If you don’t want to be buried after you die, the options for what to do with your
remains are endless.
They can be green.
They can be gross.
Here’s what really happens to bodies that aren’t buried.
Washington made headlines in 2019 for becoming the first state to legalize "natural organic
reduction," which is a polite way of saying corpse composting.
Also known as "human composting," "body composting," or "recomposition," the process involves taking
a dead person and turning them into soil.
If you decide on this new option (and live somewhere it's allowed), after you die, your
body will be taken to a specially designed facility that's part public park, part funeral
home, part memorial.
There, your body is put in a container with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw.
Then the microbes get to work on your lovely, decaying flesh.
About seven weeks later, your remains will have been converted to about a cubic yard
of nutrient-rich compost.
This can be returned to the family, or used to nourish soil.
For a generation who grew up on Mufasa telling Simba how the circle of life required their
dead bodies to feed the grass, it's a beautiful option.
It's eco-friendly in other ways, as well, using one-eighth the energy of cremation and
saving a metric ton of carbon dioxide for every body composted.
One EPA employee claimed it's the most "environmentally sound" funeral option there is.
In the 1960s, technology caught up to science fiction.
The ability to preserve bodies after death became so advanced that, theoretically, people
could be reanimated in the future.
The field of cryonics was born on January 12, 1967, when a professor of psychology who'd
just died of liver cancer was the first person to have his body be cryopreserved.
Cryonics has seriously advanced in the past half century.
If you so choose, after you die your blood will be replaced with "mixtures of antifreeze
compounds and organ preservatives," which is basically the same way eggs are frozen
in fertility treatments.
While your body is preserved in liquid nitrogen, the real goal is to keep your memories intact.
Even cryonic proponents admit reviving a body probably isn't possible.
Instead, it's hoped the brain will remain intact enough to download a person's personality
and memories into robots in the future.
It's claimed this should be possible within 50 to 100 years.
Not everyone agrees, however.
As Michael Hendricks of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, put it,
"Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology
and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the 'cryonics' industry."
Still, the hope of life after death is so great, as of 2017, 250 bodies were in a deep
freeze.
Biologist Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak was really into gardening, but she realized how bad all
the embalmed dead people were for her precious soil.
So, like one does, she spent 20 years perfecting a greener way to dispose of bodies.
Her solution?
Well, it's called promession.
Promession first involves removing the body from the coffin, to provide remains for a
wake or viewing.
The corpse is placed in the "Promator" machine and cryogenically frozen in liquid nitrogen.
So far, this sounds similar to cryonics, but then it takes a sharp left turn.
The freezing process in promession isn't meant to preserve but to make it easier to destroy.
Once the corpse is a frozen popsicle, the Promator goes to work, shaking the body until
it breaks down into teeny, tiny chunks about a millimeter in length.
The whole thing takes just a few minutes.
Next, the pile of remains is freeze dried, removing any liquid that's left over.
Metal bits like fillings are removed.
Then the dusty pile of what was once a human is put in a biodegradable container.
It's buried in a shallow grave so the topsoil will break down the urn and get nutrients
from the remains.
Crime scenes involving dead bodies are always complicated.
But if the corpse is outside, this adds a whole host of extra difficulties.
It's one thing to theoretically know how bodies will react in the great outdoors, it's another
to test it.
That's what the FBI started doing in 1981.
The first person donated their remains that year, and the Body Farm was born.
You can still donate your body to the farm (technically, the Anthropology Research Facility)
today and help contribute to forensic research.
Just know what you're signing up for.
Remains don't get treated nicely, because murderers don't care about funerary rituals.
Instead, the FBI says,
"donors are left to decompose in various states - partially clothed, wrapped in plastic, placed
in a car trunk, or in a garbage bin."
Some are submerged in water.
Then experts and students take notes, which helps them in real-life crime scene scenarios.
As odd as it seems, forensic scientists say people are constantly asking to donate.
Burial at sea is a time-honored tradition for fishermen, sailors, and members of the
aquatic branches of the military.
In recent years, the most famous sea burials are probably the unlikely duo of Neil Armstrong
and Osama bin Laden.
Legally, anyone who wants can commit their mortal remains to the deep.
In the US, you must tell the Environmental Protection Agency what you're planning a month
in advance, and you need to dump the body at least three miles offshore in deep water.
The UK has even stricter rules.
There are only three acceptable burial locations, and you need to get a license and a doctor's
note saying the body isn't diseased.
The US Navy offers full-body sea burials for veterans, but the corpse must be embalmed
and sealed in a metal casket.
This ruins the green effect a lot of people who choose ocean burial are looking for.
One New England company goes a more historically accurate way by putting the body in a canvas
bag attached to a cannonball.
While cremation is barely better for the environment than embalming, it's hot right now, in more
ways than one.
The National Funeral Directors Association estimates that by 2035, 80 percent of dead
people in America will be cremated.
But just because you selected a popular disposal method, that doesn't mean you have to be boring.
Say you want to be cremated, but you feel guilty about the carbon footprint.
The solution might be putting your ashes in a biodegradable pod that then feeds a tree.
The inventors hope to eventually be able to skip the cremation part altogether and put
whole bodies in the pods.
Humans are basically just carbon, and conveniently, so are diamonds.
Numerous companies will compress your ashes until they turn into a diamond.
Then your loved ones can wear you and pass you down for generations.
Or if you'd rather just be hung on a wall, one artist will mix your ashes with paint
and create an artwork for your family to enjoy.
And there's so much more you can do.
You can be shot into space, added to a coral reef, 3D printed, made into bullets ... the
options are endless.
In other words, your body doesn't have to be buried, and there are plenty of ways to
make death fun.
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