Goodness me, has it really been five and a half years? In
November, 2009, I devoted a column to new ways of dealing with the fact that when our loved ones go away forever,
they leave one last mess to clean up – their corporeal remains.
In a follow-up post to my Second Thoughts blog, I noted that some funeral homes are offering to
convert crematory ashes into artificial gemstones.
Apparently the early Cro-Magnon of Europe simply ate their dead, which explains why so few graves have been found from the period and why their waste dumps contain so many gnawed human bones. That would never work today; nobody knows how to cook anymore.
Organ donation is only a crude recycling scheme; what do you do with the leftovers? Among the more promising methods is “natural burial” which
dispenses with embalming and caskets and lets nature take its course. That makes the soil in the cemetery richer in time, but unless you have enough space — and a tolerant town government — Grandma can’t
An architect in Seattle, is setting up a human
composting site by means of which, as she put it to a reporter, “we could
grow new life after we’ve died.” Bodies are buried in wood chips to
facilitate their eventual transformation into compost, which the happy family
will be able to take back home and use in their garden.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2015.
