Burial Alternatives

You don’t have to end up six-feet under...

Charles Chafer has a comic book mounted on his office wall in Houston, Texas — a kitschy, colourful 1941 issue of Spicy-Adventure Stories featuring a story called “Space Burial.”

In fact, Chafer, co-founder and CEO of Celestis, Inc., says he has tracked the sci-fi notion of funerals in space to at least the 1800s — long before humans were anywhere near sending themselves into orbit, dead or alive.

But in 1997, with Chafer’s help, space burial became a reality. That year Celestis dispatched the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, along with psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary and about 20 other people, including a few restaurant owners and a 4-year-old Japanese boy.

The remains were launched in a Pegasus rocket from an Atlantic Ocean site near the Canary Islands. Celestis is close to announcing the date of its 10th mission, which will carry the ashes of 300 people. The ashes, either one or seven grams per person, are placed in aluminum capsules inside a small Celestis spacecraft, which orbits Earth for anywhere from a few years to several hundred years, depending on how far into space it goes.

The Celestis spacecraft, a small cylinder or box, is a “secondary payload” on a rocket heading elsewhere — typically, to place a satellite in orbit. Rockets have stages that fall away as they head deeper into space, and the Celestis craft stays attached to the rocket’s final stage.

Eventually, solar wind and the natural degradation of the orbit pulls the spacecraft back into the Earth’s gravity. It incinerates like a meteorite the minute it reaches the Earth’s atmosphere.

“It’s kind of an ashes-to-ashes experience,” Chafer says. Prices range from $695 to $12,500 (U.S.). If space burial is the most bizarre thing you’ve ever heard of, stay tuned.

The posthumous options available to the regular Joe have grown in number in recent years, as people have become open to mourning in unique (and more commercial) ways. Stephen Fleming, a psychology professor at York University, says that as society changes, death rituals are changing, too. Society is becoming less agrarian and more urban, with people moving around more and often dying far from where they were born. Funeral homes are offering more flexibility, choice and creativity.

“We’re moving from a ritual that was largely based on religion to a ritual that is largely based on creativity or individual uniqueness,” Fleming says. At a funeral today you might see golf clubs decorating the corners of the casket, or digital photographs “flashing around.”

Cremation has grown in popularity, jumping from 42.2 per cent of Canadian deaths in 1998 to 56.4 per cent a decade later. After cremation families have many options for what to do with the ashes, including keeping them in an urn or scattering them in a meaningful place.

But there are more creative and radical alternatives. A U.K. company called And Vinyly tops the list. For £2,000, about $3,179 (Cdn.) you can have your ashes pressed into 30 vinyl records to be shared amongst your family and friends. The record is “literally a record of your life,” says Jason Leach, who knows a thing or two about records. He’s produced more than 50 records on his own labels, including Death to Vinyl, and founded the techno group Subhead.

As he approached 40, Leach found himself thinking about his own mortality — and the struggling record industry. Pressing human remains into vinyl records seemed as good a use for the dated technology as any. Although his company has received a considerable amount of attention online in recent weeks, so far he’s only working with 10 people on preparing their records. Some choose music, others take more of a spoken-word approach, recording themselves speaking along with “sound photos” from places important to them.

Leach says it’s up to the client to decide how much of their remains to include in the records, because the more ashes, the poorer the sound quality. “You’re going to hear scratches and pops and crackles, more than you normally do on vinyl,” he explains. “But I think that’s kind of part of it, I like that part of it.”

When Toronto filmmaker Connie Diletti renewed her health card recently, she signed up to be an organ donor. After staring at the “massive sheet” with all the organs and tissues to donate (Did she want to donate her eyes? Her skin?), she decided to explore the options available for her body after she’s done with it.

Diletti, 33, crossed traversed across North America and back visiting experts and entrepreneurs who spend their working lives thinking about death. In California, she visited glass makers who use human ashes to make paperweights and keepsakes.

At the University of Maryland, she learned about modern mummification, and in Clinton Township, Michigan, about cryonics, the freezing of dead bodies in the hopes that one day, with technology that doesn’t exist yet, they will be revived.

What the film couldn’t possibly divulge, Diletti says in an interview, are the odours she encountered along the way, for example the scent of mummified limbs and organs. “Most things had a smell,” she says. “Most places had a smell.”

Diletti says what you do with your body after you die is yet another choice available to people in a consumer-driven North American society — but she suspects it isn’t something people spend much time looking into.

More options are available thanks to technology and a certain 21st century openness, Diletti says. Her film, Corpus, premieres Oct. 6 on TVO, at 9 p.m. “I feel like people are becoming more open to possibilities beyond their traditional frameworks with what and where their body would go after they die,” Diletti says. “I feel people just don’t know though, what those options are.”

Fleming, however, is a little bit skeptical. He says that if a creative ritual is meaningful to the deceased person — if they plan it before their death, leave it in their will, and set aside money so not to burden the family — than that’s the important thing. But he worries about grieving families making these decisions for themselves.

“They are extremely reluctant to let go of that sense of connectedness, that sense of being ‘in touch’ with people,” he says. “It’s that fervent wish that can get capitalized on.”

Other after-death alternatives

Compost yourself

A new ecological burial technique developed by a Swedish company called Promessa Organic, promession involves freeze-drying the body in liquid nitrogen, which makes the body very brittle. Vibrations turn the body into a dry powder, which is laid in a coffin made of corn starch and buried in a shallow grave. Watch the Video Now!

Within six to 12 months, the coffin and its contents are turned to compost.

Promessa Organic is hoping to start offering their services in Sweden, South Korea and the U.K. next year.

Be a diamond

DNA2Diamonds, headquartered in Philadelphia, creates diamonds from DNA — either ashes or hair, from an animal or a human.

Diamonds range in price from $2,250 to $16,990 (U.S.) and come in red, blue, yellow-green, cognac or white.

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