To Casket Or Not To Casket?
Coffins in a showroom. - A coffin on display in a showroom. (Amy Eckert / Getty Images)
Bernd Heinrich knows his way around the woods. He has been studying beetles, caterpillars, moths, ravens, beetles, geese, bees, trees, beetles, and crows for years (and yes, I know I've mentioned beetles more than once, but so does Bernd and so does anybody who looks closely at living things in the forest).
In his most recent book, Summer World, he tells the story of a letter he received that involves this beetle, the one you see tucked next to the dead shrew, below:
This is a sexton, or burying beetle. It's a little critter, about the size of a bumblebee, and it can (and will, with the help of a mate) take that much bigger and very dead shrew and get it very quickly underground.
(Amy Eckert / Getty Images)
Heinrich explains how these beetles (they work in mom and pop teams) manage to find, lug and inter corpses many times their weight and size. Burial beetles are, says professor Heinrich (who for years taught at the University of Vermont), "the undertakers of the small animals in the forest." And thereby hangs a tale.
A Student Writes ...
A few years ago, Heinrich got a letter from a friend, a former student in California. The young man wrote this:
"Yo, Bernd,
"I've been diagnosed with a severe illness and am trying get my final disposition arranged in case I drop sooner than I hoped ... Like any good ecologist, I regard death as changing into other kinds of life. Death is, among other things, also a wild celebration of renewal, with our substance hosting the party."
But, wrote the student, if you put yourself in a casket that "seals you in a hole," you're cut off from all the creatures that nourished you when you were alive, the plants, the worms, the fruits, the animals. That, to the student, seemed a little selfish.
And so the student decided instead of a casket burial or cremation, he asked if it would be OK to be shipped to Heinrich's beautiful mountainside property in Maine (where he had done fieldwork) and be given a shallow burial where he could be recycled by nature's most commonplace undertakers. He wanted to be "beetleized."
"I Shall Be Borne, Beetle By Flying Beetle..."
This wasn't a crazy notion. Ecology-minded scientists often discuss how they want to be buried.
William D. Hamilton, perhaps one of the greatest biologists in the 20th century, famously wrote an open letter saying that when he died he wanted to be laid out on the forest floor in the Amazon jungle.
He said he hoped to be buried by burial beetles so that:
"... later, in their children, reared with care by the horned parents out of fist sized balls moulded from my flesh, I will escape. No worm for me, or sordid fly; rearranged and multiple, I will at last buzz from the soil like bees out of a nest -- indeed, buzz louder than bees, almost like a swarm of motor bikes. I shall be borne, beetle by flying beetle, out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars."
Hamilton did not get his wish. His partner buried him in Britain in a patch of forest called the Wytham Woods. And Heinrich's student -- who is still very much alive -- was told that his wish was a touch impractical and quite possibly illegal.
I asked Heinrich whether he has any plans for his own burial, and for fun I played him the Lee Hays poem "In Dead Earnest," performed by Pete Seeger, that jokes:
All that I am will feed the trees
And little fishies in the seas.
When radishes and corn you munch,
You may be having me for lunch ...
Heinrich giggled and admitted that when his time comes he might avoid a casket, or at least a solidly sealed up one, and hopes to be "recomposed" -- he doesn't like the word "decompose," preferring to think of himself as rejoining the world rather than falling out of it.
"I try to connect," he writes in his book. "The coffin is a last attempt to place a boundary between ourselves and nature." He rejects those boundaries. He wants the connection.
And oh, by the way ...
Freeze Me, Blast Me, Shatter Me
Before we finish, I just wanted to mention that when a reporter encounters a new idea -- and for me "beetleizing" was a startling notion that I am only just beginning to understand -- what we do is we ask lots of questions. To lots of people. And along the way I had a startling conversation with Krishna Andavolu, the managing editor of Obit Magazine, an online 'zine and podcast about the funeral/mortuary business.
He says that there are already companies trying to serve the Get-Me-In-The-Ground-Where-I-Can-Be-Recycled market, including a service called "promession." I'd never heard of promession. I bet you haven't either. It's a new service, where they flash-freeze you when you die and then hit you with an ultrasound wave that shatters you into little pieces -- like broken pellets of glass from a crushed auto window -- so you can be scattered wherever your family pleases.
Here's Krishna explaining how it would work -- and you really need to listen to it to hear all the provocative and jaw-dropping details.
I don't know if I'm ready for this Greener-Than-Thou world, but certainly the conversation with Bernd Heinrich has me thinking.
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STEVE INSKEEP, host:
And next, we can finally tell you that there is a way to get something for nothing. Say something happens in your backyard that needs attention, and without lifting a finger, without even noticing, mysteriously it's taken care of for free.
NPR's science correspondent Robert Krulwich has the details.
ROBERT KRULWICH: It begins with a...
(Soundbite of bang and crash)
KRULWICH: Yeah, kind of thwack against your kitchen window or the wall of your house. So you step outside and there lying in the grass is a little bird. And when you lean over and you look closely, you see it's dead. So you look away. And then maybe a day, two days later, you pass by that very spot on your lawn and the corpse is gone.
Dr. BERND HEINRICH (University of Vermont): Mm-hmm.
KRULWICH: Totally gone...
Dr. HEINRICH: Yeah.
KRULWICH: ...and you didn't move it. So where did it go? Well, one possibility, says Professor Bernd Heinrich at the University of Vermont, is you have just received the services of a very remarkable pair of beetles.
Dr. HEINRICH: Well, they are burying beetles. They are the undertakers of the small animals in the forest: the little birds and mice, rodents.
KRULWICH: So if I'm a bird lying dead on a lawn, they would know that I'm there?
Dr. HEINRICH: Yeah. Very shortly after you die, you're going to emit some scent that they can smell apparently for miles.
KRULWICH: And because natural recycling is a very competitive business...
Dr. HEINRICH: They have to get there before the flies can get it, before a raccoon or a crow or a raven picks it up. So they work very fast.
KRULWICH: And these flying beetles are - how big are they?
Dr. HEINRICH: You know, as big as a big bumblebee.
KRULWICH: Which is not very big, if you're trying to hoist a dead starling or a dead mouse on your back and lug it off to soft ground. But when these beetles - and it's a family business, it's a mom and pop kind of arrangement, when they get you where they want you, they start to dig.
Prof. HEINRICH: They bury you. They start digging underneath you, removing the dirt and throwing it to the sides, until gradually, you start to sink down.
KRULWICH: So, how long does it take them to bury a whole bird?
Prof. HEINRICH: You know, in a night, and you're buried totally.
KRULWICH: Then, says Professor Heinrich, in a kind of, I'm not quite sure how to put this, in a sort of happy moment, the two beetles will mate…
Prof. HEINRICH: Yep.
KRULWICH: …which produces beetle babies safely underground…
Prof. HEINRICH: And they build a little nest for the larvae.
KRULWICH: Mm-hmm. And then the parents munch on the bird or on the mouse and they chew the food on behalf of their children.
Prof. HEINRICH: The young actually beg. They're sort of analogous to birds, to a pair of birds feeing their young.
KRULWICH: And after a few days, those babies mature and they become flying beetles. And they take off, refueled with bits of mouse or bird. And they rejoin the neighborhood.
Prof. HEINRICH: Yes, yes.
KRULWICH: And it's just this kind of finish, says Professor Heinrich, dying and then being scattered up and about everywhere that he wants when he dies. No tight coffin for me, he says.
Prof. HEINRICH: You know, being sealed up, totally removed from all the natural processes that normally occur with every animal on earth. It's very - somehow frightening. It seems unnatural.
KRULWICH: But I think, don't most people find that being eaten is the thing that's frightening and a little - they don't want to get eaten by a…
Prof. HEINRICH: No, I don't find that frightening at all. I find that comforting to be part of the eco-system.
KRULWICH: And he's not alone. There's an old Lee Hays song, sung by the great Pete Seeger…
(Soundbite of song, "In Dead Earnest (Lee's Compost Song)")
Mr. PETE SEEGER (Singer): (Singing) If I should die before I wake, all my bone and sin you take. Put me in the compost pile…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. SEEGER: (Singing) …decompose me for a while.
(Soundbite of laughter)
KRULWICH: You laugh, but, you know, there are a lot of people who hate the idea of being decomposed. So…
Prof. HEINRICH: Well, yeah, I don't think it's decompose that's the emphasis here, it's the grow and the compose. To be composed into grass, to be composed into ravens, to be composed into flowers and trees, you know, that's a comforting thought to me.
KRULWICH: It's not like you're looking forward to the idea, though.
Prof. HEINRICH: Well, I don't really relish being eating, anything like that. I think it's just part of the cost. And giving back, I realize I have killed untold hundreds of thousands to live. All of us have because we all live off other life. And just to remove ourselves totally so that nobody else can feed on us, just somehow it seems sacrilegious to me.
(Soundbite of song, "In Dead Earnest (Lee's Compost Song)")
Mr. SAGER: (Singing) All that I am will feed the trees and little fishes in the seas. When radishes and corn you munch, you may be having me for lunch…
(Soundbite of laughter)
KRULWICH: But when you choose to be buried in a tight coffin, says Professor Heinrich, you do lock yourself off from the trees and the animals that you know, the critters that you live with.
(Soundbite of song, "In Dead Earnest (Lee's Compost Song)")
Mr. SAGER: (Singing) Worms, water, sun will have their way…
KRULWICH: Why not share yourself with the world that you know? He asks.
Prof. HEINRICH: I find that comforting to be a part of the eco-system.
(Soundbite of song, "In Dead Earnest (Lee's Compost Song)")
Mr. SAGER: (Singing) …and then excretes me with a grin, chortling, there goes Lee again.
(Soundbite of laughter)
(Soundbite of applause)
KRULWICH: It's not everybody's way to get buried, but it is one way.
Robert Krulwich, NPR News.
INSKEEP: And if all this has you thinking about other burial ideas, Robert Krulwich has an even wilder one for you. The freeze, shatter and sprinkle option. You can hear about that and other fascinating human and animal rituals at npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
