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Roger Rabbits with |
“It’s just that….” She’s fumbling for words because I’ve upset and offended her. Wee nose upturned, lips twitching. “It’s just morally wrong”.
It was always going to be a difficult idea to pitch. But we love a challenge. So, lances and sabres drawn, and into the valley of death we charge… literally.
“How can you reduce someone you love to the consistency of soup and then tip them down the sink. It’s just… morally wrong.”
But is it?
Picture this. Standing at the kitchen sink is a priest, all censor and smoke, and chanting to the gathered sad and sobby.
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Now tip him down the sink
And in a blink,
We’ll be shot of him I think.
Amen, hallelujah,
And pass the sausage rolls.”
The “it” she suggests is “morally wrong” is the tipping of the dearly departed down the sink, tipping what’s left of the human body after alkaline hydrolysis, water cremation, or aqua-mation. A water cremation is a new-fangled, more environmentally sustainable alternative to burials and flames. Not an option for humans in New Zealand at the moment. But the idea’s been floated… so to speak.
To satisfy the ghouls, a water cremation goes something like this. Pop the dearly departed into a stainless steel pressure cooker full of water, add an alkali, potassium hydroxide or lye, turn on high-ish - 90℃ to 150℃ for six to twenty hours. The body slowly dissolves, liquifies under pressure, and voila! Bones and soup. Water cremation done.
“Yecch! A whole bunch of sludge.” The offended one still isn’t sold on this. But, apart from the fact you can’t have a “bunch” of sludge, Uncle Albert wouldn’t be whatever the collective noun for sludge is, he would be a lovely green-brown tinted liquid with a just a gentle whiff of clean earth. Delicious!
Mild acid can then be added to raise the pH level of the soup, like your hot tub, and then Uncle Albert’s environmentally clean and safe enough to pour down the sink or dunny… depending on your feelings for the man. Or the soup, with all its peptides, sugars, amino acid and captured carbon could be re-purposed as fertilizer. Uncle Albert could continue to contribute to nature in the garden.
All that’s left is a pile of gloriously white bones to be put through a cremulator – a high speed blender – smashed to dust and returned, in an urn, to the family to sit on the mantle piece.
Don’t like all that mawkish nonsense. We had a cat whose remains sat on a shelf in a bookcase for years, defying my repeated suggestions it was time for him to be s-cat-tered. Even in death that damned cat cost me – something like $320 for cremation and inscripted Rimu ashes box. “Scamp - beloved pet of… de-dum-de-dah.” I didn’t particularly care for it in the first place.
When the time comes, I want my alkaline hydrolysis bones to make a statement. I want them worked into an art installation. Maxilla and mandible, clavicle and scapula, femur and fibula, all 206 bones in an emotion-evoking artwork at the front door. I would be a real conversation piece. I could constantly evolve – just swap my bones around as the mood and desire dictates. As they say: “if you can’t get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance”.
So open the door, say: “bone-jour” and make me dance.
Plenty of upsides with water cremation? Gentler, more environmentally friendly, less energy intensive, fewer emissions, a carbon footprint 1/10th that of a flame job. But what of the other sustainable options for disposing of 89 kilos of expired humanity once the Grim Reaper comes recruiting in my corner of the paddock?
I was always impressed by a wealthy and wise woman I knew who could have bought herself a marble mausoleum of Taj Mahal proportions. Uh-uh! She went for a rough and ready oblong crate of pallet wood and flames. A loud conservation statement even as they carried her off. It made me laugh and love.
Then I learned of natural conservation cemeteries where I might give back, even after popping off. They drop you in a shallow grave filled with an uncompacted compost soil mix to allow aeration for the decomposition work of aerobic bacteria.
No chemicals, no treated timber, no inorganic fittings, nails screws, no granite, marble or sandstone monoliths. You return to the earth the way you came into it. Naturally.
Plots are over-planted with native trees or shrubs... and the kahikatea over my plot will one day burst through the canopy and reach for the heavens. A beautiful, peaceful spiritual place, not a graveyard but native bush, a forest. What a noble thing. I can hardly wait.
