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My mother passed away a few weeks ago. It was her wish to go with Recompose. She was a master gardener, and to her, the idea of returning to the ecosystem was s
by lph 5y ago
My mother passed away a few weeks ago. It was her wish to go with Recompose. She was a master gardener, and to her, the idea of returning to the ecosystem was so much better than cremation or a cemetery. Through Recompose, her 'soil' will be donated to a reforesting project.
As you can imagine, I've ruminated a lot on this lately. What's the purpose of a tombstone, or a plaque, or an urn full of ashes? To memorialize, or to honor someone who is gone? I don't need a monument for that. I spent a couple of hours yesterday propagating roses with my six-year old daughter, her grand-daughter. That's a better way to honor my mother, I think, and she would agree.
As old-world tradition and religiosity fade, we can all find our own new ways to do these things. This is 'meaning-making', an interesting term I learned recently.
Incidentally, her gardening buddies were intrigued to learn about human composting. I think Recompose is going to be big.
- mrkurt 5y agoI'm sorry for your loss. I got a lot out of reading this comment and I appreciate that you shared it.
- flycaliguy 5y agoI walk around a cemetery as part of my daily walk when I let my mind wander. Two big topics in my town are real estate and reconciliation with aboriginal people. Something about this giant plot of land covered in European names just seems so strange.
- maininformer 5y agoI fully agree with you mother, may she rest in peace. I have been thinking as well, what if after passing away of a family member we plant their favorite fruit tree with them. After generations there will be a beautiful garden. People usually laugh at this idea; maybe rightfully so, but there is something profound in it about feeding the plants and by proxy animals and fellow people who fed us.
- ford_o 5y agoFor one, tombstone cannot lead to prion desease.
- civilized 5y agoI really doubt that anyone is going to get prions from composted human remains used in a reforesting project.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoWith respect to graves especially, they are an archeological treasure trove. If in the far far future we develop a means of resurrecting the dead, the epitaphs on tombstones may be used to determine who deserves resurrection. But of course this is extremely fanciful speculation.
- science4sail 5y ago> If in the far far future we develop a means of resurrecting the dead, the epitaphs on tombstones may be used to determine who deserves resurrection. But of course this is extremely fanciful speculation. That's unlikely unless the dead person is exceptionally well-preserved (or you're just creating Generic Human Body #42 and giving it the dead person's name). Brain structure doesn't really survive current burial/embalming techniques and I imagine that any sort of "immortal soul" may have long left by then. Cryonics aims for this sort of far-future resurrection, but even it has problems about viability.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoI was thinking more along the lines of technology that can scan back through time, and record a person's neural patterns at the point of death. This would require being able to open at least observation-only portals through time, or that there exist some high-fidelity natural recordings of events on Earth encoded in some substrate in the universe, that last millions of years, and that are high-resolution enough to enable full copying of the past state of a human brain, that one day humanity could recover. How such a feat could be accomplished, I don't know, but capabilities that seem impossible today may become possible with millions of years of technological progress, especially if the exponential phase of technological progress continues for a while longer.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y agoThanks for writing this. My mother is a master gardener also, and I'm curious how she feels about this option, so now I'll go find out. I doubt she's heard of it, but I can't imagine her views will differ from those of your mother. I think in some ways, a monument helps people compartmentalize the loss in a literal way: there's a place they can go to visit, mourn, remember, etc. I imagine many people struggle with this in some form. I knew someone who drove around for years with a friend's ashes in a jar ("the copilot") before eventually spreading them somewhere scenic. Roses are indeed a fine monument.
- pazimzadeh 5y agoSome religions take a similar tact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence
- southeastern 5y agoIslam also doesn't treat bodies with preservative. Generally now people are buried at most in a wooden coffin. It's somewhat modern that we have coffins made of processed wood and are able to preserve dead people