How a simple seemingly clear-cut decision became something mind-disrupting.
Learning Curve
In my late twenties, I had my first personal encounter with death. It is clear in retrospect that I had already absorbed the notion that although death might need sacred guidance, and grief was real, the body wasn’t a part of the hurt. The body was the province of deathcare professionals whose services were triggered the moment death was confirmed.
My first born died three hours after his birth. At the moment he died, I was strapped down with my neck tightly braced against any movement for 24 hours. A 1960’s era spinal anesthetic forced me to lay flat on my back paralyzed from my shoulders down. The only solace was the splash of the fountains outside the the Stanford Hospital window lending soothing white noise to the constricted shocked unknowns swirling in my mind.
There was no handing him to me at his birth. All I remember was the nurse swishing out on the way to the NICU. At the hour when he died, no one offered me a chance to see him, caress him or kiss him goodbye. The reality of his short life and death was left to be processed in my imagination. That was standard of care in the modern American way of death even in progressive Palo Alto. He was cremated and placed in the community crypt at the cemetery closest to the hospital. Fifty years later he was finally buried with the cremains of his grandmother at my parent’s gravesite.
In 1963, John F. Kennedy’s death shocked me to the core. Jacqueline Kennedy served as my model of holding grief: Plan and execute a memorable service, breathe deeply, and maintain quiet, restrained dignity.
In 1978, a predawn phone call from my mother woke me with the news that my father had died in his favorite chair having his usual crack-of-dawn coffee. What I recall the most about that call was that my mother, who lived an hour’s drive away, was maintaining quiet, restrained dignity. She assured me she had called the authorities and that I was not to rush getting the children taken care of and making the drive. I remember the long drive being a blessing, over Hwy 17 through the stately redwoods of the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains and along California’s coastal Highway 1. I had time to savor thoughts and memories of my dad and acknowledge a fervent wish that I would arrive after his body had been removed. I wanted to honor his spirit and courageous life with a beautiful service and celebrate his memory with family and friends. But, I wanted his body safely tucked away from sight.
I attended several funerals of in-laws and close friends in the three decades between my father’s and my older half-brother’s deaths. I can vividly recall memorable celebrations of life, complete with wonderful music, poignant slide shows and touching human stories. But, no bodies.
I recall my brother telling me how happy he was that he had made arrangements with the Neptune Society and suggested I should probably do that too. The Neptune Society, is now owned by the huge, multi-national conglomerate, Service Corporation International (SCI). SCI is busy conglomerating—buying up cemeteries and funeral homes throughout the country, Canada and Puerto Rico. In San Francisco, SCI is also currently in the midst of paying a $23 million civil penalty. It has been additionally ordered to provide full restitution to clients who canceled their prepaid cremation plans but failed to get a full repayment. SCI is a publicly listed, Wall Street corporation, thus shareholder profits come before service to grieving survivors.
First Observed Death
On Sunday March 20, 2016, I was by my centenarian mother’s side when she took her last breath. She died as she had lived with grace and quiet dignity. I had been at her side in her lovely private room at a very special assisted living facility for a week. Except for taking a few hours off each night leaving the hospice nurse in attendance, I sat at her bed side and played recordings of opera arias she loved. I was her only child and I had had so little experience with death and dying that I didn’t know what to do or say. In truth I didn’t know what or how to feel either. Grace and quiet dignity were all I had for models.
My mother was quiet. There were no poignant last words. They had been said over the years in a myriad of ways. Years before she had asked and I had agreed to be with her when she died. Nothing could have kept me from fulfilling that promise. For most of her 100 years on earth she was an extremely powerful if gentle presence in the lives of friends, students, colleagues and her family. She was the family’s matriarch. Children and grandchildren held her in such high regard that to see her diminished and approaching death was almost too painful for them to witness. It was my promise to her that held me close even though I was frightened, unprepared and woefully incompetent.
It was a miraculous gift to us both that the woman who owned the assisted-living facility where my mother spent her last two years had become a good friend. She stayed with me almost every hour of the day guiding me lovingly through the whole week. I learned from her how to sit with those who are dying. I learned from her young daughter, who adored my Mom, how to speak with ease and love even on FaceTime to someone she knew she would never see again.
After she died, I didn’t sit with my mother’s body or even think of washing her and putting her in new clothes. The hospice nurse had taken care of keeping her clean all week and it didn’t occur to me that my Mom, who loved elegant clothes, might like to have been cremated in a favorite dress.
When Mom breathed her last, my miracle friend Parisa had to tell me that Mom had indeed died. It was Parisa that bid the hospice nurse to record the death, thought to place a rose in my mother’s hands, and called the funeral home to begin modern America’s traditional chain of deathcare events.
I got busy planning an over-the-top garden memorial event the preceded the burial of her cremains in the family plot in San Jose’s largest cemetery. She had prepaid for the service and I never even thought to ask if embalming had been a requirement before cremation even if there was no viewing planned.
First Glimmer of a Change of Heart
I only recently attended my first open casket funeral. The pews were filled with family and a host of peers who came to honor my step-grandson who had just died tragically and unexpectedly. He had recently graduated from university and was an outstanding athlete, so his death was especially shocking because of his young age and promise.
The service was a powerful, heartfelt, and grief-filled experience on many levels with some unexpected ephiphanies. At first I was taken aback, as any new kind of experience tends to be. But, I was profoundly aware that something touched me deeply at his service that I had not felt before. I didn’t understand the why and the significance of the difference until my current research broke open my previous unconsciously absorbed ideas of modern death care. My decades-long idea about the power and meaning-potential that our bodies hold after death was challenged, and they abruptly and sharply began to shift.
Change of Heart and Mind
I was no longer conveniently able to think of my future corpse with the level of socially responsible concern that I attribute to items I place in a Goodwill donation bag. Depriving my future corpse of meaning had meant good riddance to the annoying struggles my body provided—the always present extra ten and sometimes twenty pounds, the short legs that made running and driving hard, the cute but never pretty face that was the source of my envy and resentment of beautiful women.
With my petty complaints top of mind, I disregarded the miracle of my human body’s very being. How did I not engage in a daily gratitude practice in appreciation of its intricacies, resilience, freedom of movement and the protection it provided?
I had completely overlooked the history that would be revealed by my corpse—the mole on my left palm that had taught me left from right, the caesarian bikini smile, the missing breast, the malformed foot and shoulder, the permanent furrowed brow, the battered and age-spotted skin that had served so admirably as armor and hopefully a natural serene semi-smile on my face.
Beyond revealing my physical history, I had learned to totally ignore my body’s place and potential in the universal web of life.
Even when I recently spent hours producing a graphic of my death-inclusive life cycle for my Substack’s About Page, I had overlooked its sacredness. If I really believed my future corpse would be devoid of meaning, why did I need to design a space for it in my life cycle graphic?
Furthermore, why did I know, on some unacknowledged level, that I didn’t want my body to be thrown into a mass grave, or left to rot by the side of a road, or held up in public as a threat to others. Theologians, Cody Sanders, and Mikel Parsons, helped me realize the horrible power we the living have used to trample indigenous peoples’ burial grounds, throw native children placed in boarding schools into mass graves, leave heaps of our enemies’ bodies on battlefields, desecrate black bodies we hung from trees, and the awesome call-to-action force of George Floyd’s body in the street laid bare before our eyes.1 The power of our dead bodies is real and cannot be ignored when our protective social blinders are removed.
A person is not just a body, a person has a body . . .Why does it matter what we do with a body, knowing that the person no longer exists? . . .Why would a body have meaning? Yet it does, it always does; whether we cling to it or flee it, what happens to the emptied body feels momentous.2
How did I live 83 years without considering the potential our corpses hold to draw back the curtain and reveal what we have allowed our world to become?
…[modern American deathcare has failed to acknowledge that a body after death holds the power to reveal a great deal about our our world as we currently know it]— a society of excessive individualism, consumerism and ecological destruction3
“Anthropocene” is a big word trying to contain what we are doing to our earth. It refers to this current time period, whether you call it an era, an event, or an epoch, as the period when the predominant changes in the planet’s evolution have been brought about by we humans altering, disrupting, or directly interfering with nature’s normal tendencies.
Serious study or contemplation of how our society treats its dead bodies can help us understand who we have become. It can also help us deconstruct our predominant death care practices in ways that focus on our place in relation to all life on our planet Earth.
We are all dying. We know that much. But, we are also ALL dying, not just each of us, but the whole of humanity along with myriad other species in what many now casually call the sixth mass extinction. As of 2019, around one million of the earth’s eight million species are threatened with extinction due to climate change and ecological destruction caused by humans.4
Evolving Options
As noted in Course Conundrums Part II, dissatisfaction with modern deathcare’s limited options, outsized price tags, and growing monopolization of a restrictive industry, created a space for entrepreneurs and innovators to step in with marketable solutions. A panoply of new approaches to deathcare are popping up around the nation. Many of them are quirky and are designed to appeal to a small passionate niche of consumers.
The best and most interesting to me are emerging solutions to the ecological damage and ethical questions that stem from our professional deathcare practices of the past 160 years.
Three new practices focus on preserving our habitat and our environment. They are an interesting mix of scientific innovation and “back to the future” pre-Civil War ways of treating our dead. They are: Natural Burial, often with home funerals and communal care of the corpse; Water Cremation; and Recompose or body composting.
Natural Burials allow the body to decompose with no cement, plastic barriers or heavy caskets preventing contact with the soil. Simple shrouds or caskets made from biodegradable materials, such as wicker, are used. Some commercial cemeteries have provided segregated spaces that accommodate natural burials. And a whole new type of memorial spaces are being created in protected designated natural burial grounds such as forests, prairies, deserts and similar natural habitats. Burials at sea are in this category. I first learned about the reemergence of natural burials from an enlightening book by Mallory McDuff called Our Last Best Act. I just learned that she is starting a Substack. An excerpt from her book, can be found on Sari Botton’s Oldster Magazine.
Water Cremation also known as Alkaline Hydrolysis or Aquamation is a sustainable and gentle way to dispose of a body. It is similar to cremation, in that it produces cremains in about four hours. However, the process uses alkaline water, not fire, to dissolve soft tissue. The remaining bone matter is crushed into fine, white ashes. It is far more sustainable and energy-efficient than flame cremation. Remaining bone can be ground to ash to be used for scattering memorials. Very important is that surgical and dental implants that contain mercury are not dissolved and therefore kept out of the atmosphere and groundwater. It is now legal in about half of the United States and has replaced flame cremation in ecologically conscious medical education body donation programs in combination with ash scattering at sea. Alkaline Hydrolysis is a little more expensive than flame cremation but at least two-thirds cheaper than traditional casket burial. It is rapidly increasing in popularity despite being currently banned by the Catholic Church.
Recompose is a process of whole body composting that was developed by Katrina Spade, in Seattle Washington. She utilized rigorous research and design to develop a process that biologically mimics the earth’s natural cycles and is like what occurs on the forest floor as organic material decomposes and becomes rich topsoil. The process is more expensive than water cremation. Instead of ashes however, fertile soil is returned to the family to spread on either private or public lands. It is perhaps the most ecologically supportive of the new developing methods of deathcare.
What to Consider for your Future Corpse
First, we must learn to pause before modern America’s professional chain of death events are initiated. We need to sit with thoughts of our own future corpse or the body of our loved one who has recently died long enough to identify and learn the lessons each body holds when its life force and consciousness have departed.
Sanders and Parsons recommend that we think first of the acronym EARTH and consider the Ecological, Anthropological, Relational, Technological and Health/harm/healing impacts of the corpse disposition we are about to make.5
ECOLOGICAL: Will this disposition aid or harm the earth? Does this practice help the body reconnect with the earth or subvert the eventual connection?
ANTHROPOLOGICAL: How does the disposition practice fit into the living community and support the grieving process of loved ones? Does the practice subvert or help the living community learn to accept the reality and meaning its’ dead?
RELATIONAL: How will my future corpse, or the corpses of others I will mourn, relate to the wider web of life and to the spiritual practices that guided me or my loved ones in life?
TECHNOLOGICAL: How are the technologies of death care under consideration assessed in relation to ecological, racial, cultural and economic concerns of justice?
HEALTH/HARM/HEALING: Is this practice of death care congruent with the health of both the living and the dead?
In light of the E.A.R.T.H., my choices for my future corpse are no longer simple or easy. At the moment, after a lot of discussion and thought, I am still choosing for my Plan A to donate my body to the closest medical school in support of education. I am, however, initiating gentle, kind and serious activist measures to ensure that regulations be federally legislated to assure that donated remains are protected from the possibility of theft.
For my back-up plan in accordance with the standard requirements of Anatomical Donation Programs, I am providing for a choice that my children will make after a discussion planned for a birthday visit in two weeks. My pension’s death benefit will specify either Resomaton and/or a natural burial site in a local forest.
Notes
The ENDs inSIGHTs Resources Menu on the Home Page will continually list references for alternative death care practices as they emerge and gain acceptance in our culture.
Sanders, Cody J. and Parsons, Mikeal C. , Corpse Care: Ethics for Tending the Dead, Fortress Press, 2023, Minneapolis.
Tisdale, Sally. Advice for future Corpses and Those Who love Them. Touchstone Press. New York 2018, p. 149.
Sanders and Parsons, Ibid. p. 62
Ibid. p 61
Ibid, all of Chapter 4 pp. 83-104
My favorite read so far!❤️