The pyre funeral is so appealing that some people have even bought land in Crestone just to qualify for an open-air cremation. A forty-two-year-old woman dying of cervical cancer obtained a small plot of land, and when she died her twelve-year-old daughter helped prepare her body for the pyre.
This existential longing for the pyre’s fiery embrace is common worldwide. In India, family members transport dead bodies to a row of cremation pyres along the banks of the Ganges River. When a father dies, his pyre will be lit by his eldest son. As the flames grow hotter, his flesh bubbles and burns away. At just the right time, a wooden staff is brought forth and used to crack open the dead man’s skull. At that moment, it is believed the man’s soul is released.
A son, describing the cremations of his parents, wrote that “before [breaking the skull], you shiver—for this person was alive just a few hours back—but once you hit the skull, you know what burns in front of you is after all just a body. All attachments are gone.” The soul is set free, as an Indian spiritual song intones over a loudspeaker: “Death, you think you have defeated us, but we sing the song of burning firewood.”
Pittu Laugani, a Hindu living in the West, explains the pain of witnessing a commercial, industrialized cremation. Instead of placing the body onto the wood of the pyre, mourners watch the coffin “slide off on an electrically operated carousel and drop into a concealed hole.” Locked away in the steel and brick-lined chamber, when the skull cracks open, the man’s soul will be imprisoned in the machine, forced to mingle with the thousands of other souls the machine has trapped. It will be an akal mrtya, a bad death. For the family, the whole process “can be an unnerving and even grotesque experience.”
Davender Ghai, a Hindu activist, has fought Newcastle City Council in England for years to legalize pyres like the one in Crestone. Ghai won the court battle, and open-air pyres may soon be a reality in the U.K. He explained that “being bundled into a box and incinerated in a furnace is not my idea of dignity, much less the performance of an ancient sacrament.”
It would be simple to allow open-air pyres in any community that wanted them. Yet government cemetery and funeral boards put up enormous resistance to the idea. Like the curmudgeonly neighbors in Crestone, they argue that outdoor pyres would prove too hard to control, and that they would impact air quality and the environment in unknown ways. Crestone has proven that open-air pyres can be inspected for safety compliance just like any industrial crematory. Environmental agencies can run tests to determine the environmental impact, and regulate accordingly. So why do these local governments continue to resist?
The answer is as bleak as it is obvious: money. The average American funeral costs $8,000 to $10,000—not including the burial plot and cemetery costs. A Crestone End of Life funeral costs $500, technically a donation “to cover wood, fire department presence, stretcher, and land use.” To put this cost in perspective, that’s roughly 5 percent of the price of a traditional American funeral. If you don’t have the money but are a member of the community, the nonprofit will even forgo its fee. Ghai promises a similar model for pyre cremations in the U.K. He plans to charge ￡900, but says “we will do this as a charity, for free. They only need to find the land.”
In the twenty-first century, removing money and profit from death is almost unheard of, mostly because it is so difficult to accomplish. After Hurricane Katrina, a group of Benedictine monks in southern Louisiana began selling low-cost, handmade cypress caskets. The state’s Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors drummed up a cease-and-desist order, claiming that only funeral homes licensed by their board could sell “funeral merchandise.” Eventually a federal judge sided with the monks, saying it was clear there was no public health risk from the sale of the caskets, and the motivation of the board was solely economic protectionism.
Legally and logistically, circumventing the funeral industry and its regulations to create a nonprofit death service for a community is nearly impossible. In this landscape, where funeral boards are coming after monks—monks!—it is a challenge to convey how truly astounding the accomplishments at Crestone are.
THE MORNING AFTER the funeral in Crestone, I entered the cremation circle and was greeted by two adorable dogs bounding around the pyre. McGregor, Stephanie’s brother and volunteer ash gatherer, had arrived early that morning to sift through Laura’s remains, four and a half gallons of bone and cinders. From the ash pile he pulled out the largest bone fragments—chunks of femur, rib, and skull—which some families like to take home and keep as relics.
There were significantly more ashes in this pile than after a typical commercial cremation, which leaves only as much remains as can fit in a Folgers coffee can. In California, we are required to grind the bones in a silver machine called a Cremulator until they are “unrecognizable bone fragments.” The state frowns on distributing the larger, recognizable bones to the family.
Several of Laura’s friends wanted a portion of the ashes, and any excess would be scattered in the hills around the pyre or further into the mountains. “She would have loved that,” Jason said. “She’s everywhere now.”
I asked Jason if anything had changed for him since the cremation yesterday. “My mom brought me up to see the pyre the last time I visited. I was confused, I thought that I was going to have to sit on that bench there and cremate my mom alone, all by myself. It seemed so morbid. Three days ago I was horrified at what I was coming to Crestone to do. But Mom had told me, ‘This is what I’ve chosen for my body, you can come or not.’ ”
When Jason arrived for his mother’s wake in her home, things began to shift. By the time of the cremation, he had realized that he had a whole community by his side. There were talks and songs, and he allowed himself to be supported by everyone who loved his mother. “That was moving to me. It changed things.”
Crouched down over the ashes, McGregor explained to Laura’s son Jason what they were looking at. He demonstrated how brittle the bones were after being subjected to the heat, crumbling a small fragment into ash with his hand.
“What’s this?” Jason asked, pulling out a small piece of metal from the pile. It was the iridescent face of a Swatch watch that Laura had been wearing when she was brought to the pyre. Warped into rainbow colors by the heat of the fire, it was stopped forever at 7:16 a.m.—the moment the flames took hold.
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* There is one other pyre, a private pyre, at the Shambala Mountain Center, a Buddhist retreat in northern Colorado.
INDONESIA
SOUTH SULAWESI