Death to Life: Towards My Green Burial

Abstract

This paper presents reflections on the author's death aspirations as they are informed by a set of earth-connection stories, environmental concepts, and modernist burial practices. This weave is meant to inspire further consideration on what is coming to be known as ‘green burial’. More precisely, this means an exploration of the author's earth-centred burial musings in association with the following themes: the meanings and historical trajectory of prevailing death and burial practices; ‘narratives’ of the human–earth life-cycle; relevant environmental ethics and place literature concepts; and lastly, some sense of the newly emerging practices and appeals to green burial—i.e. the normative and practical grounds for rethinking and working toward more environmentally sensitive burial practices. This weave of themes is instructive for posing green burial as evocative of a more comprehensive and spiritual ethos of connection, continuity, and responsibility. In this sense, rather than being seen as contrary or contentious, green burial may actually enable us to dispel some of the growing angst, uncertainty, and insensitivity often underlying prevailing burial practices, while contributing to an emerging environmental consciousness.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank his family and colleagues for their sense of humour regarding his prognostications on this theme, and his partner Irena Zenewych for her editing prowess, as well as her promise to follow through with his green burial hopes.

Notes

Notes

¹Note that the process of getting to this remote location is hazy in some respects—ensuring that friends and family get my close-to-death body to this sacred place on time, though not so soon that I find myself twiddling my thumbs and waiting impatiently for my death to occur. I jest here, as my story has raised much collegial humour.

²The terms ‘decay’ and ‘rot’ do not generally connote pleasant or comforting images in their common usage—certainly not when applied to our conceptions of the body after death and its placement in the earth. Such visual speculations on decay and rot are more the fodder for the genre of the horror film, where they are meant precisely to horrify, not appease or comfort us regarding the continuity of the cycle of life after death.

³My own death scenario on the surface has some resemblance to the Zoroastrian ‘sky burial’, one whose tradition, held by the Parsis, was to have vultures pick the bones clean of the ‘contaminated’ flesh. The bones could then be properly disposed of in water, fire, or earth (see Kastenbaum, 2004).