by Mary Roach
Curt added that young people in Sweden had recently begun moving away from cremation because of the pollution it creates. “Now the young can go to Grandma and say, ‘I have a new way for you—a cold bath!’” Then he laughed and clapped his hands. I decided that this was the sort of man I wanted running my funeral.
Wiigh-Masak joined us. “You are a very good salesman,” the man in the gray suit told her. He works for Fonus, Scandinavia’s largest mortuary corporation. The man let Wiigh-Masak take in the compliment before stepping on it: “But you haven’t convinced me.”
Wiigh-Masak didn’t flinch. “I expected to get some resistance,” she told him. “That’s why I’m so surprised and pleased to see that almost everyone in the audience looks happy while I talk.”
“Believe me, they’re not,” said the man pleasantly. If I didn’t have an interpreter, I’d think they were discussing the pastries. “I hear what they say.”
On the drive back to Lyrön, the man in the gray suit became known as The Slime.
“I hope we don’t see him tomorrow,” Wiigh-Masak said to me. At three o’clock the following afternoon, in Stockholm, she was scheduled to give a presentation before the top regional managers of Fonus. That she was speaking there was a matter of some pride. Two years ago, they hadn’t returned her phone calls. This time it was they who called her.
Susanne Wiigh-Masak does not own a business suit. She delivers her presentations in what American dress code arbiters would term “smart-casual” trousers and a sweater, with her waist-length, wheat-colored hair braided and pinned up in back. She wears no makeup for these talks, though her face tends to flush mildly, bestowing a youthful blush.
In the past, the organic look has worked in Wiigh-Masak’s favor. When she met with Church of Sweden clergy back in 1999, they were comforted by Wiigh-Masak’s noncommercial mien. “They said to me, ‘You are really not a seller,’” she tells me as she dresses for the trip to Fonus’s Stockholm headquarters. She really isn’t. While as 51 percent owner of Promessa’s shares Wiigh-Masak stands to earn a substantial sum should the process take off, wealth is clearly not her motive. Wiigh-Masak has been a hard-core ecologist since the age of seventeen. This is a woman who takes trains instead of driving, to make herself less of a burden on the environment, and who disapproves of holiday-makers flying to Thailand when a beach in Spain would suffice, on the grounds that jet fuel is needlessly burned. She readily admits that Promessa has little to do with death and everything to do with the environment, that it is essentially a vehicle for spreading the gospel of ecology. The dead bodies attract the media and public attention in a way that the environmental message alone could not. She is a rarity among social advocates: the environmentalist who is not preaching to the converted. Today is a good example: Ten mortuary company executives are about to sit through an hour-long talk about the importance of giving back to the earth through organic composting. How often does that happen?
The Fonus headquarters takes up the better part of the third floor of a nondescript Stockholm office building. The interior designers have gone out of their way to infuse color and nature into the surroundings. An arrangement of café tables is surrounded by a sort of indoor hedge of potted trees, in the midst of which stands an immaculate tropical fish tank the size of a plate-glass window. Death is nowhere in evidence. A bowl of complimentary lint brushes bearing the Fonus logo calls out to me from the receptionist’s desk.
Wiigh-Masak and I are introduced to Ulf Helsing, a vice director of the corporation. The name hits my ears as Elf Helsing, causing great internal merriment. Helsing is dressed like all the other elves in the lobby, in the same gray suit, with the same royal-blue dress shirt and the same subdued tie and silver Fonus lapel pin. I ask Helsing why Fonus instigated the meeting. As Wiigh-Masak envisions it, it is Sweden’s crematoria, until recently operated by the church, that would be doing the freeze-drying. The funeral homes would simply make the option known to their clients—or not, depending on what they decide. “We have been following this in the paper, but we kept a low profile,” came his enigmatic reply. “It is time we heard more.” Possibly contributing to the decision was the fact that 62 percent of three hundred visitors to the Fonus Web site answered, in a survey, that they would be interested in an ecological funeral.
“You know,” Helsing adds as he stirs his coffee. “that freeze-drying corpses is not a new idea. Someone in your country came up with this, about ten years ago.” He is talking about a retired science teacher from Eugene, Oregon, named Phillip Backman. Wiigh-Masak told me about him. Backman, like Tim Evans and the cremationists of yore, was inspired by a loathing of funerary pomp. He spent several years at Arlington National Cemetery arranging military funerals that, much of the time, no one showed up for. This, combined with a background in chemistry, got him interested in the possibilities of freeze-drying as another alternative to burial. He knew that liquid nitrogen, a waste product of certain industrial processes, is cheaper than natural gas. (Wiigh-Masak estimates the liquid nitrogen cost per body at $30; the gas for a cremation costs about $100.) To break down the frozen bodies—for freeze-drying a whole human body would take over a year—into tiny, quickly freeze-dryable pieces, he proposed running them through a machine. “It’s something on the order of what they do with chipped beef,” he told me when we spoke. (“It was a hammer mill,” Wiigh-Masak later told me.) Backman managed to secure a patent for the process, but the concept was coolly received at local mortuaries. “No one wanted to talk about it, so I just let it go.”
The meeting begins on time. Ten regional directors for the company, along with their laptops and their polite gazes, gather in the conference room. Wiigh-Masak begins by talking about the difference between organic and inorganic remains, how cremains contain little nutritive value. “When we are burning remains, we don’t give it back to the earth. We are built up from nature, and we have to give it back.” The audience seems respectfully quiet and attentive, except for my interpreter and me, whispering in the back row like poorly brought up schoolgirls. I notice Helsing writing. At first he appears to be taking notes, but then he folds the sheet in two, and, when Wiigh-Masak’s back is turned, slides it across the table, where it is passed along to its recipient, who slips it under his notebook until Wiigh-Masak turns away again.
They let Wiigh-Masak talk for twenty minutes before they begin asking questions. Helsing leads the pack. “I have an ethical question,” he says. “An elk dying in the woods and returning to the earth is just lying on the ground. Here you are doing something to break it up.” Wiigh-Masak replies that in fact, an elk that dies in the woods is likely to be torn up and eaten by scavengers. And while it is true that the dung of whoever eats the elk would act as a sort of elk compost and, in effect, achieve the desired goal, it was not something she could envision families being comfortable with.
Helsing pinkens slightly. This was not where he intended things to go, conversationally. He persists: “But can you see the ethical problem of breaking it up this way?” Wiigh-Masak has heard this line of argument before. A technician at a Danish ultrasound company, whom she contacted early on in the project, declined to work with her for this reason. He felt that representing ultrasound as a nonviolent way of breaking up tissue was dishonest. Wiigh-Masak was undeterred. “Listen,” she said to the morticians. “We all know that taking a body down to powder requires some kind of energy. But ultrasound, at least, has a positive image. You cannot see the violence. I would like it to be possible for the family to watch it happening, behind a glass wall. I want something where I can show a child, and the child won’t start crying.” Glances are exchanged. A man clicks his pen.
Wiigh-Masak makes a small detour into defensive mode. “I think that if you put a camera inside a coffin we wouldn’t be very impressed with ourselves. It is a terrible result.”
Someone asks why the freeze-drying step is needed. Wiigh-Masak answers that if you don’t remove the water, the little pieces will start to decompose an
d smell before you can get them into the ground. But you mustn’t get rid of the water, the man counters, because this is 70 percent of this person. Wiigh-Masak tries to explain that the water inside each one of us changes day by day. It’s borrowed. It comes in, it goes out, the molecules from your water mix with someone else’s. She points to the man’s coffee cup. “The coffee you are drinking has been your neighbor’s urine.” You have to admire a woman who can toss the word “urine” into a corporate presentation.
The man who has been clicking his pen is the first to raise the subject that is surely on everyone’s mind: coffins, and the disappearing profit therefrom that an ecological funeral movement will mean. Wiigh-Masak envisions the freeze-dried, powdered remains being placed in a miniature, biodegradable cornstarch coffin. “That’s a problem,” acknowledges Wiigh-Masak. “Everyone will be angry at me.” She smiles. “I guess there will have to be a new thinking.” (As with cremation, a standard coffin could be rented for a memorial service.)
Cremationists faced the same objections. For years, according to Stephen Prothero, undertakers were advised to tell their clients that scattering was against the law, when in fact, with few exceptions, it wasn’t. Families were pushed to buy memorial urns and niches in columbaria and even standard cemetery plots in which to bury the urns. But the families persisted in their push for a simple, meaningful ceremony of their own making, and scattering caught on. As did the use of rental caskets for pre-cremation services and the manufacturing of inexpensive cardboard “cremation containers” for the actual burning. “The only reason there are rental caskets,” Kevin McCabe once told me. “is that the public demanded it.” The tremendous attention that Promessa has received since its founding has forced the funeral industry to deal with the possibility that very soon people may be coming to them requesting to be composted. (In a Swedish newspaper poll taken last year, 40 percent of respondents said they’d like to be freeze-dried and used to grow a plant.) Mortuaries in Sweden may not be actively recommending the ecological funeral any time soon, but they may stop short of trying to derail it. As a friendly young Fonus regional director named Peter Göransson said to me earlier, “It’s pretty hard to stop something once it’s rolling.”
The last question comes from a man seated next to Ulf Helsing. He asks Wiigh-Masak whether she plans to first market the technique for dead animals. She is adamant about not letting this happen. If Promessa becomes known as a company that disposes of dead cows or pets, she tells the man, it will lose the dignity necessary for a human application. It is difficult, as it is, to attach the requisite dignity to human composting. At least in the United States. Not long ago, I called the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the official U.S. mouthpiece of the Catholic Church, to ask its opinion on freeze-drying and composting as an alternative to burial. I was put through to a Monsignor John Strynkowski in the Doctrine office. While the monsignor allowed that composting and nourishing the earth was little different from a Trappist monk’s plain shroud burial or a church-sanctioned burial at sea, following which the body will, as he put it, provide nourishment for fish, the idea of composting struck him as disrespectful. I asked him why. “Well, when I was a kid,” he answered, “we had a hole where we put peelings from apples and such, and used it for fertilizer. That’s just my association.”
While I had him on the phone, I asked Monsignor Strynkowski about tissue digestion. He replied with minimal hesitation that the church would be opposed to “the idea of human remains going into the drain.” He explained that the Catholic Church feels that the human body should always be given a dignified burial, whether it’s the body itself or the ashes. (Scattering remains a sin.) When I explained that the company planned to add an optional dehydrator to the system that could reduce the liquefied remains to a powder that could then be buried, just as cremains can be, the line went quiet. Finally he said. “I guess that would be okay.” You got the feeling Monsignor Strynkowski was looking forward to the end of the phone call.
The line between solid waste disposal and funerary rituals must be well maintained. Interestingly, this is one of the reasons the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t regulate U.S. crematoria. For if it did regulate them, the rules would be promulgated under Section 129 of the Clean Air Act, which covers “Solid Waste Incinerators.” And that would mean, explained Fred Porter, of the EPA Emission Standards Division in Washington, “that what we’re incinerating at crematoria is ‘solid waste.’” The EPA does not wish to stand accused of calling America’s dead loved ones “solid waste.”
Wiigh-Masak may succeed in taking composting mainstream because she realizes the importance of keeping respectful disposition distinct from waste disposal, of addressing the family’s need for a dignified end. To a certain extent, of course, dignity is in the packaging. When you get right down to it, there is no dignified way to go, be it decomposition, incineration, dissection, tissue digestion, or composting. They’re all, bottom line, a little disagreeable. It takes the careful application of a well-considered euphemism—burial, cremation, anatomical gift-giving, water reduction, ecological funeral—to bring it to the point of acceptance. I used to think the traditional navy burial at sea sounded nice; I pictured the sun on the ocean, the infinite expanse of blue, the nowhereness of it. Then one day I had a conversation with Phillip Backman, during which he mentioned that one of the cleanest, quickest, and most ecologically pure things to do with a body would be to put it in a big tide-pool full of Dungeness crabs, which apparently enjoy eating people as much as people enjoy eating crabs. “It’ll do the thing in a couple of days,” he said. “It’s all recycled, and it’s all clean and taken care of.” My affinity for burial at sea—not to mention crabmeat—was suddenly, dramatically diminished.
Wiigh-Masak finishes speaking, and the group applauds. If they think of her as the enemy, they do a good job of concealing it. On the way out, a photographer asks us to pose with Helsing and a couple of the other executives for the company Web page. We stand with one foot and shoulder forward, arranged in facing columns, like doo-wop backup singers in unusually drab costumes. While I avail myself of a Fonus lint brush, I hear Helsing say that the company plans to add a link to Promessa on its Web site. A wary friendship has been forged.
On the road between Jönköping and Wiigh-Masak’s home on Lyrön is a graveyard on a hill. If you drive all the way through to the back of this graveyard, you come to a small field where the church will one day dig more graves. Halfway up the unmown terrain, a small rhododendron bush stands among the weeds. This is the Promessa test grave. Last December, Wiigh-Masak concocted the approximate equivalent of a 150-pound human cadaver, using freeze-dried cow blood and freeze-dried, pulverized bones and meat. She placed the powder in a cornstarch box, and the box in a shallow (thirty-five centimeters down, so the compost could still get oxygen) grave. In June, she will return to dig it up and make sure the container has disintegrated and the contents have begun their metaphysical journey.
Wiigh-Masak and I stand in silence beside the grave of the unknown livestock, as though paying our respects. It’s dark now and hard to see the plant, though it appears to be doing well. I tell Wiigh-Masak that I think it’s great, this quest for an ecologically sound, meaningful memorial. I tell her I’m rooting for her, then quickly rephrase the sentiment, omitting gardening-related verbs.
And I am. I hope Wiigh-Masak succeeds, and I hope WR2 succeeds. I’m all for choices, in death as in life. Wiigh-Masak is encouraged by my support, as she has been by the support of the Church of Sweden and her corporate backers and the people who have responded positively in the polls. “It was and is,” she confides as the wind shimmies the leaves on the cow’s memorial shrub. “very important to feel I’m not crazy.”
12
REMAINS OF THE AUTHOR
Will she or won’t she?
It has long been a tradition among anatomy professors to donate their bodies to medical science. Hugh Patterson, the UCSF professor whose lab I visited, looks
at it this way: “I’ve enjoyed teaching anatomy, and look, I get to do it after I die.” He told me he felt like he was cheating death. According to Patterson, the venerable anatomy teachers of Renaissance Padua and Bologna, as death sidled near, would choose their best student and ask him to prepare their skull as an anatomical exhibit. (Should you one day visit Padua, you can see some of these skulls, at the university medical school.)
I don’t teach anatomy, but I understand the impulse. Some months back, I gave thought to becoming a skeleton in a medical school classroom. Years ago I read a Ray Bradbury story about a man who becomes obsessed with his skeleton. He has come to think of it as a sentient, sinister entity that lives inside him, biding its time until he dies and the bones slowly prevail. I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see. I didn’t see it becoming my usurper, but more my stand-in, my means to earthly immortality. I’ve enjoyed hanging around in rooms doing nothing much, and look, I get to do it after I die. Plus, on the off chance that an afterlife exists, and that it includes the option of home planet visitations, I’d be able to pop by the med school and finally see what my bones looked like. I liked the idea that when I was gone, my skeleton would live on in some sunny, boisterous anatomy classroom. I wanted to be a mystery in some future medical student’s head: Who was this woman? What did she do? How did she come to be here?
Of course, the mystery could as easily be engendered by a more routine donation of my remains. Upward of 80 percent of the bodies left to science are used for anatomy lab dissections. Most assuredly, a lab cadaver occupies the thoughts and dreams of its dissectors. The problem, for me, is that while a skeleton is ageless and aesthetically pleasing, an eighty-year-old corpse is withered and dead. The thought of young people gazing in horror and repulsion at my sagging flesh and atrophied limbs does not hold strong appeal. I’m forty-three, and already they’re doing it. A skeleton seemed the less humiliating course.
