Wyrd Death Rituals

The strange ways dominant culture has warped our tending the dead

I left a sheep’s head to rot in front of our porch a few weeks ago. We killed her here, to have meat for a little while. We dried her hide to have as a little sitting mat by the woodstove, made bone broth from her bones, and cleaned her sinew to sew with. I put her head and her feet facing the porch, so I could watch as death turns into life again. I wanted to see how quickly it happens here in the damp woods, where the ground is feet-thick of loamy, spongey decomposing death of all flavors. Dark rusty-ruby red cedar bodies wearing a lace of mycelial white, black plant bodies in black soil, roots thick and twisted. The maggots came in fast, and within a day somehow removed all of her hair. It all fell off, which has me wondering if they ate it off at the root? They infested her eyes, and mouth, and nasal cavities, thriving and writhing in a wriggly boil. For days they were spilling out of her open jaw, down her lolling tongue. I thought it was quite perfect for Samhain. May I be so lucky as to be eaten by maggots one day when I die, somewhere that allows such a thing as bodily decomposition. It is truly amazing to see how many flies were laid and born in that skull. Thousands, certainly. Oh, the boisterous little frogs around here are feasting upon them! And the fat bottomed spiders who so bravely weave their forest webs are delighted. The opossums with their freaky little chompers love maggots like candy. And I actually saw a bat the other night, darkly flashing above the skull. The nourishment of that sheep’s skull is now in the bellies and bodies of thousands of other beings. Death feeds life.

I see that the pace of the rotting is ushered along by the maggot dance, as the skull melts into the ground, releasing minerals and nutrients into the soil. Looking at her often from the porch keeps me present here, where my flesh is supple and warm, my breath fills my lungs, I can eat and read and snuggle my sweetheart in the cold autumn mornings. We are alive, for a time, and every day is an astounding miracle. It won’t be this way much longer, even if I live to be an old woman. I’ll die, and one day not that far off, everyone I know will have maggots filling their nose and throat, Gods willing. Or I suppose they might opt out of such life-giving arrangements and go for a chemical preservative, in a chemically preserved coffin, in a manicured cemetery, in a grave lined with cement to keep the rot at bay.

It is direly important to plan what you want to happen to your body. Unfortunately, when someone dies, the family is often caught with their pants down - unprepared and uneducated about their choices, rights, and options. Then a funeral home sweeps in, offers a 10,000 dollar funeral package, and whisks the body away to “take care of it”. Most folks aren’t aware of the implications of how their dead are treated, (both for the dead themselves but also the earthly impacts of poisons, toxins, preservatives, fossil fuels, etc) and that there are many options for how to proceed with caring for your dead.

It is pretty standard for bodies to be embalmed, without permission, even though there is no law saying it has to be so, and even when the body is about to be cremated. It is estimated that upwards of 5.3 million gallons of embalming fluid (ie formaldehyde, and other poisons) is buried every year in cemeteries. Imagine what that does to the ground. According to my research, embalming in this country started as a serious business during the civil war, when soldiers died far from their homes in the humid, hot south. Criminals, outlaws, and men on the fringe started experimenting with chemical concoctions, sawdust, and anything at hand to preserve bodies enough for them to be shipped home for burial. Now, I’m not certain what the justifications for it are.

There is a deep cultural fear of dead bodies as ‘diseased’ and ‘unsafe’, and some folks feel like if you liquify their guts and pump them full of chemicals that it makes them clean. I once read a description of how the funeral home prepares a body for embalming. They have a sharp vaccum-like instrument that they insert into the body cavity and aggressively stab and jab into the stomach area to sort of liquify a person’s organs to suck them out. Honestly, the thought of someone doing that to my lover or my mother is enough for me to opt out, let alone the consequences of saturating a body in poison before putting them in the ground.

The standard options for a cemetery burial have immense consequences for resource extraction as well. Here is a quote from the Funeral Consumer’s Alliance.

“Each year US cemeteries bury over 30 million board feet of hardwood and 90,000 tons of steel in caskets, 17,000 tons of steel and copper in vaults, and 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete in vaults.”

When I read these numbers, I can’t quite comprehend what they actually mean. So, I just ran some data to try to understand what this is saying. Bear with me -

I found this concrete calculator https://www.calculator.net/concrete-calculator.html to estimate how much concrete would be needed for a 1 mile, one lane road. I got 977.78 yards, which I then entered into a yards to tons calculator here https://calculator-online.net/yards-to-tons-calculator/ and ended up with 1584.01 tons. So, lets divide our 1.6 million tons by 1584.01 to get 1010, which is the amount of miles we can pave with that much concrete. To give some perspective, every single year the US is burying the equivalent of a highway from Seattle to South Dakota in cemeteries. But why does that matter?

Have you ever wondered about concrete and cement, the most widely used building materials in the world? Quite a few years ago I got fixated on what concrete and cement actually are, and what their implications are in leaking poisonous waste materials into the ground and water. One day during this intense phase of research and inquiry, I happened to ride my bike past a concrete and cement factory in the warehouse district of Seattle. Luckily, I was with a fearless friend who was just as curious as I, so we just walked into the factory yard. There were a handful of orange clad workers milling about, somehow not interested in us at all, these two strange kids on bikes looking around in astonishment. I saw someone with a clipboard, and so I walked up to him and asked the question that had been fueling my research for weeks.

“What is cement??”

To which he looked at me with utter bewilderment.

“What??” he scoffed, still confused.

“What is cement??? I’m just so curious about what it is actually made of. I’m a college student and I’m writing a paper” (which I most definitely was not).

Well it was my lucky day, because this man was actually the man who was in charge of mixing all of the various ingredients of different types of cement and concrete. The clipboard in his hand was actually all of the ingredient lists for all the different grades of cement. There were dozens (maybe more?) of chemicals, and as he flipped through describing how each grade differs, I saw flame retardant listed. I asked him why they had to use flame retardant. I couldn’t understand how something like concrete or cement could be flammable. He explained that they use so many flammable ingredients in the manufacturing of cement that the cement itself becomes flammable. Holy moly.

So of course I left the factory and continued my studies. If cement was so full of chemicals that it was actually flammable, do those chemicals leach? How much? For how long? It surprised me that I thought concrete and cement were inert - just sortof like stone. Turns out they totally leak all sorts of gnarly stuff, including heavy metals, for the entirety of their existance. Studies have been done monitoring antimony, arsenic, barium, chromium, copper, lead, manganese, mercury, nickel, selenium, sulfur (as sulfate), zinc, cadmium, thallium, and vanadium. It even looks like the older concrete, rather than leaking less (I would think that it gets sort of washed out over time) actually leeches more. Oof.

Here is a great info graphic that I came across that really helps sum it all up.

And all this for what exactly? When really all we need to do is literally put a dead body in a shallow hole in the ground. It is already a perfect system. No resources required, other than a shovel. It’s bewildering how we have gotten so far off track with all these insane industries confusing our rituals of dying. When one of my dearest friends committed suicide, I helped dig her grave on her land, in the ferns and mushrooms, among the tall trees dancing overhead. I laid in it, kissed the ground, and felt what it would be like for her to rest there. It is so simple, if you can do it at home. We plant dead bodies, so that they can create life again. So that the bugs and maggots and mycelium can eat the fertility and nourishment and sprout into livingness once again. It can’t really happen the same in conventional cemeteries. And home burials are tricky in some states, including Washington. There are some green burial options, but unfortunately, ‘green burial’ cemeteries are often prohibitively expensive. One I was looking at in Colorado charges a minimum of 7,000. To dig a hole.

I’ve heard of other options popping up. Water cremation, human composting, etc. To be honest, I’m not convinced that they are better than just putting someone in the ground. I don’t understand why you have to have an entire company dedicated to “composting” a human when the earth just does it naturally. And without plastic, or money, or a website.

So my dears, it is incredibly important to do your research. May it be that there continue to be more options for us to bury our own dead. Plan out your death now, with an advanced directive, even if you are in your 20’s and think you’re never going to die. Go to green cemeteries, get the handouts, start preparing, look around. Talk to your parents. Get it written down.

Know that your dead ones are your ‘legal property’, and that you have every right to be with them, take care of them, and tend to them, in your own home. Usually, the law says you can have a dead body as long as it is “refrigerated”, which ice packs count for. Talk to the hospitals around you about how this would work for them, if someone you knew died in that hospital, but you wanted to take them home to care for them. What paperwork would you need? A certificate of transport? From where? Townhall? In my experience, most hospitals don’t actually know the laws around this, because most people outsource the care of their dead to the funeral homes. When my father was dying in the hospital, I called them to tell them of my plans to pick him up in my pickup truck. They were not stoked to hear this. They transferred me many times, told me it was illegal, even though I had the law printed out in front of me that I read back to them. They kept telling me that I needed a funeral home, which was bullshit. I ended up yelling at a nurse, telling her that if my dad died, I would be there with my truck to get my dead father and there was nothing they could do about it. He actually didn’t die that time around, though it was close. I ended up returning home, and then when he was hospitalized the final time I flew back out, so I didn’t have my truck. Luckily an alternative funeral home worked with me and transported him. I rented their chapel to hold a 24 hour vigil with him before the body company came to take him away. I still chuckle to think of if I had arrived in my truck, all duct taped together with a broken window and the front end all smashed up.

Know that funeral homes legally have to sell you their services a la carte - meaning that you don’t have to buy the 10,000 dollar funeral package. You can hire them just to file paperwork, etc.

Know that there are other options out there, but start doing the work now, before someone dies and the big grief hits. Trying to navigate these realms with a well resourced mind is difficult enough. During grief it is a nightmare. We can reclaim these ways together, one step at a time.