It is a solemn, magnificent moment, which has a sacred, majestic quality. The combustion of a corpse always produced in me a very strong emotional arousal. As long as its shape is still human, and the flesh is burning, one is overcome by wonder, admiration; when the form has vanished, and all the body is charred, sadness takes over.
By 1873, Brunetti was ready to debut the results of his experiments at the Vienna World Exhibition. His booth, #54 in the Italian section, featured various glass cubes containing the results of his experiments—bones and flesh in varying degrees of disintegration.
Brunetti’s cremation technology represented a chance for society to skip over decomposition and incinerate the body down to its inorganic material. He hoped to industrialize the process, to do it as quickly as possible with the efficiency of a factory line. According to Laquer, modern cremation, as Brunetti saw it, “was a problem for science and technology.” The message was clear: nature, left to her own devices, was far too sloppy and inept, taking months to do what a 2,000-degree blast furnace could do in mere hours. A sign at Brunetti’s booth at the Vienna exhibit read “Vermibus erepti—Puro consumimur igni,” or “Saved from the worms, consumed by the purifying flame.”
Almost 150 years later, both Katrina and I would disagree with Brunetti that only flames can purify. The poet Walt Whitman spoke of soil and earth as the great transformers, accepting “the leavings” of men and producing “such divine materials.” Whitman marveled at the ability of the earth to reabsorb the corrupt, the vile, the diseased, and produce new, pristine life. There is no reason to zap away your organic material with gas or flame when there is good to be done with “the leavings” of your mortal form.
Dr. J headed back down to the tent in the parking area to upload data from an electronic logger which had been placed on the chest of John Compost to record the temperature spikes his body experienced while in the mound. That left Katrina and me to start uncovering the second mound, containing June Compost. The seventy-eight-year-old woman was emaciated by disease at the time of her death. Her mound consisted of pure woodchips and was at the bottom of the hill, uncovered, in the shade.
As we got deeper into the pile, the dirt exposed larval beetles and grubs. The soil inside the pile was abundant and dark—compost is often referred to as “black gold.” But the presence of the insects was not ideal, as it meant there was still something inside the pile serving as a nutrition source, a feast to keep these creatures occupied. Then I hit June’s femur, covered in a thick white leftover of decomposed fat, the consistency of Greek yogurt (apologies, Greek yogurt fans). As we uncovered more, we found the woman at the very end stages of decomposition, mostly down to bone.
June Compost’s problems were the opposite of John Compost’s. There was enough moisture (which is why she had been successfully taken down to bone), but without enough nitrogen the temperature in her mound never got high enough to reconfigure her bones to soil.
Neither John nor June Compost had been a success. But this was only the beginning of Katrina’s experiments. More bodies will come into the FOREST facility to be composted. At Wake Forest University, a law professor named Tanya Marsh is assigning her cemetery law students to comb through state laws to discover how to legalize recomposition facilities in all fifty states. At Western Washington University, a soil scientist and composting expert, Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, will begin experiments with human-sized animals (small cows, large dogs, shorn sheep, the occasional pig—all predeceased). There are already studies underway on what the composting process does to mercury amalgam fillings in teeth, whose toxic release into the air is one of the biggest environmental concerns about cremation.
“Lynne called me on the phone the other day to talk about the teeth study,” Katrina said, “and casually mentioned, ‘I dug my own grave and slept in it last night.’ She’s a pretty serious practicing Sufi.”
“Damn, dug her own grave and slept in it,” I replied.
“Yeah, death is part of her spiritual practice. She’s much more than just a lover of livestock composting.”
It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong. They’ve given prominent space in their professional careers to changing the current system of death. Katrina noted that “humans are so focused on preventing aging and decay—it’s become an obsession. And for those who have been socialized female, that pressure is relentless. So decomposition becomes a radical act. It’s a way to say, ‘I love and accept myself.’ ”
I agree with Katrina here. Women’s bodies are so often under the purview of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress. There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse.
When deathcare became an industry in the early twentieth century, there was a seismic shift in who was responsible for the dead. Caring for the corpse went from visceral, primeval work performed by women to a “profession,” an “art,” and even a “science,” performed by well-paid men. The corpse, with all its physical and emotional messiness, was taken from women. It was made neat and clean, and placed in its casket on a pedestal, always just out of our grasp.
Maybe a process like recomposition is our attempt to reclaim our corpses. Maybe we wish to become soil for a willow tree, a rosebush, a pine—destined in death to both rot and nourish on our own terms.
SPAIN
BARCELONA
The American funeral home exhibits a suspiciously uniform aesthetic: squat midcentury brick, velvet-curtained interior, uneasy aroma of Glade plug-ins (covering over the antiseptic smells from the body preparation room). By contrast, the Altima funeral home, in Barcelona, is Google-headquarters-meets-Church-of-Scientology. It is minimalist, hypermodern, projecting the potential for cultlike activity. Its three stories feature floors, walls, and ceilings of elegant white stone. Wide balconies allow you to step outside and overlook the gardens. Not parking lots, gardens. One wall is floor-to-ceiling glass, exposing a panorama of the city stretching from the mountains to the sea. Stop by the espresso bar to take advantage of the free Wi-Fi.