this in mind, sit back, relax, and conclude your evening by clicking here to listen to that interview.