by Mary Roach
America’s first crematory was built in 1874, on the estate of Francis Julius LeMoyne, a retired physician, abolitionist, and champion of education. Though his credentials as a social reformer were impressive, his beliefs about personal hygiene may have worked against him in his crusade for funereal cleanliness and purity. According to Prothero, he believed that “the human body was never intended by its Creator to come in contact with water,” and, as such, traveled about in his own personal miasma.
LeMoyne’s first customer was one Baron Le Palm, who was to be incinerated in a public ceremony to which national and European press had been invited. Le Palm’s reasons for requesting cremation remain murky, but somewhere in the mix was a deep-seated fear of live burial, for he claimed to have met a woman who had been buried alive (presumably not very deeply). As things turned out, Mr. Le Palm was finished some months before the crematory was, and had to be preserved. He fell victim to the spotty and improvisational embalming techniques of the day, and wasn’t looking his best when rowdier elements of the crowd—uninvited townsfolk, mainly—pulled the sheet from his earthly remains. Crude jokes were made. School-children snickered. Reporters from newspapers across the country criticized the carnival air of the proceedings and the lack of religious ritual and due solemnity. Cremation was all but doomed to an early grave.
Prothero posits that LeMoyne had erred in presenting a more or less secular ceremony. His unsentimental memorial speech, devoid of references to the Hereafter and the Almighty, and the bare, utilitarian design of his crematory (reporters likened it to “a bake oven” and “a large cigar box”) offended the sensibilities of Americans used to Victorian-style funerals with their formal masses and their profusely flowered, ornately appointed caskets. America was not ready for pagan funerals. It would not be until 1963—when the Catholic Church, in the wake of the reforms of Vatican II, relaxed the ban on cremation—that disposal by incineration would start to take hold in a serious way. (1963 was a banner year for cremation. It was that summer that The American Way of Death, the late Jessica Mitford’s exposé of deceit and greed in the burying business, came out.)
What has inspired funeral reformers throughout history, Prothero maintains, has been a distaste for pomp and religious pageantry. They may hand out pamphlets detailing the horrors and health risks of the grave, but what really bothered them was the waste and fakery of the traditional Christian funeral: the rococo coffins, the hired mourners, the expense, the wasted land. Freethinkers like LeMoyne envisioned a purer, simpler, back-to-basics approach. Unfortunately, as Prothero points out, these men have tended to take mortuary utilitarianism too far, outraging the churches and alienating the public. Take the American doctor who put forth a plan to boost the dead’s utility by skinning them prior to cremation and making leather. Take the Italian professor who advocated burning cadaveric fat in streetlamps, speculating that the 250 people who died each day in New York would yield 30,600 pounds of fuel daily. Take the cremationist Sir Henry Thompson, who sat down and calculated the value in pounds sterling of the 80,000-odd people who died each year in London, should their cremated remains be used as fertilizer. It worked out to about £50,000, though the customers, should any have emerged, would have been dealt a raw deal, as cremains make lousy fertilizer. If you wanted to fertilize your garden with dead people, you were better off doing it the Hay way. Dr. George Hay was a Pittsburgh chemist who advocated pulverizing dead bodies so that they would—to quote an 1888 newspaper article on the topic—“return to the elements as soon as possible, if for no other purpose than to furnish a fertilizer.” Here is Hay, quoted at length in the article, which is pasted into a scrapbook belonging to the Historical Collection of the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The machines might be so contrived as to break the bones first in pieces the size of a hen egg, next into fragments of the size of a marble, and the mangled and lacerated mass could next be reduced by means of chopping machines and steam power to mincemeat. At this stage we have a homogeneous mixture of the entire body structures in the form of a pulpous mass of raw meat and raw bones. This mass should now be dried thoroughly by means of steam heat at a temperature of 250 Fahr…. because firstly we wish to reduce the material to a condition convenient for handling and secondly we wish to disinfect it…. Once in this condition, it would command a good price for the purpose of manure.
Which brings us, ready or not, to the modern human compost movement. Here we must travel to Sweden, to a tiny island called Lyrön, due west of Gothenburg. This is the home of a forty-seven-year-old biologist-entrepreneur named Susanne Wiigh-Masak. Two years ago, Wiigh-Masak founded a company called Promessa, which seeks to replace cremation (the choice of 70 percent of Swedes) with a technologically enhanced form of organic composting. This is no mom-and-pop undertaking of the lunatic Green fringe. Wiigh-Masak has King Carl Gustav and the Church of Sweden on her side. She has crematoria vying to be the first to compost a dead Swede. She has the dead Swede ready to go (a terminally ill man who contacted her after hearing her on the radio; he has since taken up residence in a freezer in Stockholm). She has major corporate backing, an international patent, over two hundred press clips. Mortuary professionals and entrepreneurs from Germany, Holland, Israel, Australia, and the United States have expressed interest in representing Promessa’s technology in their own countries.
She appears to be doing, in a matter of years, what took the cremationists a century.
This is especially impressive given that what she is proposing has its closest precedent in the ideas of Dr. George Hay. Let’s say a man dies in Upsala, and that he has checked the box on the church-distributed living will that says, “I want that the new method freeze-drying ecological funeral will be used if it is available when I die.” (The equipment is still being developed; Wiigh-Masak hopes to have it ready sometime in 2003.) The man’s body will be brought to an establishment that has licensed Promessa’s technology. He will be lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen and frozen. From here he will progress to the second chamber, where either ultrasound waves or mechanical vibration will be used to break his easily shattered self* into small pieces, more or less the size of ground chuck. The pieces, still frozen, will then be freeze-dried and used as compost for a memorial tree or shrub, either in a churchyard memorial park or in the family’s yard.
The difference between George Hay and Susanne Wiigh-Masak is that Hay, in suggesting that we feed crops with the dead, was simply trying to be practical, to do something beneficial and useful with a dead human body. Wiigh-Masak is not a utilitarian. She is an environmentalist. And in parts of Europe, environmentalism is tantamount to its own religion. For this reason, I think, she may just succeed.
To understand Wiigh-Masak’s catechism, it helps to pay a visit to her compost pile. It lies beside the barn on the acre and a half that she and her family rent on Lyrön. Wiigh-Masak shows her compost pile to guests the way an American homeowner might show off the new entertainment center, or the youngest son’s grades. It is her pride and, it is no exaggeration to say, her joy.
She pushes a shovel into the heap and raises a loamy clod. It is complex and full of unnamable fragments, like a lasagna baked by an unsupervised child. She points out feathers from a duck that died a few weeks back, shells from the mussels that her husband, Peter, farms on the other side of the island, cabbage from last week’s coleslaw. She explains the difference between rotting and composting, that the needs of humans and the needs of compost are similar: oxygen, water, air temperature that does not stray far from 37 degrees centigrade. Her point: We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week’s coleslaw. Thus we should respect Nature, and when we die, we should give ourselves back to the earth.
As though sensing that she and I might not be entirely on the same page, perhaps not even in the same general vicinity of the Dewey decimal system, Wiigh-Masak asks me
if I compost. I explain that I don’t have a garden. “Ah, okay.” She considers this fact. I get the feeling that to Wiigh-Masak, this is not so much an explanation as a criminal confession. I am feeling more like last week’s coleslaw than usual.
She returns to the clod. “Compost should not be ugly,” she is saying. “It should be lovely, it should be romantic.” She feels similarly about dead bodies. “Death is a possibility for new life. The body becomes something else. I would like that that something else be as positive as possible.” People have criticized her, she says, for lowering the dead to the level of garden waste. She doesn’t see it that way. “I say, let’s lift garden waste to as high a level as human bodies.” What’s she’s trying to say is that nothing organic should be treated as waste. It should all be recycled.
I am waiting for Wiigh-Masak to put down the shovel, but now it is coming closer. “Smell it,” she offers. I would not go so far as to say that her compost smells romantic, but it does not smell like rotting garbage. Compared to some of the things I’ve been smelling these days, it’s a pot of posies.
Susanne Wiigh-Masak will not be the first person to compost a human body. That honor goes to an American named Tim Evans. I heard about Evans while visiting the University of Tennessee’s human decay research facility (see Chapter 3). As a graduate student, Evans had investigated human composting as an option for third-world countries where the majority of the people can’t afford coffins or cremation. In Haiti and parts of rural China, Evans told me, unclaimed bodies and bodies from poor families are often dumped in open pits. In China, the corpses are then burned using high-sulfur coal.
In 1998, Evans procured the body of a ne’er-do-well whose family had donated him to the university. “He never knew he was going to end up as compost guy,” recalled Evans, when I telephoned him. This was probably just as well. To supply the requisite bacteria to break down the tissue, Evans composted the body with manure and soiled wood shavings from stables. The dignity issue rears its delicate head. (Wiigh-Masak would not be using manure; she plans to mix a “little dose” of freeze-dried bacteria in with each box of remains. )
And because the man was buried whole, Evans had to go out with a shovel and rake to aerate him three or four times. This is why Wiigh-Masak plans to break bodies up, with either vibration or ultrasound. The tiny pieces are easily saturated with oxygen and so quickly composted and assimilated that they can be used immediately for a planting. It was also, in part, a matter of dignity and aesthetics. “The body has to be unrecognizable while it composts,” says Wiigh-Masak. “It has to be in small pieces. Can you imagine the family sitting around the dinner table and someone says, ‘Okay, Sven, it’s your turn to go out and turn Mother’?”
Indeed, Evans had something of a rough go of it, though in his case it was more the setting than the deed. “It was hard being out there,” he told me. “I used to think, ‘What am I doing here?’ I’d just put on my blinders and go to my pile.”
It took a month and a half for compost guy to complete his return to the soil. Evans was pleased with the result, which he described as “really dark, rich stuff, with good moisture-holding capacity.” He offered to send me a sample, which might or might not have been illegal. (You need a permit to ship an unembalmed cadaver across state lines, but there is nothing on the books regarding the shipping of a composted cadaver. We decided to leave it be.) Evans was pleased to note that a healthy crop of weeds had begun growing out of the top of the compost bin toward the end of the process. He had been concerned about certain fatty acids in the body, which might, if not thoroughly broken down, prove toxic to plant roots.
In the end, the government of Haiti respectfully declined Evans’s proposal. The Chinese government—in what was either a remarkable show of environmental concern or a desire to save money, manure being cheaper than coal—did express interest in human composting as an alternative to open-pit coal burnings. Evans and his adviser, Arpad Vass, prepared a white paper on the practical advantages of human composting (“…material can then be safely used in land applications as a soil amendment or fertilizer”) but received no further word. Evans has plans to work with veterinarians in southern California to make composting available to pet owners. Like Wiigh-Masak, he envisions families planting a tree or shrub, which would take up the deceased’s molecules and become a living memorial. “This is as close,” he said to me, “as science is going to get to reincarnation.”
I asked Evans if he plans to try to crack the mortuary market. There are two questions there, he answered. If I was asking whether he wanted to make composting available to people, the answer was yes. But he didn’t feel sure he wanted to make the process available through funeral homes. “One of the things that got me interested in this is a disdain for current practices of the funeral industry,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to die.” Ultimately, he’d like to offer it through a company of his own.
I then asked how he imagined he’d get the word out, get the ball rolling. He said he had tried to get a celebrity interested in the cause. The hope was that someone like Paul Newman or Warren Beatty might do for composting what Timothy Leary did for space burials. As Evans was living in Lawrence, Kansas, at the time, he called fellow Kansan William S. Burroughs, who struck him as suitably eccentric and moribund to consider it. The calls were not returned. He eventually did try to contact Paul Newman. “His daughter runs a horse stable doing rehabilitation for handicapped kids. I thought we could use the manure,” Evans said. “They were probably thinking, ‘What a freak.’” Evans isn’t a freak. He’s just a freethinker, on a topic most people would rather not think about.
Evan’s adviser, Arpad Vass, summed it up best. “Composting is a wonderful possibility. I just don’t think the mentality of this country is there yet.”
The mentality of Sweden is a good deal closer. The thought of “living on” as a willow tree or a rhododendron bush might easily appeal to a nation of gardeners and recyclers. I don’t know what percentage of Swedes have gardens, but plants seem very important to them. Business lobbies in Sweden hold tiny forests of potted trees. (In a roadside restaurant in Jönköping, I saw a ficus plant inside a revolving door.) The Swedes are a practical people, a people who appreciate simplicity and abhor frou-frou. The stationery of the Swedish king is simply embossed with his seal; at a distance it appears to be a plain sheet of cream-colored paper. Hotel rooms are furnished with what a reasonable traveler might need and nothing more.* There is one pad of paper, not three, and the end of the toilet paper is not triangulated. To be freeze-dried and reduced to a hygienic bag of compost and incorporated into a plant, I suppose, might appeal to the Swedish ethos.
That is not the only thing that has made Sweden the right place at the right time for the human compost movement. As it happens, the crematoria in Sweden have been hit with environmental regulations regarding volatilized mercury from fillings, and many need to make costly upgrades to their equipment within the next two years. Purchasing Wiigh-Masak’s machinery would, she says, cost many of them less than would complying with government regulations. And burial hasn’t been popular here for decades. Wiigh-Masak explained that part of the Swedes’ distaste for interment can be traced to the fact that in Sweden you must share your grave. After twenty-five years, a grave is reopened, and “the men in gas masks,” as Wiigh-Masak puts it, haul you up, dig the grave deeper, and bury someone else on top of you.
This is not to say that Promessa faces no resistance. Wiigh-Masak must convince the people whose jobs will be affected should composting become a reality: the funeral directors, the coffin makers, the embalmers. People whose apple carts stand to be upset. Yesterday she gave a talk at a conference of parish administrators in Jönköping. These are the people who would care for the person-plants in the churchyard memorial park. While she spoke, I scanned the audience for smirks and rolling eyes, but saw none. Most of the comments seemed positive, though it was hard to tell, as the comments were in
Swedish and my interpreter had never actually interpreted before. He consulted frequently with a piece of graph paper, on which he had written out a list of mortuary and composting vocabulary in Swedish and English (formultning—“moldering, decay”). At one point, a balding man in a dark gray suit raised his hand to say that he thought composting took away the specialness of being human. “In this process, we are equal to some animal that dies in the woods,” he said. Wiigh-Masak explained that she was only concerned with the body, that the soul or spirit would be addressed, as it has always been, in a memorial service or ritual of the family’s choosing. He didn’t seem to hear this. “Do you look around this room,” he said. “and see nothing more than a hundred bags of fertilizer?” My interpreter whispered that the man was a funeral director. Apparently three or four of them had crashed the conference.
When Wiigh-Masak finished and the crowd moved to the back of the hall for coffee and pastries, I joined the man in the gray suit and his fellow undertakers. Across from me sat a man with white hair, named Curt. He wore a suit too, but his was checkered and he had an air of jollity that made it hard for me to picture him running a funeral home. He said he thought that the ecological funeral would one day, perhaps in ten years, become a reality. “It used to be that the priest told the people how to do it,” he said, referring to memorial rites and rituals and the disposition of the body. “Today the people tell the priest.” (According to Prothero, this was also the case with cremation. Part of the appeal of scattering ashes was that it took the last rites out of the hands of the undertakers and handed them over to the family and friends, freeing them to do something more personally meaningful than what the undertaker might have had in mind.)
