I listened to a TED Radio Hour this week called Dying Well.
The podcast focuses on the idea that our society doesn’t like to talk about death, but we should. Specifically, it talks about:
- how to deal with grieving
- how to prepare for death while still alive
- how to speak openly about it
I found the whole hour very worth listening to, but I want to focus on one part; what to do with your body when you die.
One woman on the podcast talks about how backward our ritual of removing dead bodies has become.
The first thing she speaks about is the funeral industry.
Dying is expensive.
While not all are like this, the industry as a whole profits by playing on our emotion of a recent death. They promote the idea that we should do as much as possible to honor the dead regardless of the price or environmental impact, because, you know, we’re worth it.
The second thing she speaks about is what we actually do with our bodies.
The two most common things are burials (as we know them), and cremation. But when this woman talks through them, you realize neither make that much sense (though burials make a lot less sense).
Burials – Let’s put your body in a thick wooden casket which is lowered into a concrete hole in the ground where you remain for the next thousand years, as no natural decomposition process takes place. She also touches on embalming, and how unnatural it is just to make the bodies “last” long enough to get you in there.
Cremation – This is better than burials environmentally speaking, but according to her takes the same amount of natural gas as a 500 mile car trip. That’s not that much, but if there’s a better option (I’m getting there), why not explore it?
Her proposed alternative is good (I think).
She talks about recomposition.
The line of thinking is this – we’re made up of molecules that are all constantly joining and leaving our bodies. When we die, at whatever random time that is, let’s allow the molecules in our body at that time to essentially ‘rejoin’ the earth.
Specifically, our dead bodies can make really good soil. A common idea is planting a tree ontop of where your body was buried (and not buried six feet under in a wooden box surrounded by a concrete box) so ‘you’ literally help the tree grow after your death.
This gives you a tangible object to represent the dead like a headstone or urn full of ashes.
Listen to the talk below, as she does a better job than I do of explaining everything.
Does it sound a bit… hippy-ish? Perhaps, but this is one of those things that we just accept without really thinking about it despite the fact that it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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