Eco-Burial: The Last Way You Can Help Nature

Between the weather and the events of the last day or so (not to mention the historic and personal significance of this week), I am in a bleak mood. I don’t feel much like laughing (even at myself) and death is a topic that is on the minds of our nation. It is that whole “What if it had been my son, my daughter? What if it had been me?” mentality that I think drives our common sorrow. It is a human way.

So it struck me as poetic that while wandering around YouTube.com, I came across this news cast on Eco-burials.

Now take note, because I expect all of you to be my witness 50 years from now when I die. This is the type of burial I want. I do not want to buried like a giant pickle. I want to be able to return to the earth and become part of the plants that I love as quickly as possible. Then, when the world has moved on and there is no one left to remember me, I want to make room for that future.

The GreenSprings Natural Cemetery Preserve is located in New York, which isn’t too far from here, as the crow flies. According to this site there are none closer to me. But then again, I have it firmly in my planner to live about 30 years more, so who knows… maybe by then the United States will have realized that we really can’t store our dead indefinitely and that the person was not in the body but rather in the memory.

But all of my melodrama aside… my thoughts go out to those this week who have far, far more than the weather to bring them pain.