If you are not sure what to do with a dead body, don’t start with a funeral home. Start with the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a national organization with clear, concise information and suggestions intended to help people get what they want at a fair price. In an interview, Joshua Slocum, the executive director, said, “If we treated car buying the way we treated funeral buying, we would walk into the Honda dealer and hold our hands out and say to the first salesman on the floor,‘Um, I need a car. What do I need, and how much will it cost?’ But this is exactly how we buy funerals.” Instead, he suggests, we should put on “our grown-up pants” and be good consumers.
By the time my mother died, she’d had breast cancer for two years, a double radical mastectomy, a broken hip, and liver failure. She was yellowed, gaunt, with swollen limbs, her hair thinned to transparency. The day after she died, I took my father to the funeral home to pick out a casket. My father was a firefighter and wouldn’t consider cremation. The funeral director happened to be one of my parents’ best friends. He sold my father the most expensive coffin available and assured him that it would be waterproof.
Two days later, we returned for the viewing. We were led into the “Slumber Room,” but after a few steps, I stopped in shock. For one weird moment in that strange marginal land of acute grief—for one long and very eerie moment—I thought my mother was alive again. She looked better than she had for years, almost plump, her skin glowing and warm, her hair full. Even her nails were done. I found it difficult to go closer. I had the irrational thought, and I knew it was irrational and illogical, and I couldn’t shake it, that she might sit up. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want this false life.
To this day, I resent what was done to my mother. (To me.) I had attended deaths, washed bodies, done cadaver dissection. But hers was the first body that spooked me. I was just thirty years old; I wanted her to live—we all longed for her to live—but she died. I had seen it coming; I had come to believe it, to accept it. But when I saw her in the funeral home looking as though she might turn and smile at me, a lot of my hard-won acceptance was knocked loose. The next day the lid was sealed on her heavy waterproof metal casket, and she was buried.
Embalming was considered strange in the United States until the twentieth century. In the Civil War, great numbers of people died away from home, and thousands of officers were experimentally embalmed. (Lincoln himself was famously embalmed to allow the long public mourning his death invoked.) But the odd practice didn’t catch on. The growing size of the country meant that funerals sometimes had to be delayed. Bodies that couldn’t be buried quickly were packed in ice, and occasionally suspended in alcohol. Neither method was entirely reliable, and the occasional failure was spectacular.
Embalming is still uncommon in Europe. In many parts of the world, it is so unusual that a special permit is required to do so. But over a very short period, starting in the 1930s, embalming became normal in the United States. By the early twentieth century, American society had changed. People were dying more often in hospitals than at home, and homes were smaller and closer together while families were more scattered and wandering. Religion had lost a little of its hold on daily life. The profession of “undertaker”—a professional who could handle all the complex details of a funeral—appeared. Embalming allowed for more time.
Jewish law generally forbids embalming, for reasons I find familiar: it is an unnecessary mutilation, a desecration of the image of God, and serving only the living. It is forbidden even if the person who died has asked for it. Since my mother’s death, I’ve seen embalming done, as well as autopsies and cremations. I find embalming the most disturbing. In almost all cases, embalming has one purpose: it slows decomposition enough that cosmetic work can be done and a funeral can be held several days after death. It is not required by law. Don’t believe it. The few exceptions involve a funeral delayed for a long period, or when a body is being transported by common carrier, like a train. Laws vary from state to state, but are far more liberal than many funeral directors would lead you to think. Embalming doesn’t protect public health by preventing the transmission of disease except in rare cases, and doesn’t destroy all bacteria or viruses. Dead bodies are not particularly dangerous most of the time, and disease transmission can be prevented with the same precautions used with sick people. The chemicals of embalming, principally formaldehyde, are toxic and dangerous, and they go into the ground with the body—hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals every year.
I suppose the specialized vocabulary of many professions is troubling to people outside those professions, since words are often used in unusual ways. Environmental engineers use a bomb calorimeter. A graphic designer is concerned with the bleed edge. A dairy farmer may do a teat dip. But the internal language of embalming is odd indeed because it is so clear. The vocabulary means just what it says. Embalmers use aspirators, separators, and arterial tubes. They may need eye replacers and mouth formers. Kelco makes a lip wax that is “formulated in a moderately loose consistency for applications to restore normal, dehydrated, blemished or traumatized lips and other soft tissue areas.” A popular brand of pump is known as the Porti-Boy Mark V. The Esco company’s “Primer” fluid offers “unsurpassed cosmetic effects and life-like color,” because, the company literature explains, “maximum dilation of vessels ensures extensive penetration of arterial chemical and homogeneous distribution of natural color.” Esco also offers “the original and still most powerful blood liquefying and mineral sequestering agent in the industry,” for those more difficult cases. You can also buy a bone dust vacuum.
Embalming and “restorative art”—cosmetic work designed to make a corpse look like a living person—are sold to the public as a way to honor the dead person and preserve your positive memories of them. A school for restorers advertises that this skill helps family members by leaving them with “a peaceful eternal image of solace…by clearing the mind of perceived traumatic images of the deceased.” Even talking to each other, they don’t want to say dead. This is all about helping us, the living. “We at ‘The Restorative Arts Academy’ believe that the bereaved should, whenever possible, be faced with a deceased relative or friend who is presented in a visually acceptable manner, and in a safe environment. ‘The Restorative Arts Academy’ achieves this by not only returning dignity to the deceased, but also by bringing a comforting reassurance to the bereaved at a time when most needed.”
I know that my reaction to the practice is directly related to my mother. But what better experience is there? I was her eldest daughter, I was young, I had small children, I’d watched her decline through a fast-moving cancer. None of that was easy. Embalming interfered with my ability to accept her death. Directly.
The idea behind it—that we are comforted by not having to see the dead body look dead; that we are somehow traumatized by such a sight and able to find solace only by pretending they are still alive—is not supported by any science or by history or anthropology or our own experience. Embalming has been called the art of complete denial.
After Carol died in the hospital’s urgent roar, I didn’t see her body for a few days. She was kept cool but not embalmed, and then dressed in one of her favorite hippie prairie dresses. Her skin was hard and very cold when I kissed her. She looked dead. She felt dead. And I began to shift from Carol to Carol’s body. After the viewing, the body was put into the muslin shroud, and we buried Carol’s body in her own little meadow, the place she’d wanted to be. And I could feel the shift from Carol’s body to the body, a body, like the body of a weasel or rabbit. Like an antelope. We lowered the body into the hole on the cardboard bier and covered it with shovels of rich, dark dirt. Her husband planted a tree at the head.
The poet and mortician Thomas Lynch gets angry when he hears talk about embalming being a comfort to the living, or that people shouldn’t look at the body of the dead loved one because it will spoil the memory. When someone tells Lynch they don’t want to look at the body because they wa
nt to remember a person “the way he was,” he suggests that they deal with “the way he is.” Not looking is magical thinking. (In rare circumstances, such as a death from trauma, it may be reasonable to avoid full contact with the body. I would still suggest at least a distant view: a view that drives home the fact that the person has died, that what is left is a body.) Lynch doesn’t find it helpful to say that the body is “merely a shell” and not the real person. Only a “frightened and well-meaning ignoramus” would try to comfort the grieving that way. Such words are just another way to deflect, to flinch at the blow that must be felt. Even if our personal belief is that the soul has left the body and the person we love is living in a noncorporeal place, not looking at the body doesn’t make the loss of the living person easier to bear. “I’m an apostle of the present tense,” he writes. “Seeing is the hardest and most helpful part.”
At the moment of death, the blood in the body begins to settle with gravity. As the red blood cells start to break down, they release hemoglobin and stain the skin. This is called livor mortis, the discoloration of the body. A newly dead body turns gray, with dusky, bruised, and mottled areas. The face may be almost white or red or purple, while the back is livid and the chest is pale. Later a green cast spreads across the skin. These changes begin immediately after death. Livor mortis is the first visible sign of putrefaction, which proceeds in clear waves over months. In the instant after death, you are changed. Within days, you are unrecognizable.
Decomposition. Nothing can stop it.
Many cultures practice exposure of various kinds. In Europe and many other cultures, it was common practice to punish enemies and those seen as sinners by having their bodies thrown to dogs or scavengers—to deny a consecrated burial, to show the world the devastation of death. Other cultures consider exposure to be an honorable end. Traditional Tibetans practice what is called sky burial: the body is chopped into pieces and laid out for carrion eaters. The Zoroastrians place their dead bodies in a round raised structure known as a Tower of Silence. The thick, high walls are intended to protect the body from being degraded by water and fire. The bodies are laid on a rim inside, open to the air and the scavenger birds that perch on the walls. When they are reduced to a skeleton, attendants push the bones into the pit in the center.
I like the sound of this, exposure to the elements, to the world. It is what Perry wanted, and was not allowed to have. This is how countless people for countless years have returned to the earth. Our modern equivalent is the body farm, where corpses are laid out in a variety of conditions so that scientists can study natural decomposition, often for forensic research. Your body can be covered with a kind of cage if you prefer to be consumed primarily by insects, or you can be left out for the birds and small mammals, too.
Natural burial is simply the practice of burying a body without embalming, the way millions—billions!—of human bodies have been handled for uncounted centuries. (The Neanderthals started the practice.) Judaism and Islam share a tradition of burying a body in the earth as quickly as possible. If a coffin is used, it must have holes so the body touches the earth. But the image of burial in the ground is terrifying to many people: to be food for worms, a dreadful and seemingly unavoidable fate. Nigel Barley, an anthropologist who directed the British Museum’s Museum of Mankind, writes of the nineteenth-century naturalist and vivid eccentric Charles Waterton, whose will protected the ducks from his estate after he died. Waterton knew that worms would eat him and that ducks eat worms and the thought could not be borne that anyone would eat the ducks. On the other hand, the Marquis de Sade insisted that he be buried in the forest in order to be eaten by trees.
You can slow things down a little if you’re buried in a steel casket that costs thousands of dollars, with an interior that is “Chemically Treated to Resist Rust and Corrosion,” with locking mechanisms, rubber gaskets, adjustable beds and waterproof lining. Walmart sells a casket “specially designed for a woman” with interior bedding in a light-pink velvet that is “soft to the touch,” 18-gauge steel, and a welded bottom. Or you can rent a coffin and give it back after the funeral. You can be buried in a shroud. You can buy a coffin now that works as a bookcase, coffee table, or linen press until you don’t need a linen press anymore, and then your friends can put it together the other way. You can paint a coffin, decorate it, draw on it, invite your friends to draw on it. You can fill the coffin with leaves and vines. You can be buried in willow, cardboard, paper, bamboo, or cotton.
You can buy a wooden coffin kit that can be put together without tools. You can get a biodegradable bespoke coffin: a police call box, a giant box of chocolates, a pile of autumn leaves, a set of armor, the deck of a starship. A golf bag. Leopard print. You don’t have to bury a body in anything, but the urge to do so seems nearly universal. The formality of it, the slow, awkward, emotional work of fitting a body into a linen bag, or rolling the body back and forth into what has long been called a winding sheet—you can’t do it alone. You need many hands for this work: the act drives home in a new way what has happened.
Jae Rim Lee went to MIT to study ways to redesign the human environment. She became particularly interested in waste, including that around human death. She studied conventional methods of embalming and burial, and then studied mycoremediation, the use of mushrooms to repair environmental damage. She founded the Infinity Burial Project and the Decompiculture Society, which are intended to help people get comfortable with what you might call postmortem change. Her Infinity Burial Suit (and soon the Infinity Burial Shroud) looks like one-piece pajamas: soft and roomy, with a hood, face mask, gloves, and footies. A line of white buttons looks stylish but is intended to ease dressing a body. The dark fabric is covered in white lines running along the edges like an embroidered vine impregnated with a bio mix of mushroom mycelium and other microorganisms. After burial, the mushrooms sprout and speed up decomposition. (The strains used are found around the world in order to avoid introducing invasive species.) The mushrooms also break down and neutralize toxins from the human body and—according to the Infinity Burial Project, which continues to study the process—increase the body’s release of nutrients and energy to the soil.
You can also buy a mushroom suit for your pet.
There are hundreds of natural burial grounds in the United Kingdom, ranging from woods, parks, and meadows to a section of a traditional cemetery or churchyard. Natural burial is growing in popularity throughout the United States and Europe, where many cemeteries offer a particular section for the practice, and a few preserves have been created. The company Capsula Mundi makes a biodegradable egg designed to be buried beneath a tree planted above it. The small egg is intended for ashes and bone, and the larger egg for a whole body folded into a fetal position. (You can also buy an egg for your pet.) Capsula is trying to sell more than an ecologically sensitive way to bury people; they are trying to sell the idea of a different kind of cemetery. The new natural burial ground is either a corner of a traditional cemetery of tombstones, or a distant, rural place. Imagine a city cemetery, there in the middle of the neighborhood, with trees of all types and sizes. Instead of orderly rows of tombstones, the graveyard is a rambling, woodsy place growing willy-nilly by the highway. Perhaps there are a few plaques here and there, a bench or two, but mostly there are trees, growing over eggs.
We tend to think of cemeteries as permanent places. Whether they feel like oases or wasted space depends on your point of view. Any given grave is really only temporary; as time goes by, many to a plot is common—sometimes more than one to a box. There is no end to the practice of reinventing and reusing gravesites. The headstone belongs to whoever bought it, but when you buy a site, you are usually buying a limited right to use the property: a “privilege,” easement, or license that applies only as long as the place is a cemetery.
In the UK you can also lease what is called an “unpurchased grave,” with no exclusive rights and no headstone. The landowner retains the right to bury someone else there as
well. Prevailing law may say a grave is protected until a corpse is “dispersed,” in commonly used language. The law may simply name a period of years—twenty, fifty, a hundred years. In Norway for a time in the 1950s, the law required all bodies be wrapped in plastic before burial. Eventually it was discovered that the bodies weren’t decomposing fast enough to allow the graves to be reused in a timely manner. A gravedigger figured out that a lime solution would help, and he made a lot of money injecting cemeteries.
Even if the law says forever, there’s no such thing. Just as a corpse is a unique object, a graveyard is a unique property. Ordinary real estate and corporate laws don’t easily apply. Graves are seen to have inherently different qualities from other land. They are universal and indispensable and at the same time impermanent. In the United States, a government isn’t allowed to absolutely prohibit the establishment of a graveyard, but it can set limits and even disinter bodies when public benefit seems to require it. In Alberta, Canada, a cemetery can be sold only to a religious group, a government, or another cemetery company, in an effort to keep cemeteries intact. If a graveyard is neglected—which happens eventually to all graves in time—or all the bodies are moved, the place is considered abandoned. An abandoned graveyard is no longer a graveyard, and can become something else. A park. A highway. Apartments. A vast reservoir. When the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority were built, many graveyards were inundated. Most remains, such as they were, were moved first. Even pyramids crumble. Graves are lost, destroyed by landslides, floods, and sinkholes, emptied and turned into parking lots. There are countless bodies in our soil.
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