Apparently dying is an issue. Well, it’s probably always an issue of some kind, whether it’s your death or that of a loved one, friend, or colleague. For years I have given thought to ways I do not want to go.
Drowning
Fire
Dementia
Recently, I’ve added COVID to the list because the idea of gasping for air like a fish out of water or being intubated (I removed my mother from life support. She had been intubated for a week with no hope that her heart and lungs would ever support her again.) The list goes on, but I suspect that many of us who’ve thought about it or read something or watched on TV or listened on radio have had the passing thought, “I don’t want to go that way.”
But this isn’t about going; it’s about what happens after.
There is a small but growing movement for eco-burials. In short, instead of being pumped full of chemistry, put in a resource-draining box and shoved into the ground to disintegrate leaching (potentially) toxic materials, there are alternatives.
And, not cremation either. My Mom was cremated and I put her ashes in the flowerbed of the Sarasota County Public Library—a place she loved—then drove to Tarpon Springs and put the rest of her ashes on her mother’s grave. My Dad was cremated, too. He sat on my brother’s desk for awhile then was taken out into the Gulf on my brother’s boat and dumped. I wanted my Dad’s Lions Club buddies to put on their purple jackets and take him to a golf course—a place he loved. I was overruled. My brother couldn’t see himself parading around with a bunch of old guys on a golf course. I don’t know if the Lions were on the boat. It wasn’t really for Dad, so I didn’t go.
Cremation, though, pumps our chemistry into the air. Sometimes people buy the box so those resources are used and they go up in smoke, too.
The eco-departure alternatives turn you into energy (as you decompose) or into compost when you’re done. All the elements that you have consumed throughout your life can be returned to the Earth from which they came. An article in this months Discover Magazine provides a vivid and exciting way to do your last give-back to planet Earth.
If I’ve gotta go, and I probably do, that’s the way.