About six months ago I came face to face with my own mortality, but didn’t even know it. Yet, as you can see, it wasn’t time. But then I read an interview with Suzanne Kelly in The Sun (August 2024 issue) about green burial and mortality. Wow! Talk about timing. She says death isn’t some terrible thing: in our death with a green burial we are brought back into a vital relationship with earth and all its living things, from plants to insects to other animals. (And I like to think rocks and rivers, too.) And there’s comfort in knowing that someday they will die too; it’s a circle of life, of which we are all a part.

Of course we mourn the loss of a loved one; it’s only natural. But we can also celebrate the life of the deceased. It’s happening more and more often, and is a kind of party. In many traditions, the deceased is simply placed in a shroud, and then placed, without benefit of a mortician, into the ground. It’s not so common in this country and the western world, and it’s hard to find a place where it’s allowed. But can you imagine? The mourners could decorate the shroud–tie-dyed, for example? I think of a late friend of mine and I laugh: she was Jewish, so I’m pretty sure she was buried in a shroud, and given her joy in life, I imagine she went to her grave laughing all the way. Yet many people want to preserve the deceased’s body so they look as much as possible as they did in life. They’re placed in elaborate caskets, which are often open at a “viewing” and then, driven in a shiny black hearse, followed in cars of the surviving friends and family, in a (painfully) slow procession to the cemetery, and placed in a grave, often lined, to avoid as much as possible all contact with dirt, thus denying the realities of the earth. (“From dust you came, and from dust you shall return.” What’s so terrible about that?)

Really, in a green burial, we are almost like compost (which, although I know some people do that, seems, to me at least, a bit beyond the pale), feeding the earth richly. I think that of the three major ways to go–casket, cremation, or green burial–I would like the latter best. I wouldn’t be as afraid as I would be with the others: what if they made a mistake? And I would, even dead, be embarrassed to having people staring at me and making comments (oh, how natural he looks!), etc.

All of this reminds me of a true story from the nineteenth century in the United States. A young boy is dying and knows it. He watches his father build the coffin and dig the grave. And the boy says to the father that he is afraid, afraid of the dark: could he have a window in his coffin so he can see light? And the grieving father, fighting back tears, says yes, and makes him a window.

Green Burial

Death is my friend, reached
one day with cessation
of debilitating pain. I will
know true peace,

the only sound that of my
decay. Yet my death is
the road to sadness
for my friends: they

cry out in despair at my
green burial, not understanding
that nothing, not even life,
is permanent,

and neither is death. It is simply
another form of life, upon which
the earth and its beings feast.

******

Now that’s a party. Go cheap on the burial,
and bring out a keg of the best beer. Get down!

Yikes! I’m Spike!