From Here to Eternity

by Caitlin Doughty

  A third doctor told Sarah, “If you were my wife, I would tell you not to carry this pregnancy to term.”

  A fourth doctor offered two grim choices. The first was to induce labor in the hospital. Her baby would live outside the womb a very short time, and then die. The second was to terminate the pregnancy. “I know someone in Los Angeles who can do this for you,” the doctor said. “She doesn’t usually perform the procedure this late, but I’ll call her for you.”

  At this point, Sarah was almost six months pregnant. She made the appointment. She tried to distance herself from her baby to prepare for what was coming, but he was kicking inside her. She didn’t want him taken away. “He wasn’t something foreign inside me; he was my son.”

  To end a pregnancy at such a late stage required three appointments over three days. A line of protestors blocked Sarah and Ruben’s path to enter the clinic. “One particularly vile woman screamed over and over that I was a murderer. I couldn’t take it, so I walked directly up to her and screamed in her face, ‘My baby is already dead! How dare you!’ ”

  They waited in the clinic for an hour, listening to the faint screams of the protesters outside: “Hey, lady with the dead baby! Listen, we can still save you!”

  These were the three worst days of Sarah and Ruben’s lives. A final ultrasound was required. Sarah turned away from the monitor, but Ruben saw their baby moving its hand, as if waving goodbye.

  In another room Sarah could hear the wrenching sobs of a young girl who had tried to end her life because she was pregnant. “I don’t want it! I don’t want it!” the girl screamed.

  “I wanted to comfort her, and tell her I would take her baby,” Sarah thought, “but that wasn’t really what I wanted. I wanted this baby, my baby.”

  On the last day of the procedure, the whole staff came in and stood around her operating table and told Sarah how very sorry they were this had happened, and how they promised to take good care of her. “This is where people treated me with the most kindness,” Sarah said, “in the place that was, for me, a place of death.”

  More than three years later, the weight of her son’s death is like a constant anchor in Sarah’s body. In the cemetery in Tzintzuntzan, as Sarah stared at the photo of baby Marco, Ruben lovingly rubbed the small of her back. She broke the silence. “Parents just want to show off their baby. They are so proud. If their baby dies, that opportunity is taken away. This is their chance, to show they still love their child, they are still proud of him.”

  Instead of pride, Sarah felt the opposite when her son died. She felt pressure to maintain her “dignity” and to keep her grief silent, lest her visceral trauma depress anyone else.

  The Western funeral home loves the word “dignity.” The largest American funeral corporation has even trademarked the word. What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality. Wakes last exactly two hours. Processions lead to the cemetery. The family leaves the cemetery before the casket is even lowered into the ground.

  In the cemetery we found grave after grave memorializing young children, including Adriel Teras de la Cruz. He was born on what would have been Sarah’s due date, and lived just over a week. His parents sat at his graveside. A small girl lay on her mother’s chest, and an older boy was tucked up under a blanket next to the grave, sound asleep.

  Adopting or adapting the customs of the Días de los Muertos, argues Claudio Lomnitz, could end up saving the emotional lives of Mexico’s neighbors to the north. He writes that Mexicans “have powers of healing, and of healing what is certainly the United States’ most painfully chronic ailment: its denial of death . . . and its abandonment of the bereaved to a kind of solitary confinement.”

  ON OUR LAST DAY in Mexico, we returned to Mexico City, and we visited the home of Frida Kahlo, the famous Casa Azul. It was in this house that Kahlo was born, and where she died at age forty-seven. “As outlandish and weird as this sounds, coming here is almost an act of gratitude,” Sarah explained. “Frida helped me. La Casa Azul is a pilgrimage.”

  “I think most mothers have at least some fear of being imprisoned by the birth of a child,” Sarah said. “I’m always aware of all the things I can do, all the places I can travel, these pilgrimages I can take, because I don’t have a young child. I’m aware of all the time I have. It makes it more valuable, because I possess this time at a terrible cost.”

  On display in La Casa Azul was Kahlo’s painting Frida and the Cesarean, an unfinished work that depicts Frida with a split stomach, lying next to a full-term baby. Sarah gasped when she saw it. “This is my first in-person meeting with one of these pieces. It’s like making friends with a person online and then meeting them face to face, in real life. It’s emotional.”

  Frida Kahlo’s true feelings on bearing children may never be entirely clear. Some biographers are so keen to protect her saintly image that they have rebranded her medical abortions as the devastating “miscarriages” of an otherwise eager mother. Other biographers insist that Kahlo was uninterested in children and that her “poor health” was just an excuse to duck the cultural expectation of raising a family.

  Upstairs, in Kahlo’s small bedroom, there was a pre-Columbian urn containing her ashes. On her single bed lay Frida’s death mask, an eerie reminder that the artist had bled and died in this very room. Above her bed Frida had hung a painting: a dead infant, swaddled in white, wearing a flower crown, lying on a satin pillow: an Angelito.

  ___________

  * His name has been changed.

  NORTH CAROLINA

  CULLOWHEE

  The grey whale is an impressive creature—fifty feet long and weighing over thirty-six tons, with formidable flukes spanning ten feet. A dozen miles off the coast of California, she emerges into view and exhales with a final, weakened puff. After sixty-five years, death has come for the great beast, and she hangs limp at the surface.

  Some whales begin to sink straightaway, but this particular whale will remain afloat. Inside the carcass, tissues and proteins are breaking down, organs are liquefying, and gases are building up—they are filling the whale’s blubbery outer casing, transforming her into a macabre balloon. If she were to be punctured in a single spot, the force of the pressurized gases would launch her mushy innards several yards from her body. But this whale’s skin holds. Gases slip out slowly; our former cetacean deflates and begins her gradual descent to the sea floor below. Down, down she goes, traveling more than a mile, until at last the beast meets soft bottom.

  Down here in the bathyal (or midnight) zone of the ocean, it is cold and completely dark—sunlight does not reach these depths. Our whale hasn’t come down here to “rest in peace” and lie on the ocean floor in cool, undisturbed darkness. Her remains are about to become the location of a grand banquet that will last decades. This process, known in the ocean science community as a whale fall, creates an entire ecosystem around the carcass—like a pop-up restaurant for the alienlike creatures of the primordial depths.

  The mobile scavengers smell the whale and arrive first to feast. They are the quintessential otherworldly denizens of the deep: sleeper sharks, hagfish (an unfair name—they’re more like slime-producing eels than fish), crabs, and ratfish. They begin tearing into the decomposed flesh, consuming up to 130 pounds a day.

  Once the bulk of the organic material has been picked clean, the area around the carcass becomes a hotspot of life on an otherwise barren seabed. Mollusks and crustaceans set up camp. A thick red fuzz of deep-sea worms grows on the whale’s bones, 45,000 of them per square meter. The worms’ Latin name, Osedax, means “bone devourer.” True to that designation, these eyeless, mouthless creatures will burrow into the bones and extract oils and fats from within them. Recently, scientists have discovered that the sulfur-loving bacteria present at a whale fall are similar to those found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

  The site of the whale fall turns into a decades-long version of “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, a debau
ched, celebratory party where creatures devour the whale “course by course, one by one.” The whale is the epitome of a postmortem benefactor, part of an arrangement as beautiful as it is sensible—an animal dying and donating its body so that others may thrive. “Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious,” the carcass seems to say. The whale, in short, is a valuable necrocitizen.

  To be fair, science has yet to determine how whales feel about this state of affairs. Given the chance, would they prefer to forgo the whale fall and have their carcasses locked up in an impenetrable coral reef fortress somewhere? A postmortem safe haven, perhaps, but one that would prevent other animals from benefiting from the vital nutrients that are no longer of use to the departed whale?

  Whales spend their whole lives supporting the environment that surrounds them. Their diet is fish and krill, and for years humans assumed that fewer whales = more fish and krill for us. This equation justified the whaling industry’s slaughter of almost three million whales in the twentieth century alone.

  As it turns out, fewer whales does not mean more fish. Whales dive down to the shadowy depths of the ocean to feed. They must return to the surface to breathe, and while there, they release robust fecal plumes. (Note: Poop, they’re pooping.) The whale poop is full of iron and nitrogen, which trickle down to fertilize plankton, which—you guessed it—fish and krill depend upon to live and thrive. Whales are a crucial part of this cycle during their lives, and in death they are no different.

  Instinctually, you may feel the same pull to contribute past your own death. How else to explain the increasing popularity of the refrain: “When I die, no fuss. Just dig a hole and put me in it.”

  A sensible request, indeed. Sending your corpse back into nature would seem to be both the most inexpensive and the most “green” option for your death. After all, the plants and animals we consume during our lives are grown and nourished by the soil.

  A single acre of soil can contain 2,400 pounds of fungi, 1,500 pounds of bacteria, 900 pounds of earthworms, 890 pounds of arthropods and algae, and 133 pounds of protozoa. The soil teems with life, as does the dead body (inside its sausage casing of keratin, or dead skin). Microscopic sorcery takes place when a body is placed just a few feet deep in the soil. Here, the trillions of bacteria living inside you will liquefy your innards. When the built-up pressure breaks the seal of skin an orgiastic reunion takes place, in which our bodies merge with the earth.

  We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, “the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” Though, presumably, they are a start.

  “HOW WOULD YOU describe what we’re doing here, Katrina?”

  She thought for a moment before replying, “We’re setting up the experiments.”

  “What are the experiments?”

  “Wait, let’s not call them ‘experiments,’ that makes it sound like I’m a mad scientist.”

  “What’s a better word than experiments?”

  “We’re here setting up the mounds. No, that’s equally creepy. Dammit.”

  I waited.

  “Let’s just say we’re tweaking the mound recipe,” she decided, only half satisfied.

  You have to be careful with language if you’re Katrina Spade, the person leading the charge, as the New York Times put it, to “turn corpses into compost.” It is a delicate sales pitch, a proposal that toes the line between eco-death innovation and the deranged Soylent Green scheme of a charlatan.

  Katrina and I drove up the winding roads of southern Appalachia, the Blue Ridge Mountains that straddle the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. Here, as in the rest of the United States, the modern funeral industry has seeped in and taken over the rituals and logistics of deathcare. But because of the isolation, religion, and poverty of the area, the creep of industrialized death took longer here than almost anywhere else in the country.

  At last, we turned down an isolated road and pulled up at a gate. Dr. Cheryl Johnston—Dr. J, as her students called her—was already there, joined by a small group of undergraduate volunteers. Dr. J runs the Forensic Osteology Research Station (FOREST) at Western Carolina University. You might have heard this type of facility described as a “body farm,” where corpses, donated to science, are laid out to decompose for forensic study and law enforcement training. But, as Dr. J is quick to point out, “body farm” is an inaccurate term: “A farm grows food. We don’t grow bodies. Considering our end product, you could call it a skeleton farm, I guess?”

  I was giving the side-eye to some silver tarps covering what looked to be dirt burial mounds. “Do they place the donor bodies under there? Right where we park the cars?” I wondered. I had seen many a dead person in my day, but they were all nonthreatening, lying on sterile white tables and gurneys. It makes you uneasy when a body is somewhere it’s not “supposed” to be, like seeing your chemistry teacher at the supermarket.

  “Nope,” Dr. J said, after introductions were made. “They’re not human. Those are the black bears. Roadkill. Sometimes the Department of Natural Resources brings us fifteen to twenty a year. Their fur is so black that they’re pretty easy to hit with your car at night.”

  The bear burials (bearials, if you will) acted as practice for the undergraduates. After a bear decays down to bone, the students set up a systematic grid and collect the bones to bring back to the lab for examination. Successfully processing a bear permits a student to work on the human beings, located not in the parking area (I was pleased to discover) but in a 58-by-58-foot pen up the hill, fenced in with razor wire to keep out the curious, which include coyotes, bears, and drunk college students.

  The group trudged up the hill to the pen’s padlocked gate, which Dr. Johnston opened. Stepping inside, I wasn’t hit by a pungent smell or an eerie sense of death. Instead, this tiny pen for corpses in the North Carolina mountains was picturesque as hell, with dappled sunshine pushing through the trees and hitting the voluptuous undergrowth. At present it held the remains of the fifteen souls that had come to rest in the facility postmortem—three bodies buried beneath the soil, twelve exposed on top.

  The bones of a female skeleton in purple polka-dot pajamas had scattered due to runoff from the spring rainstorms. Her skull had come to rest down near her femur. Several yards to her left a man, more recently dead, had a jaw that yawned open, hanging by a thin layer of flesh that held his mandible in place. If you knelt next to him you could see the amber facial hair poking through.

  Katrina gestured up the hill to a splayed skeleton. “When I was here a few months ago that guy still had a mustache and the most beautiful marbled blue skin. He didn’t smell so great, though.” Then, seeing as he was lying right there, she apologized. “Sorry, it’s true.”

  The idea to compost the dead first came to Katrina when she was working on her master’s degree in architecture. While other students aped the work of Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry, Katrina was designing a “resting place for the urban dead.” She saw her future clients as the deceased denizens of the modern metropolis, comfortable with a life in the concrete jungle, but longing in death to return to the natural world, where “flesh becomes soil.”

  Why attempt to compost, though, when the obvious way to address the primeval yearning to have “flesh become soil” would be to open more natural or conservation burial cemeteries, where corpses could go straight into a hole in the ground—no embalming, no caskets, no heavy concrete vaults? Katrina responds, correctly, that overcrowded cities are unlikely to assign huge swaths of valuable, developable land to the dead. And so she aims to reform not the market for burial, but for cremation.

  The result of Katrina’s thesis was the Urban Death Project, an architectural blueprint for body composting centers in urban areas. The centers would be scalable worldwide, from Beijing to Amsterdam. Mourners would carry the dead person up a ramp built around a central core made of smooth, warm concrete, two and half stories tall. At the top, the body would be laid into a carbon-rich mixture that would, in four t
o six weeks’ time, reduce the body (bones and all) to soil.

  The compost reaction occurs when you mix things that are high in nitrogen (think food waste, grass clippings, or . . . a dead human body) into a pile of material high in carbon (think woodchips or sawdust). Adding a dash of moisture and oxygen causes the microbes and bacteria inside the pile to begin breaking down the organic tissues and releasing heat. This gets the whole thing cooking. Temperatures inside the compost pile often reach 150 degrees, hot enough to kill most pathogens. With the right balance between carbon and nitrogen, the molecules will bind, creating incredibly rich soil.

  “During those four to six weeks you’re in the core, you’d cease to be human,” Katrina explained. “Molecules literally turn into other molecules. You transform.” This transformation of molecules is what inspired the name she’s given the process: recomposition (“corpse composting” being about three degrees too intense for the general public). At the end of the recomposition, the family can collect the soil to place in their garden, and a mother who loved to garden can, herself, give rise to new life.

  Katrina was 99 percent confident we could recompose a human, and she had an impressive roster of soil scientists on her advisory board who thought that her confidence should be at 100 percent. After all, they had been composting livestock for years. The chemical and biological processes that break down a 1,000-pound steer should work just as well on a measly 180-pound human. But she needed experimental evidence on real live (well, real dead) human remains.

  This is where Dr. Johnston and the FOREST facility came in. Dr. J was intrigued by Katrina’s idea for studying human composting, but hadn’t planned immediate experiments. Then, serendipitously, she inherited a small mountain of woodchips from the on-campus recycling program. Shortly after, she got a call that a new donor body was on its way to the facility. So she texted Katrina: “I’ve got a body. Should we try?”