I think about death often. I think it’s healthy.
I know it’s a taboo topic, but I never understood why if it’s going to happen to all of us. We should try to get more comfortable with the subject; in fact, I think we should talk to our kids about death all the time. Just remind them they’re going to die, every now and then – in a healthy way of course, don’t like, threaten them or anything – perhaps you could do it over breakfast, while you pour cereal into their bowl.
Regular reminders of your mortality could go a long way to curving a lot of toxic habits. It could serve as a check on the ego, thereby reducing the number of assholes who think they’re invincible –people starting bar fights, drunk drivers, or girl scouts.
Thinking about my death naturally leads to the question of what will happen to my body after I die. I think most adults have thought about this at some point. I’m not going to explore the question of whether there is life after death, that’s above my pay-grade. I operate under the assumption that the lights just go off for eternity until smarter people tell me otherwise.
My grandparents want to be buried; my mom wants to be cremated; I asked my wife what she would like to happen to her body after she dies and she said, “Are you going to murder me?” Which I guess is a fair response – it is a weird question to be awoken to in the middle of the night. Anyway, I fed her to the dog, seemed appropriate considering how much she loved him.
As far as I’m concerned, a natural burial is the way to go. That’s the one in which they wrap you in thin linens, dig a shallow, unmarked grave in the middle of the woods and leave you to be consumed by nature. The idea is that if woodland critters and bugs have easy access to your corpse, it will speed up the decomposition process and turn your body in to natural fertilizer for a tree. This way all of your body is used to nourish an ecosystem.
Along with donating your body to science, a natural burial is the most sensible thing you could do with your body after you die. It makes the idea of being put in a casket and buried six feet underground seem selfish by comparison.
Before you’re even born, you’re taking. The air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat; all those particles that you did not create serve as your fuel. You take your parents time, you take up space, and most of us don’t contribute or give back in any substantive way; at least not enough to replace all we’ve consume.
Take, take, take, and your last act on Earth is to take that body you got on a loan and put it in a metal box to stash away so nature can’t have it back? Why? What is there to gain at that point? What is so precious about your decomposing corpse? Why not make your last act a selfless one and give it back to serve as a flowerbed at the very least?
If you don’t return a library book, you get a fine. If you borrow a car and you don’t return it, it’ll be reported stolen. What makes you think you can take all those molecules that created your meat-vehicle, and refuse to give it back once your consciousness has faded?
The vast majority of us have never contributed to building anything remotely as impressive as a Southern Live Oak or Giant Sequoia. So what makes you think you deserve to keep that body locked away for eternity? Instead, you could be contributing to the biological diversity of a forest, serve as the foundation of a home for a flock of endangered birds, or be the earth sustaining a field of wild daises. You could literally be one with nature. Like Snow White, just dead.
Do you really want to your last contribution to be the mourning of your loved ones, when you could be the foundation for a tree instead?
One last note to this incoherent ramble: what sparked this rant was some research I was doing into burial methods – I know what that sounds like, I promise it wasn’t for anything weird; just sex stuff. Actually, I’m an amateur stand-up comedian and I was working on bit about being buried.
While researching I came across this website which explained what a natural burial was. I found the opening line of the article particularly funny.
You may have recently heard about natural burials (which are sometimes incorrectly referred to as green burials) as an alternative to a traditional burial.
Which implies that building caskets and digging six-foot-deep holes in the ground to put them in is the ‘traditional’ methodology. I’m not an expert on, well, anything. But something tells me that in the millions of years that took us to reach modern society, there was not a lot of time to build caskets while running from saber-tooth tigers. I have a feeling that caskets were more of a luxury in those days. So, if you want a truly traditional burial, let your body rot away in the woods.
Lando Writes Sometimes 