When I think of how I want to die, I am left undecided between painful yet dramatic and memorable, or a soft death in my sleep. The only real aspiration I have surrounding death is to live to be 101 so I can die having seen three centuries. This is ultimately just a factoid for my obituary, though, and out of my control. What I have come to realize is that while my fate may be out of my hands, my burial is not. I have plenty of stipulations in regards to how and where I want to be laid to rest.
Somewhere along the way I started thinking about being buried alive. The sort of buried alive after having gone into a coma and everyone thinks you’re dead, so they bury you, and then some years later grave robbers try to steal your diamonds and pearls and they find scratch marks on the lid of the coffin. Think Buffy season 6 premiere meets A Tale of Two Cities, Jerry Cruncher the grave robber. The stuff of nightmares, waking up from a coma, knowing there is no way to escape suffocation, getting blisters on my fingers anyways, and dying with a tormented mind. I guess nowadays they pump you full of chemicals before you’re buried, so the buried alive thing may not be a huge concern, but as someone who doesn’t like chemicals now, why would my spirit like them? In the words of folk singer John Prine:
“Please don’t bury me
Down in that cold cold ground
No, I’d druther have ‘em cut me up
And pass me all around”
Once I started thinking about being buried alive, I started thinking about being cremated alive. Imagine if you were in a coma, and woke up right as they locked the door to the kiln and there you are enduring psychological torment for the split second before you are zapped to death. Even if you were 100 percent dead, your ashes are still mixed with those of whoever else was in there before you, because there is no way to clean out that dust all the way, or so I assume. Its definition sounds like a chemistry experiment: “the combustion, vaporization, and oxidation of a cadaver” makes it sound like a harsh act that strips you of personality. When your family puts you on the mantle, or scatters you by the sea, they are also scattering Jane Doe, and that sort of intimacy freaks me out.
Right now, my dog Harvey is sitting on my dining room table. He died two years ago, and we keep his ashes in a pot my Nana made. As funny as it is when people open up the urn and realize it is a pot of a decimated dog, the ashes smell really weird. It’s a smell that sticks with a person, which I wouldn’t really want my descendants to have to experience. I also wouldn’t really want to continue having to witness family dinners from the afterlife, forgotten on the mantle and never scattered. The fact that we have yet to disperse Harvey speaks to the fact that my ashes would probably never see the light of day.
My mom always talks about a funeral pyre, like the type you find in Thailand or Norse mythology. There is still the burning, but you are on your own personal pyre, being sent out to sea, and you know that you won’t end up on a mantle. The future of my body, my ashes, would be decided by me, and there would be a nice air of mystery to being lost at sea in a pseudo-sense, without a plaque or tombstone. If I happen to be in southeast Asia at my time of death I would be down for this form of disposal, but chances are my fate will come at home in America, where open flames on the Pacific (always Pacific over Atlantic) are probably frowned upon.
People talk constantly about giving back, making something of their lives. Having a natural burial—being buried with the seedling of a tree wrapped in a biodegradable sheet—cuts down on chemical use, which is always appreciated by the earth. Moreover, you are returning to the land from which you have taken. Even from the afterlife your legacy is able to live on with positive benefits. A natural burial is more feasible than a funeral pyre, less claustrophobic than the idea of a coffin, and less scary than cremation.
I respect the tradition of cremation and coffins. They both have religious and cultural connotations in the ways in which they honor the dead. Both are undeniably off-putting ideas to me, though, and when you think about it, a natural burial is the most traditional form of disposal of all; cremation and coffins were not the ways people were disposed of a thousand years ago. Death has become just another commercial facet of our consumerist culture. Even if I weren’t pro-environment, pro-individual, and weary of capitalism, I would change my will now to state in no uncertain terms that if anyone dares cremate me instead of giving me natural burial, my spirit will be coming back to do some haunting.