Mrs. Shepard, for her part, did not have a “throw back a few drinks and burn it” advance directive for her mortal remains. She had, however, been a liberal activist and environmental advocate her whole life, and her family felt that embalming and a metal casket would be against everything she stood for.
Tony, a Joshua Tree native covered in tattoos, had dug the four-foot grave by hand early in the morning, before the unforgiving sun rose. A pile of sandy, decomposed granite soil was piled next to the grave, and four plain wooden boards spanned the hole.
We hand-carried Mrs. Shepard to the site and laid her shrouded corpse on the boards, where it hovered above the grave below. In her shroud, you could see the outline of her body. It was Grade A humility, just as burial would have been when this land was still wild—the only elements being a shovel, some wood, a shroud, and a dead man or woman. Three cemetery employees pulled Mrs. Shepard a few inches off the boards with long straps, as I knelt down and slid the boards out from beneath her. Then they lowered her while Tony the gravedigger hopped in beside her to see her safely to the dirt below.
After a moment of silence, the three men, working with shovels and rakes, brought the soil down, on top of Mrs. Shepard. Halfway through the process they placed a heavy layer of stone, to deter interested coyotes (this step appears to be mostly superstitious, as there is no evidence that natural cemeteries attract the notice of scavenger animals). Filling the grave took all of ten minutes. In other cemeteries, the burial process disturbs the grass, leaving the stark, obvious outline of a grave amid the symmetrical green landscape. When Tony and his crew had finished you couldn’t tell where the grave was. Mrs. Shepard had disappeared into the endless desert.
THAT IS WHAT I want in death: to disappear. If I’m lucky, I will disappear, swallowed by the ground like Mrs. Shepard. But that wouldn’t be my first choice.
In two minutes they re-appeared with the empty bier and white cloth; and scarcely had they closed the door when a dozen vultures swooped down upon the body, and were rapidly followed by others. In five minutes more we saw the satiated birds fly back and lazily settle down again upon the parapet. They had left nothing behind but a skeleton.
In 1876, The Times of London described that scene at a dakhma, known in the West by its ominous translation, tower of silence. That day, swarms of vultures devoured a human body down to its skeleton in minutes. This consumption is exactly what the Parsis (descendants of the Iranian followers of Zoroastrianism) desire for their corpses. The religion regards the elements—earth, fire, water—as sacred, not to be defiled by an unclean dead body. Cremation and burial are off-limits as disposal options.
The Parsis built their first towers of silence in the late thirteenth century. Today there are three towers that sit high on a hill in an exclusive, wealthy neighborhood in Mumbai. A circular brick amphitheater with an open ceiling, a tower of silence features concentric circles on which are placed the eight hundred dead bodies brought to the towers every year. The outer circle is for men, the middle circle for women, the innermost circle for children. In the center, the bones (post-vulture) are collected, to slowly decompose into the soil.
A Parsi funeral is an elaborate ritual. The body is covered in cow’s urine and washed by the family and attendants from the tower. There are recitations, a sacred burning fire, continuous vigils, and prayers throughout the night. Only then is the body brought into the tower.
This ancient ritual has hit a roadblock in recent years. There was a time when India had a vulture population of 400 million. In 1876, the swift devouring of the body was the norm. “Parsis speak of a time when vultures would be waiting for bodies at the towers of silence,” explained Harvard lecturer on Zoroastrianism Yuhan Vevaina. “Today, there are none.”
It is hard to cremate without fire. It is even harder to dispose of a body via vulture without vultures. The vulture population has dropped 99 percent. In the early 1990s, India allowed the use of diclofenac (a mild painkiller similar to ibuprofen) for ailing cattle. Hoof and udder pain were eased, but when the animal perished and the faithful vultures soared down for the meal, the diclofenac caused their kidneys to fail. It seems unfair that such iron-stomached creatures, used to devouring rotting carrion in the hot sun, could be felled by something akin to Advil.
Without the vultures, the bodies in the towers of silence lie waiting for the sky-dancers who will never show. The neighbors can smell them. Dhan Baria’s mother was placed in the tower when she died in 2005. One of the tower attendants told Baria that the bodies lie exposed and half rotten, with not a vulture in sight. She hired a photographer to sneak in, and the resulting photographs (showing bodies indeed lying exposed and half rotten) caused a scandal in the Parsi community.
The tower attendants tried to get around the lack of vultures. They set up mirrors to concentrate solar energy on a group of corpses, like a nine-year-old zapping bugs with a magnifying glass. But the solar blasting doesn’t work during the cloudy monsoon season. They tried pouring dissolving chemicals straight into the bodies, but that made an unpleasant mess. Family members like Dhan Baria ask why Parsis cannot shift and adapt their traditions, try burial or cremation so that bodies like her mother’s are not left intact on cold stone. But the priests are obstinate. Vultures or no, there will be no change to the towers of silence.
This is the ultimate irony. There are people in the United States enamored with the thought of giving their bodies to animals at the end of their lives—and we have more than enough vultures and other scavenger animals to pull it off. But the government, religious leaders, etc., would never allow such a vile spectacle on American soil. No, our leaders tell us: cremation and burial, those are your options.
Dhan Baria, and a growing number of Parsis disturbed at the treatment of their dead, would like to explore cremation or burial. No, their leaders tell them: vultures, that is your option.
SINCE I FIRST discovered sky burial I have known what I wanted for my mortal remains. In my view burial by animals is the safest, cleanest, and most humane way of disposing of corpses, and offers a new ritual that might bring us closer to the realities of death and our true place on this planet.
In the mountains of Tibet, where wood for cremation is scarce and the ground too rocky and frozen for burial, they have practiced celestial burial for thousands of years.
A dead man is wrapped in cloth in the fetal position, the position he was born from. Buddhist lamas chant over the body before it is handed over to the rogyapa, the body breaker. The rogyapa unwraps the body and slices into the flesh, sawing away the skin and strips of muscle and tendon. He sharpens his machete on nearby rocks. In his white apron, he resembles a butcher, the corpse appearing more animal than human.