How to grow your garden.
On burials and fertile soil for imagination.
This post, written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium with the theme “Growth,” is dedicated to all those of you out there who obsess about things like “subscriber numbers,” “likes,” and “who deserves to be called a writer.” If you read this post and also in between the lines, you will understand that you need to find something better to do. Like, think about death. Now, there’s a worthy hobby if ever there was one.
I have been reading and writing a lot about death lately, and with that, I have developed a curiosity about body disposal across different cultures and religions. So, I got books on the matter. It has been an interesting trip. I learned, for example, that embalming is a big no-no if you want to be ecological. I mean, I should not have needed a book to understand that dumping a body zooming formaldehyde and then expecting Nature to digest it is not very environmentally friendly. Alas, there goes a part of my funeral plan, but there is a silver lining since embalming costs a ton and scratching it from the proceedings will leave more money for the open bar. My friends and family will surely appreciate it.
Embalming being out of the question, the issue remains: What to do with my cadaver? Well, it very much depends on what type of faith one professes. And I am searching keenly for the best option for me. I will not go in-depth on the different approaches, but three warrant an honorary mention1 before we go into the ritual that I guess is expected from me but am trying to find a good excuse to forgo - the good old burial.
In fourth place, I will mention composting: for a reasonable price, your body can be placed in a bin with wood chips, straw and soil, where the workers will turn the soil regularly to accelerate the decomposition. At the end of it all, the family gets some truly fertile soil that can be used to grow a tree… or some edibles… I guess this is the most vegan way to go cannibal. I can only imagine feeding your guests the ultimate homegrown carrots to ensure your loved one spreads their wings, but I like the idea. Also, have you ever reviewed someone’s CV who has under “past work experience” something like:
2003-2015: Human body composter.
Some people have the most bizarre coolest jobs.
In third place, I have to mention body farms. Apparently, one can donate their body to a research facility where “body decomposition can be studied in a variety of settings” to help advance forensic science. This might be my last chance at a forensic career. I could be the posthumous Sherlock Holmes I always envisioned I would become.
Runner-up comes the most divine form of body disposal: excarnation. It turns out that Zoroastrians build these circular towers of silence called dakhma where bodies are laid out and given to vultures to consume. This is, in my opinion, the most fascinating form of honouring the dead, and I am not joking. The closing of the circle of life at its finest. It turns out that, nowadays, the practice is in peril of extinction due to a shortage of vultures. Climate change and deforestation are also coming for our dead ones.
Which brings us to what seems most feasible in my case, my number one choice. If I am to follow tradition, then I guess I will be buried; how I will be buried is a matter of debate. Should I go whole-body-plus-a-coffin or ashes-in-an-urn? Apparently, cremation is a pretty widespread practice, primarily for practical reasons, land shortage one of them, except in Hinduism where it is a “must”, and in Orthodox Christianity where it is a “must not do”. What to do with the ashes after that is the question. If you are Catholic, you have to bury the ashes in a consecrated piece of land (aka cemetery); otherwise, God might not find you, and you could potentially be left out of the whole “resurrection of the flesh” part of redemption. This is kind of ironic because I am pretty sure that God’s omnipotence surely includes the capacity to find stuff, like, I have that superpower; surely the Almighty does not lack it; right? Furthermore, what could possibly be more sacred than, for example, this:
Should I contemplate doing the whole shebang “à la Católica,” I have to find a place where I would like to lie down until Kingdom Come, so I am looking for a comfortable spot. I sent my colleagues from the Soaring Twenties Social Club to their local cemeteries to see if I could be inspired by local practices and find a final resting place for my tired bones (so tired that they would be, in fact, dead). I find Spanish and Italian cemeteries joyless, with their concrete niches all stacked one on top of the other, no life anywhere to be seen except for the file of cypress trees leading to the entrance, all so straight, warning you to wear your most sombre attitude when entering the place.
Thus far, my favourite one is in
‘s village in Croatia, up on a hill overlooking the sea. You should go for a walk with him and visit the place. You can do that here. also sent me some pics of the very urban Trinity cemetery in New York City, right next to a boxing club. Seems like an excellent placement for both the cemetery and the boxing club… New Yorkers are always coming up with ways to save a lot of unnecessary steps.Then there is, of course, my local cemetery. What a happily-placed joint right in front of the hospital! Pessimists abound in my hometown and seem to be in charge of city planning. But I admit it is a very peaceful spot, with a great variety of trees and bushes, and in the spring and summer, they even let the grass grow tall to serve as small ecosystems for insects to thrive in. I like going for walks in the cemetery. It is serene, soothing and fun all rolled into one. One of my favourite pastimes during my three maternity leaves was to stroll along the gravel footpaths. The bumpy walks allowed my babies to nap and me to imagine stories about the people whose gravestones gave me enough details to spin the yarn. Today I will not go into the stories I have invented (I might do some other time), but I will refer to two graves I keep coming back to.
The first one I do not know whose it is, but it is what the embodiment of grief looks like to me: the body aching so much that it cannot peel itself away from the grave of the loved one.
The second is the grave of a five-year-old boy who died in a bus accident, Joakim Stambolovski. The tombs that I find the hardest to bear are the ones that hide children in their entrails, torn from their mothers’ arms at an incomprehensible age. Life can be truly cruel, not just because children die but also because they leave those of us who have to carry on with an emptiness inside us that will remain unfilled and that we will have to drag around for as many years as we roam the earth. I feel that in children’s graves there are also buried pieces of us who are left behind, a piece of us that we can't retrieve, whether we need it now or not. This one grave cries out to the sky and makes us unwitting witnesses to that cruelty. But it also allows us to glimpse the unfathomable joy children bring by merely existing.
For in-depth reading, I suggest “Death and Religion. The Basics” by Candi K. Cann. Clear, concise and to the point.
I have heard too of a green burial where your body is wrapped in a sheet and buried standing up so you take up less space and can rise from the ground (like the zombies in Thriller!).
I would like to be used as a cadaver in medical school dissections. There’s a global shortage of cadavers right now, as fewer and fewer people choose to donate their bodies to this cause. For this reason, many medical schools have given up cadaver dissections for first-year students. But this is such an important piece of future physician training, that cannot be replicated by the best simulation. Have you considered being a future cadaver yourself? It really extends the amount of time folks can admire your fabulosity, as an added bonus.