Katrina Spade grew up on a dead-end dirt road in New Hampshire. Her family raised cows, and they ate what they raised. She watched the animals die -- sometimes naturally, sometimes slaughtered for food. Spade’s parents worked in the health-care industry and often spoke about their patients’ end-of-life struggles and their deaths. None of it was morbid to Spade. “From an early age,” she says, “I always had a good idea of the cycle of life.”
Later on, while she was pursuing a degree in architecture, Spade began thinking about Western death rituals. Dying is an inherent, natural part of life. Why, she wondered, did humans insist on being cremated or else embalmed with formaldehyde, sealed inside a lacquered casket and entombed in the ground? Both practices are harmful to the environment.
“They didn’t feel meaningful to me,” she says. “Back when I was thinking about cremation and burial, I didn’t want the very last thing I did on this earth to be toxic.”
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Sounds good to me. I'd rather go out being useful than as another underground or mantle piece souvenir. Take every organ possible for reuse, then compost the rest, please.
ReplyDeleteAOC is always trying to push a "Green Deal" she should set a good example and do this ASAP to show her support!
ReplyDeleteI would like my untreated rotting body to be placed in the lobby of greenpeace's headquarters permanently.
ReplyDeleteThat's sick! It's also BioHazardous Waste. Very dangerous.
ReplyDeleteShe could use it for her cauliflower garden that she is always taking about.
ReplyDeleteThis is going on right now in the Ginsburg house, she is dead and rotting but they are keeping her smelling fresh with Freebreeze.
ReplyDeletepelosi too
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ReplyDeleteMay 24, 2019 at 5:44 PM:
You eat "BioHazardous Waste" every day. Yep, dead meat. Seriously, how sick is that? That's what we are when we die, dead meat. Burying dead meat is not a hazard to anybody. Microorganisms will consume everything, leaving behind nothing but fertilizer that nourishes new growth and life. It's the cycle of life. Nothing sick about any of it. It's only in your head and your fear of death. When your casket is opened 100, 500, 1000 years from now, what they'll see...well that's what I call sick. Trying to preserve that which cannot be preserved forever, rather only for a very brief period of time. And then, time does what it does to the dead. Everybody rots eventually. You too, even in your casket.
Gee thanks for that tidbit. I was planning on looking pretty all dressed up in my casket for centuries.
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