Sitting on a folding chair in a bracken fern meadow, I’ve just watched my daughter plan and plant our section of a “green and natural cemetery.”
This is an excerpt from the Wild Ones Journal
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It is green because:
- No embalming fluids will be used. Such powerful poisons will never be here to leach into the water table.
- No casket. The corpse will be wrapped like a mummy in white fabric.
- No cremation. It takes two to three hours of fourteen-hundred-degree heat to convert a human body to ashes.
- All landscaping must be done with native plants. The funeral director gave us a list that matched our climate and soil type.
I chose a white oak, a wild rose, and nodding onions. The names sounded Midwestern, and would provide winter food for wildlife, and add seasonal design in snowless winters.
It is such a wonderful feeling to know that my death will result in more nutrition and protection of the soil and its dependent life. Today the little oak is only two feet tall. Some day a part of me will surely be a part of it.
I smile when I think of Lorrie Otto pushing for native-plant cemeteries. It is a little like Joe DiMaggio recommending Wheaties.
I’m now living with my daughter, in a one-bathroom house on one hundred acres of her land-trust forest, on the side of a mountain, with a stream and a working beaver dam. No mowing. No blowing.
And on this 2009 December day I want to wish all of you darlings the happiest of holidays.