A 'Cause' for all greenie conservationists to adopt.

Perry Mann

Ashes to ashes... to green shoot: A better way to dispose of one's remains

One learns in biology that earth without decayed matter will not sustain plant growth; and since animal growth is dependent upon plant growth, then earth that contains not death will not sustain any kind of life.

When I learned this, I recalled learning earlier in school that American Indians put a fish in the hill of corn to fertilize the corn. And the logic of that led to the question of why not put a human corpse in a hill of, say, an apple tree or an oak, to fertilize it. I certainly posed it to myself, for I knew enough of the world not to shock it with such a suggestion.

Further, I thought of the Egyptians and how they disposed of royal corpses: the mummification and the enormous expense of human labor to build mausoleums to house the preserved remains. How ridiculous, how wasteful, how unnatural, I thought, to move mountains, so to speak, to bury a body that by nature's mandate should be better planted at the foot of a tree to decay and then to rise to its leaves or in a rose garden to color a bloom.

Then, of course, it occurred to me that man today is doing just the same as the Egyptians and their predecessors did thousands of years ago: He still mummifies the body of the dead, still encases it in a costly coffin and wraps that in a water-proof copper container and maybe that in an earthquake-proof mausoleum - maybe not so great as a pyramid, but often in imitation thereof. And then he leaves this monstrosity to nature for her to spend millennia digesting and resolving it all to a natural state and thus eventually getting to the remains to put them back into circulation. How frustrated Mother Nature must be by all these funereal obstacles to her cosmic conversions.

Why have hillside cemeteries with their Hong Kong flowers coloring them obscenely in December? Why have the good land loaded with granite quarried in Vermont, when a better way would be to cremate the dead and deposit the remains where a tree is simultaneously planted? Thus, in time there would be a forest or an orchard or both. And the dead would be living and the living would be shaded and nurtured by them.

In this manner, man could for once be working in harmony with nature instead of at odds with her. And to work with nature instead of against her is surely a proposition worthy of consideration, particularly when by such partnership one gone can soon return to life in any number of living varieties.

Lately, I learned to my utter delight that this concept that I had so long kept to myself was conceived a century ago by Thomas Hardy, my frequent companion and source of solace, and that he put the thought into a poem called "Transformations":

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