Member-only story
Meghan Daum
Basically Dead
A Gen Xer contemplates mortality, burial, and decay
I think a lot about being dead. Not necessarily dying (I try not to think about that) or death — but deadness, specifically my own eventual state thereof. I think about lying underground and decaying into the earth, my flesh feasted upon by parasites and spores, my bones eroding into the soil, my organs liquefying and being siphoned up through tree roots. As though listening to a yoga instructor tell me to relax each body part, one by one, during the final savasana portion of a class — release your left foot, exhale out your right shoulder, let your spleen melt into the floorboards — I imagine the incremental corrosion of my carcass. I imagine the passing of a season or two until wildflowers grow over me like a blanket.
I run through this sequence of thoughts at various times of the day and night; when I’m lying in bed trying to fall asleep, when I’m sitting at my desk trying to work, when I’m stuck in traffic staring at a mile of taillights stretched out ahead of me on the freeway. You might find this morbid; to me it’s soothing. I’m still in my forties, reasonably happy and, as far as I know, perfectly healthy. But there’s something almost meditative about conjuring my physical being in a state of active disintegration.
“We’re basically dead. Nothing we grew up with or cared about when we were young even exists anymore, so we sort of don’t exist either.”
I don’t know how or when I’m going to die, but I do know that when it does happen, I want a green burial. (Loved ones, please take note.) Sometimes called a “natural burial” (though definitions and standards of “greenness” vary), this is when a body is buried, without embalming, inside a shroud or container that can decompose right into the soil. The gold standard of green burials takes place on land trusts that have been set aside as permanent conservation easements and are maintained according to certain restoration ecology principles, but these, unsurprisingly, are few and far between. The next best thing is often a hybrid cemetery, which offers burial areas that minimize environmental impact by using only biodegradable caskets and shrouds and never…
