Category: Burial

The official Death Becomes You gift guide!

~ cwirka
The last Noel

This isn’t a death doula gift guide or anything like that. I support any effort to promote the de-stigmatizing death, but I have no fashion tips or art suggestions or quirky knick-knacks to have around your place to celebrate death in our lives. Sorry.

Honestly – don’t buy new stuff. If you can, give people something you make or has meaning to you. Part of promoting a good death (and a good life) means re-framing priorities. Capitalism is not helping.

But perhaps you’re dead set on giving a unique gift.

May I suggest a brick?

Get your friends and loved ones a brick! Get one for yourself, even!

I got a brick

Benefits of a Brick

  • Each one is unique. None of the flawlessly dull or dully flawless elements of modern tech.
  • Never needs charging.
  • No updates. Depending on how you plan on using it, a “vintage” brick is just as effective as a brand new one.
  • No subscriptions or plans to sign up for.
  • And, if you’re like me, you probably only need one. No need to replenish!

Now, it should be noted, I bought myself a higher-priced brick, but I also frame it as purchasing property and making an investment in the future. For now the brick is a nice/odd addition to the apartment. When I’ve died, 23 grams of cremated me goes into the hole in the middle of the brick, gets fired up, and the brick will then be part of the People’s Pyramid. It’s fun and weird and silly and creative. I highly recommend reading more about it.

Artist’s Rendition of the People’s Pyramid

I’ve been thinking about bricks and gifts and building materials and death. A few years back I was working at a Minoan archeological site on a tiny Greek island called Mochlos. It was not a season for excavation, instead the focus was on shoring up these exposed walls. As it turns out, being buried makes for good protection from the elements; now that the walls are dug up, effort has to be put in to ensure they stay up. So, there I was, sweating in the sun somewhere in the Aegean, doing masonry work on walls that were first put up 5,000 years ago. Working with the same ancient bricks, with the same simple goal of wall building. Measured in bricks, the past isn’t so far away.

Working with stones – “nature’s bricks“

Sometimes it’s good to view time from a less-human perspective, or think about time in lifetimes that aren’t roughly 80 earth years. To think of time in tree-lives or brick-lives. Sometimes using precise measuring terms doesn’t quite get across how time feels.

You could point at a wall from an ancient (or even not so ancient) site and say, “these bricks have been around for hundreds or thousands of years, these bricks have seen countless events and leaders, and still they stand!“

Well, of course “still they stand!” It’s what bricks do. It’s why we still use them. Honestly, it’s the least remarkable thing about bricks. If a building stops standing, it’s rarely because the bricks stopped working.

Enjoy a simple brick as a memorial. It’s a (very) long term investment.

ComPosthumous

~ cwirka

The start of 2023 found the State of New York joining Washington, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Vermont as a state that permits human composting. Pretty great! Better for the earth. More wholesome. Nice for the fungi.

Now, despite the fact that humans have been putting bodies in the ground regularly for -oh, I dunno – over 100,000 years, there’s scant history of using human remains as an agricultural resource. Compost Magazine (yes, really), found this quote from Plutarch observing the aftermath of battle (via Agricultural History magazine):

They say that the soil, after the bodies had rotted and the winter rains had fallen, was so fertilized and saturated with the putrefied matter which sank into it, that it produced an unusual crop the next season.

Greeks weren’t the only ones to take note, the Arabs did as well. Ibn al-‘Awwām wrote the Book of Agriculture back in the 12th century or so. He too noted that “blood has prodigious virtue to revive some trees and plants” – not getting too specific about what sort of blood we’re talking about.

Of a grimmer nature is the write-up from an 1822 edition of London’s Gentleman’s Magazine:

The Nautical Register says, that “It is estimated that more that a million of bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe, into the port of Hull. The neighborourhood of Leipsic, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late blood war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero, and the horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull, and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone-grinders, who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granulary state. (…) The oily substance of the bone gradually evolving as the bone calcines, makes a more permanent and substantial manure than almost any other substance – particularly human bones.

With all this in mind, it’s nice to see the idea of human composting as a return to earth in a positive sense, bringing about new life. As long as you don’t have Ebola or tuberculosis, you too can become plant food! While still very much a niche industry, I think it’s a path worth pursuing. It’s more environmentally friendly than other methods – the carbon emissions from cremation are terrible, and the embalming chemicals in a buried body are good for nothing but preserving the body (and bad for just about everything else). Plus, what a nice “full circle” way to wrap up. 

I’m still hoping for a sky burial (oh to be interred in an oxymoron…), but this is a good plan(t) B.