A Final Act of Compost
There have been a handful of instances in my relationship with the person I am now married to where we find ourselves on the same page of something that feels important without needing to discuss it. Perhaps it is where my subjective common sense overlaps Brian’s, a Venn diagram of our values. These pages don't make up the totality of the book of our relationship. That book is the ins and outs of the menial and every day, how we handle conflict, and the things we do to see each other in this world, but those pages don’t hurt. We both find it valuable to grow our own food. It is unspoken that a cocktail should be sweetened with pure maple syrup, even if a recipe calls for simple syrup. And when it comes to death, our bodies will be composted.
As many children are, I was comfortable talking about the idea of death in an abstract way. I was interested in practices around death, enjoying walking around cemeteries and observing dead animals when I came across them. I was self-aware enough to know my interests were perceived as morbid and welcomed the label. Though looking back now, I think I was just a curious kid. I was never violent. I wasn't the one killing the animals. I never did and still don't like gore. But I was interested in the difference between the bloated body of a roadkill deer on a summer day and how it would change the next time we drove past it, assuming no one had moved the body. I was curious about people who seemed so attached to their physical selves that they cared about their bodies being preserved after death.
When my little sister’s guinea pig died during a school day, my mother buried its fat little body in the alley, just behind the fenceline of our backyard. Later that day, when she met Hannah and I at the bus stop, she broke the news. Hannah would have been about seven at the time. She asked our mother where her guinea pig was now, and my mother said she had already buried it. That made Hannah cry more, because it meant she didn’t get to say goodbye to her pet. I’m sure my mother thought she was doing her young child a favor by disposing of the guinea pig’s dead body before we got home from school, but she was mistaken. Hannah insisted she wanted to see it one more time to say goodbye. “Are you sure?” she asked. Hannah sniffled a “yes,” and Mom went to get the shovel for the second time that day.
I like the idea of becoming soil. When I die, my organs will be removed if they are of use to someone else, but after that, I have no desire to have my corpse exist in perpetuity. If surviving loved ones want to think of me, they can do that wherever they want. My favorite park, perhaps, or theirs. I don’t need a grave dedicated to my physical self, where no one else can be buried. I like the idea of nourishing something as a last act, and becoming human compost can help me do that. When I became an environmentalist as a teenager, I used to joke that I wanted to be buried under a fruit tree. Hoping that my body would fertilize it and that I might become part of the fruit it bore, I told my friends they could honor my memory by eating it. The joke was far-fetched because no one got buried under fruit trees and turned into fruit, everyone was either buried or cremated. The idea of telling someone I wanted something as specific as that also has a whiff of Soylent Green.
But there really is something to the idea of returning to nature when I die. I hope I have a big and beautiful life and can suck all the marrow out of this world. And when it is done, I’d like my last act to be easy on the planet. I try to walk lightly on the earth in my life, and I’d like to plan for a death that follows the same path. Human composting is a newly legal method of body disposition. It is an alternative to being sealed in a wooden casket, tucked into a concrete vault, and suspended just under the surface of the earth. It is an alternative to incineration, of myself being vaporized into volatile compounds, greenhouse gasses, and the heavy metal from the mercury of my dental fillings polluting the air. Human composting scratches my itch to become soil.
Last month I had the opportunity to tour Recompose, a facility in Seattle that championed the legalization of human composting in my home state of Washington. I got to touch the straw and wood chips and alfalfa that are blended to lend the right carbon and nitrogen ratios after a body is laid in. I learned about their scientific process, interwoven with meaningful death rituals, to offer people an alternative to mainstream funeral practices. After the 6-8 week period, a body has been naturally and organically reduced, resulting in a cubic yard of compost. Should I die before my spouse, I like the idea of him taking what was once me, and spreading it around our garden. And if I outlive my loved ones and there is no one to take the compost home, Recompose has a partnership with a reforestation project in Southern Washington on Bells Mountain, a 700-acre property cared for by a land trust. Should my me-soil be donated there, it would nourish the land at the base of the Cascades, breaking down and recycling back through the ecosystem for good and for all.
Brian was a gardener before I met him and since we have been together, he has also become a composter. We engage with nutrient cycling intimately in our backyard, where our food scraps sometimes get passed to our chickens or get tossed in the worm bin, both animals whose waste makes it back into our garden to once again nourish us. Getting him on board with the idea that we should also plan to be composted didn't take any convincing. As we are in the 7th year of our relationship, planning for our future feels easy and prudent to plan for the end.
After touring Recompose, we will soon begin paying for a plan to care for us when we die. Though I try not to spend too much time thinking about him caring for my final wishes or me carrying out his, it is likely that one of us will die before the other. If I think too long about it, I start contemplating fantastical ways to die that take us both out, painlessly. Though, those visions always seem to happen to us while young, and I don’t wish for that. With no plans to have children, I’d hate to put undo burden on whoever is responsible for the final wishes of the surviving spouse. We will pre-plan a final chapter while we have our health and our youth, and in our shared values.
Until then, I will fantasize about becoming a quince tree. Or perhaps a fig tree or maybe an apple tree. Even if I cannot decide, I know I will at least become soil, same as millions before me, same as my food scraps, same as Brian, same as my little sister’s guinea pig.