Another Morbid Blog Entry.

I didn’t plan this, I swear! It just so happens that I was reading one of my green blogs today and found this article. It is extremely interesting, especially for those who are so organized as to have their own death planned and specific instructions left regarding their remains.

I will paraphrase so as not to bore you all, but for those so inclined, the whole article is here.

The greenest possible way to die is naked in a ditch so that wolverines can eat you and all of your bodily organs can ooze into the ground and fertilize plants. However, since most people haven’t lived as cavemen did, there are lots of toxins in your body, deceased or otherwise, so after the wolverines are done and you have oozed, those toxins go into the soil of the ditch. Also, it takes almost 12 years for a body left to its own devices to decompose. Nice if you've got the time, but what if you don't have the space? Green enough, but we can do better.

Enter Resomation. This is a process that reminds me of a little old lady burying her cat. In fact, veterinarians have been using this process for years. The body of your loved one is put in a tank filled with “a 1:21 solution of potash lye and water” (thats the part that reminds me of the little old lady. cooking up this concoction on the stove) where upon the magic of chemistry takes over. The body is essentially broken down into parts. A bit like taking a cake and breaking it down into sugar, flour, water and egg; except the body is broken down into salts, sugars, peptides, amino acids, and bone ash. The gooey stuff comes out as a “solution” that is great for soil, much like a VERY organic miracle-gro. The bone ash is similarly good for the ground, and is comparable to ashes left over from cremation, though without the other stuff that goes in the incinerator with the body. So, everything that comes out is everything that went in, in a different format. Pretty cool eh? Plus the whole thing looks very much like the standard funeral and body processing, except that everything is nice for the planet. The only addition to the coffin is a silk lining that becomes a silk bag inside the resomator. I wonder if you can rent a coffin, because you’d only really need it for whatever funeral or visitations are planned.

Another thing that the mention is that the process does no harm to prosthetics or implants. Meaning that once you are broken into goo and bone ash, all of the things that were put into you to keep you living can be sifted out, sterilized and used again to help someone else keep living. There has been talk of giving them to third world or developing countries where prosthetics are almost impossible to find and where they probably wouldn’t mind as much that it was originally in someone else.

All in all it sounds pretty cool. And when you’re dead, since you don’t care much at that point, your loved ones can feel better that your life ended, but your remains have fed a tree, or helped a garden.

” Myself, I've always had different plans for my burial, and it just so happens that this process fits my plans perfectly! I have been assured by Mr. Sullivan [the inventor and proprietor of this method] that if I were so inclined, I could preserve the structure of the bones rather than powdering them. I would have my skull reinforced and then filled with soil (fertilized with my own bio-gunk). In that soil, I'd have them plant a seed for what would grow up to become a huge tree bearing fruit! A hundred years later, the neighborhood kids would still be scared witless of that tree, where a crazy old fool was buried (Alive, the rumors say!) and then a tree grew out of his eye socket! The ghost tree would be the stuff of legends, I say! Legends!”