Imagine a gently sloping hill covered with fallen leaves, green ferns and bright wildflowers, the branches of sturdy oaks and maples arching overhead. Birds chirp in the trees. Squirrels and chipmunks scamper on the ground.
Now imagine yourself buried underneath.
No proud shiny headstone engraved "Beloved." No manicured, fertilized grass. Just your body decomposing inside your biodegradable shroud, your tissues feeding the tree roots and who knows what else.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You can now be politically correct when you're six feet under.
It's known as a green or natural burial, a way of combining an eco-friendly interment with land conservation. Make your burial a statement of values by helping create a forest, says Mike Salisbury, one of the founders of the Natural Burial Coop, a group in southern Ontario. "If you're buried where roots grow through your bones, you're doing what you're supposed to do –– give back in the end."...
"What could be more beautiful than to become a part of nature, that a molecule from your body ends up in a berry that a bird eats," says Woodsen. "It's completing the circle of life."
Circle of life? It sounds to us more like reincarnation for the downwardly mobile. Granted this is a sensitive issue and leeway must be made for personal eccentricities, not to mention outright weirdness, but what is simply unbearable is the thought of spending a seniority trapped at dinners with intense Boomers who insist on sharing every detail of their heroic decision to disappear without a trace for the sake of the biosphere, all the while daring you through pointed stares to admit you are selfish enough to be partial to a modest little memorial in hope of a few visits from the family. I imagine there would be about as much profit in arguing with them as there would be in trying to make them see another side of George W. Bush, but it would be fun to just smile back in feigned respect while turning up that special CD you’ve been saving for the occasion:
And if you come, when all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be
You'll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.
And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above me
And all my dreams will warm and sweeter be
If you'll not fail to tell me that you love me
I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.
13 comments:
If you're familiar with the online journal The New Pantagruel, which closed up shop last year, you may remember that one of the contributors wrote under the pseudonym "Fr. Gassalasca Jape" (originally from Ambrose's Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary.) They must have gotten fond of the old boy, as the last edition had an elegy for him which I thought was not too bad:
Elegy for Father Jape, Along Old Route 24
In particular soil, dark Kansas soil,
a man and his wife will husband Jape’s corpse,
layer it low among husks and cobs. Oils
from his reddened face will, in their due course,
become a part of the fall mud. His head
amidst a field of rotted pumpkin shells
will find its home at last. The happy dead
he always preferred to the happy hells
of the living and the glib. “Te Deum
Laudamus” the crows will sing as they pluck
out his hair and leave his eyes. Like Adam,
he gets to see the fall and all its muck.
To save the world, he learns, at last, he must
conserve one fertile place, become its dust.
- David Wright
Outside Knoxville, 'The Farm' has for quite a few years allowed corpses to return naturally. In the name of forensic anthropology, so a prof at the U. of Tennessee can record how bodies decay under differing circumstances.
I understand he always has plenty of material to work with.
Why not do both ?
It won't harm the forest to have memorial plaques every few meters.
In fact, here's a grove that has both trees and memorials, (although no bodies), with no harm to either and to great emotional effect:
Warriors Walk in Ga. running out of room
By RUSS BYNUM, Associated Press
Fri Jan 26, 2007
FORT STEWART, Ga. - The sergeant major calls the name, Staff Sgt. John L. Hartman Jr., as it's unveiled on a granite marker at the root of a new eastern redbud tree on Warriors Walk, where hundreds of these living memorials have been planted to honor the wartime dead.
Oroborous said what I was going to.
Peter:
Very touching poem, and a perfect tag to the post.
I prefer cremation.
I'm with erp. If I'm not using my body, I don't want the bugs using it either. Neither am I thrilled about laying in a tin box in my business suit looking like the crypt-keeper.
Peter, how often are you accosted by exo-zealots at dinner parties? It seems like a regular occurence, judging you your blog.
As the guy who founded conservation burial, it is amazing that you feel comfortable displaying your astoundingly arrogant ignorance. You can have more types of memorials with green/conservation burial than in a contemporary park. We allow markers and have more evangelical christians than atheists at Ramsey Creek. What part of Genesis 3:19 do you feel objectionable and "liberal"?
Now Peter, don't go quoting scripture out of context just to fan the flames of debate.
RE: Jeremiah 16:4, I'd imagine that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like to paint a future for Israel, the USA and all other infidel nations similar to that which the Lord painted for Jeremiah.
Where's the Bible passage that says:
"And ye shall be pumped with noxious fluids,
and encased in iron and stone,
and your sinews shall wither,
and your skin shall harden,
under the earth your visage will decay,
until you resemble a ghoul,
and children shall contemplate your corpse and shudder."
No place Duck. Our funerary customs are based on sanitary concerns and the concerns/sensitivities of the living. You do make a very good point though, and a well stated one too.
Erase all memory? Sharp entrepreneur? Preying on the old and vulnerable? War?
I am a physician: family practice, the only doc for a small town in rural SC for 23 years. I still take care of my first grade teacher. I have been there for I do not know how many deaths. I have cried with families that I have known since I was a child and for my elders, including the man who gave me my first hair cut and taught me in Sunday School.
I have "pronounced dead" friends, teachers,my own childhood bullies and children. Thousands of hours in the ER. 17 years of every-other night call. I have pronounced hundreds of people dead and told even more that they have terminal cancer or something just as bad. I have seen children with severe head trauma, choking on their own blood, eyes hanging from sockets. You know nothing about me; I doubt you have any direct experience on the subject.
The impetus for creating conservation burial came from the realization that my father's funeral (premature death at 54 from a complication of a "routine" surgery) cost enough to purchase 5-10 acres at the time. And everyone said "It just didn't look like George-his mouth was all wrong". That and seeing families that could ill afford it spend a year's income or more on a funeral. For what? Not for memory, but for (among other things) a $6,000 box in a $2,000 box and that no one ever sees again. What about a college fund for the grandkids? Politically correct my ass. It is all about memory. You have no idea.
Green burials are generally a lot cheaper (about half the cost of contemporary funerals or less), are being designed to benefit non-profit groups like land trusts and universities more than the "contract service providers" who actually run the facilities and do the work (most of the income after expense goes to the non profit).
What exactly is it about this that makes you want to "go to war"? You are way too full of yourself. How old are you, 28? What do you know of death? Whom have you lost? Whom have you buried? Which person did you watch take their last breath? Tell me.
Billy Campbell, MD
Amen Peter.
You took this way too personally and got way too defensive billy C.
apologies, but when I read that you think some slick entrepreneur is bilking the poor and old with green talk, I do take it personally. Believe me, Mike is not all that slick, and I (obviously) am not either.
I think that the current industry is geared to shake people down. I went through that. I do think that if you are going to spend money on anything other than a straight cremation, that green burial probably makes more sense: financially and for the positive benefits to land conservation,etc. which does have something to do with quality of life.
I also believe that organ donation is better than not donating your organs-or having your organs taken out and gold plated if that was the custom of the moment. it has to do with valuing life, and trying to figure out how the decisions you make can benefit your community and life in general; if that is one of your values then great.
I agree, by the way, that the green thing could be hijacked to shake more cash out of people. Green-washing is already a common marketing ploy in other industries. It really depends on how it is done. That is why we are tying to move to a model that puts non-profits in the driver's seat and not pay our stewards commission on sales. And why the Green Burial Council is adopting consumer protections suggested by the Funeral Consumer's Alliance.
Suggested reading: The American Way of Death and the new Grave Matters (even if I am in the latter book).
Peace
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