To Burn or to Compost?
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Being born a Hindu, I have always assumed that when I die, my body will be cremated. Cremation is in vogue not only in India but also increasingly a popular option in Christian countries as well (Scandinavia is a leading example). Even the Roman Catholic Church approved of it in the sixties (as long as it is done not to show disrespect for resurrection). In America, the practice has decent acceptance these days despite a few hiccups, the most infamous of which is the strange case of Ray Brent Marsh. Mr. Marsh was the co-owner (along with his father) of the Tri-State crematory in Georgia. In 2002, an anonymous tip led the feds to discover more than 300 decomposing bodies all over the crematory. Sometime ago, Marsh had stopped incinerating the bodies. Instead he just piled them up in sheds, in the woods, etc. He was brought to trial and sentenced but he brought a bad name to crematory operators everywhere.
Cremation is definitely a cheaper option here in America; however, there are concerns about air pollution. The Crematories have improved their equipment in recent years to reduce the pollutants released, but mercury released from dental fillings is still an issue of concern.
Traditional Burials are associated with ground water contamination from noxious gases and embalming liquids (they used Arsenic for this once). The lack of space also poses a big problem in places like Japan for this method of disposal of the bodies. For this reason, some cemeteries re-use their graves. The bones are removed after a certain period of time and moved to an ossuary and the plot re-used for another burial.
Excarnation is practiced by the Parsis (Zoroastrians) in Mumbai. This is the process by which the bodies are exposed to the elements on the roof of special structures such as the famous Towers of Silence and in this particular case, vultures take care of the rest. This method had been practiced by Native Americans too though I am not sure what animals (or other natural elements) were used in reducing the bodies to bones. One famous person who was excarnated was Christopher Columbus.
Some societies apparently indulge in post-mortem Cannibalism. Among them was the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea. The maternal kin of the deceased would take care of dismembering the bodies and would often feed the brains and other internal organs to their children. They also ate the flesh especially of those who died of the fatal prion disease, Kuru or laughing sickness (the second stage of this disease is marked by outbursts of laughter). This was because the fat layer in the people who succumbed to Kuru resembled pork.
For the rest of us, there are a few other options - Burial in Space is common among science fiction writers and other space aficionados such as LSD guru Timothy Leary. This option is quite expensive but you can choose to have (a small amount of) your ashes dispersed in either Earth’s orbit (150 people), our Moon’s orbit (only one person so far) or outer space (none so far). They get more and more expensive the farther you want your ashes to travel. However, you still have to be cremated first in this method. Burial at Sea was also popular once among the sea-faring people and navies. This is rarely done these days. The same goes for the Mummification practiced by ancient Egyptians. There are facilities which will cryogenically freeze your body for posterity. Again, an expensive and space consuming option.
This brings us to Tissue Digestion and Ecological Funeral. The former was invented by Americans Gordon Kaye and Bruce Weber; the latter by a Swedish biologist named Susanne Wiigh-Masak.
Tissue Digestion involves the dipping of the remains (placed on a perforated basket a la French fries) into a vat containing lye (the same alkali which is the base of soaps and glass) and water. The freed hydrogen ions from this mixture breaks apart the proteins and fat of the body and reduces it to a “coffee-colored liquid” and a few bones which can apparently be crumbled in one’s fingers. A funeral home in Michigan is apparently testing this method with animals. This process takes advantage of the fact that over 70% of the human body is water.
Ecological Funeral involves converting your remains to compost - sort of continuing the ecological cycle of life. Wiigh-Masak’s company Promessa is due to open its first “promatorium” next year. In this method, the body is chilled to 18 degrees below zero (Celsius) and dipped in liquid nitrogen. Then the body is gently vibrated at a specific amplitude which will shatter it into powder. The powder is then placed in a small box containing starch and placed in a shallow grave. In about six months, this converts into compost. The promatoriums will allow the survivors to plant trees at the site of these shallow graves thus contuing the cycle of life.
The last option seems to be the best environmentally. The only cost is the energy consumed in making liquid nitrogen which is normally available as a by-product during the manufacture of oxygen. If you are curious, check out Promessa’s website for more details.
As for me, I am still not sure what I want done with my remains though donating it to science might be an option. After reading the brilliant and hilarious (quite an achievement for such a morbid topic) book called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, I have started thinking about this for the first time. Roach herself says that one should respect the wishes of one’s survivors rather than trying to control from beyond the grave (or space or a garden in Sweden).
What method would you prefer?
Interesting. I suppose I’ll leave the decision to my survivors for now.
That link you had to the ‘Towers of Silence’ sent me on an interesting detour (perhaps this is old news to some of you). The article alludes to declining vulture populations leading to Parsi excarnation rituals becoming infeasible. According to this May 2004 article, the (then) 95% decline in vulture population may be attributable to the use of ‘diclofenac’ which is a pain reliever for animals. The residues of the drug persist after the animal dies, which when ingested by vultures leads to visceral gout and subsequent death.
‘Tis a complex web we live in.
Somehow, I’ve managed to munge the link to the article. Hopefully this will work.
If not cut and paste
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0128_040128_indiavultures.html
No discussion on corpse disposal would be complete without at least a mention of the famous Varanasi ghats in India. Due to the Hindu belief that dying in the holy city enables one’s soul to escape the cycle of reincarnation, lots of geriatric homes have sprung up in Varanasi. The corpses used to be cremated on the banks of the river Ganga, and unscrupulous crematorium employees would throw half-burnt corpses into the river so that they could get through more cremations in a day. I think the government has now banned cremations on the ghats, as part of the Ganga purification project.
Regarding the dying vultures, maybe they should import some of the South American or California Condors to India?
When travelling by train near the Ganges, you will often find people coming onto the train with corpses. Sometimes they disembark at the stations with the corpses and sometimes they throw them off from the bridges over the Ganges.
I don’t think you need to export Condors because we have already exported most of our Parsis.
A case of premature cremation:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4312030.stm
Even if you donate the bodies to science, they still need to be disposed of in some other traditional way once the organs have been harvested, no?
Donate organs to the needy, and donate the rest to carnivores in zoos.
I would prefer that every organ in my body be donated to help someone who may be in need (Note to Harvester: Sorry! The Liver may not be of much use to anyone thanks to my long association with fellow blogger - anupcs
Any organ not used to help someone should be used to determine whether there was indeed any Intelligent Design behind them. When that is exhausted I would prefer the remains be cremated.
Even the shrivelled liver might be of use in educating the masses about the dangers of overindulgence in certain liquids.
BTW: On the subject of preferences on how one would like to exit this world, there is a really interesting article in a recent New Yorker titled ‘The Shroud of Marin’. It profiles a chap named Tyler Cassity who is a very Narcisstic player in the ‘Death Care’ industry - (No, I am not making this up, ‘death care’ is indeed what they call it). Mr Cassity is also a proponent of the ‘green’ cemetery movement.
Green burial entails placing a body in a grave in either a shroud or a biodegradable wooden box—or, in a variation that Cassity is currently working on, a papier-mâché “egg” that resembles a seed pod. The sheer imagery of the dead getting back into a fetal position and returning to the earth is raff with symbolism. The idea behind ‘Green burials’ is indeed noble, i.e. the body will quickly rejoin the ecosystem as fertilizer to push up grass and trees above it. Actually this is a very old-fashioned idea. Jews and Muslims have, essentially, conducted green burials for thousands of years—Indeed many muslims continue to practise a very stark form of green burial (the most notable case recently was the King of Saudi Arabia), but it’s also a sharp departure from the way most American bodies are now buried.
American burials are ecologicaly unfriendly not to mention financially draining on the family left behind. The embalming done by the mortuary uses chemicals to make the body look fresh. The burial itself is in metal caskets or processed wooden caskets. An embalmed body goes into the ground with three gallons of formaldehyde and mercuric chloride in it, all of which merely slows bacterial decomposition. Some of these boxes remain in the ground and practically mummify the body for years and even decades.
He and his unfortunate, but more idealistic, partners (One of his partners is a professor and another is a former producer of shows for NBC) want to make sustainable burial practices a mass market in the cemetery industry. Given Mr Cassity’s very eccentric personality and tendency to get into teenage like ‘non-speaking terms’ with his business partners, it appears a very Sisyphysian effort.
All in all, as we enter the ghoulish time of the year, it was an enjoyable article to read. Too bad this article is not available online.
Is it just the box (or shroud) itself which is biodegradable? Do they treat the corpse in some way like the Swedish folks? Otherwise, I don’t really see much of a difference between traditional burials and the Cassity approach.
[...] deed alarming, alarming because only recently did this subject receive a healthy treatment here and it is also the subject of the book I am currently reading titled Stiff [...]
If you enjoyed Stiff as much as I did, you might want to check out the latest from the delightful Ms. Roach:
I haven’t read it yet but reviews seem quite good especially considering how difficult it is to follow a great first act.
An interesting related article on Ghana and its corpse problems in today’s BBC online:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4375292.stm
anyone know how freddie mercury\’s body was disposed of? was he excarnated since he was a parsi?
According to Wikipedia, Mercury seems to have been cremated.
Cadavers are in the news again.
[...] In one of our most popular posts, ‘To Burn or to Compost‘, there was a good discussion around ‘death care’ … what happens to your body postmortem. In that discussion, a few of us offered our own preferences on what should be done with our cadavers. Some of you who want to donate your bodies to science and be cremated might want to think again. The ash urn that is supposed to contain your mortal remains might be a blend instead of your own. The parts of your body (except for the liver of course) that you want to donate to science might end up being used for creating cosmetics. The going price for your head is around $900 and legs around $1000. [...]
Recently a friend of mine passed away, and we offered her son a cremation urn. It was a perfect white marble vase style urn, and exactly what this woman reflected to us. Many people touched the urn and had a special connection to her through it. She was a good woman, good friend, and a knowledgeable and active member of our mountain side community. I will miss our walks in the morning with my dogs.
We were glad to memorialize our friend through the urn we choose. Cremation urns provide the special opportunity to give a loved one a special resting place just as unique as they were in life.India’s hindus cremate as well, but scatter in the their loved ones cremains in their sacred rivers.For urns for your loved one, to go: Cremation Urns
“Spook” by ms. Roach was a bust relative to “Stiff”…………lot of stuff about afterlife and mostly based on research done in India
Hello
As newly registered user i just want to say hello to everyone else who uses this forum <:-)
In America, as cremation becomes more acceptable, I’m seeing people buying themed, personalized cremation urns. Everything from angels to motorcycle urns. People tell me they want to keep grandpa close and not in a closet while also wanting something that doesn’t immediately scream “Urn” when their friends come over. They also want something that reflects the memory of their loved one during the service. Unlike burial, cremation offers a clean, space saving alternative.