It’s not easy being buried green,
but here’s how I want it to happen:
Someone,
preferably an old friend, dresses me in my oldest, softest
clothes.Let’s see, how about my favorite and virtually
threadbare navy blue flannel shirt and my tatty black sweat pants?
If shoes seem important, hopefully they’llgo for my sheepskin
bedroom slippers. Then, I’m wrapped in one of my flannel
sheets.
Meanwhile, someone uses a shovel to dig a hole
somewhere on the prairie –preferably in sight of the majestic
Buttes of Pawnee National Grasslands out in eastern
Colorado.
Finally, I’m lowered gently into the hole
and dirt is shoveled on top of me. No embalming. No coffin. No
cremation. No headstone. And especially no misplaced Kentucky blue
grass. Just me and a few old clothes being recycled back into the
earth. With maybe a layer of native buffalo grass sod on
top.
You think I’m crazy? Maybe, but as John Lennon
sang, “I’m not the only one.”
In fact, the idea of
a natural, environmentally sound burial is catching on. To the
point that last November, even Newsweek ran a brief piece about a
“natural” cemetery opening in Texas. And in South Carolina,
Memorial Ecosystems was founded in 1996, to create one of the first
natural U.S. cemeteries.
Why would anyone care? Well,
we’re just catching up with a trend in Great Britain and
Europe, where hundreds of natural or “woodside” cemeteries create
nature preserves. The idea is that traditional burials and
cemeteries are not very environmentally friendly.
Embalming, for example, requires the use of some nasty toxic
chemicals likeformaldehyde. There is something bizarre about the
possibility that I would have lived most of my life avoiding
chemicals in my home and on my lawn, only to be pumped full of them
when I croak. This is not to mention the production of those
chemicals and any possible exposure to funeral workers.
As
for a wood casket, it involves the cutting of a tree and the energy
required to make it into a box and deliver it. On top of that, it
may not rot for centuries.
Then there are the cemeteries
themselves. In some cases, I suppose, they may preserve open space
that otherwise would be developed. But in Colorado, the downside is
that they are green grass parks on a high plains desert that is not
meant to be green. This translates into lots of water, fertilizer,
herbicides and extermination of wildlife such as burrowing prairie
dogs.
So what about cremation? Well, remember you have to
use fuel to burn a body, and there will be some air pollution to
deal with. Plus there is the container, whether it be a wood casket
or a cardboard box, that also goes up in flames.
My other
objection to cremation is something I haven’t heard anyone
else referto, and that’s the loss of nutrients that my body
would provide if allowed to melt naturally into the soil. As we
used to chant on my first-grade playground, “the worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out, the ants play pinochle on your
snout…”
To pursue my fantasy burial, I called the
Colorado Department of Health and Environment. There I learned that
burial requirements in Colorado, where I live, are pretty minimal;
that by law, if a body isn’t disposed of in 24 hours, then it
must be embalmed or frozen. But there’s no requirement for
burial (honest!) and Colorado is one of the few states that
doesn’t require funeral directors to be licensed, so anyone
can dispose of the body in those first 24 hours.
There is
one cemetery nearby that comes close to what I want. But Mountain
Wilderness Memorial Park only buries cremated remains in a forest
setting. They’re considering another site for body burials,
but that’s down the road. And anyway, I want to be planted on
the prairie. I may have to settle for having my cremated remains
scattered out by the Buttes.
The only other option I can
see is to try to buy a small piece of land out on the eastern
plains and have it there waiting and paid off when my time comes. I
could stipulate in my will that it go to some agency or
organization that would keep the land undeveloped, dressed in
native grasses and open to wildlife.
Of course, I have no
money to pursue such a dream. And even if the day comes when I have
disposable income, I’ll probably need some partners who share
my crazy idea. Any takers?
Patricia Walsh is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). She still lives and breathes north
of Denver.
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