Natural death is comparable to natural childbirth. In both cases people replace modern, technological and medicalized procedures with gentler more personalized ones, preferably taking place in their own homes. Too often people die in hospitals while hooked up to drips and in a coma, their hand-wringing relatives sitting at the bedside wondering “how much longer? If I step outside will I miss ‘it’?” We are conditioned to think that planning for and discussing death is morbid, but it may be to those with most passion for life and emotional connection to the natural world that this handbook will most appeal.
In the Natural Death Handbook, editors Stephanie Wienrich and Josefine Speyer take us through the personal, practical and legal considerations surrounding natural death at home, discussing everything from visualization and breathing exercises for the dying to how to remove a pace-maker from a corpse. They then guide us in planning the natural sequel, a green burial (“rent or borrow a transit van”), and describe various sample memorial rituals – pagan, Quaker, Hindu, secular and so on depending on personal affiliation.
This handbook was produced by the Natural Death Centre in the U.K. and its lists of resources and addresses are of most use to the British reader, but the philosophy of natural death and green burial is transferable anywhere. Green burial sites are appearing in North America, and are more like wildlife parks than traditional cemeteries. In them, an individual’s grave will be marked by a tree or a planting of shrubs rather than a headstone, emphasizing the idea of the body’s return to the natural womb from which it came, its blending back into the soil, water and air of the planet. Cremation by contrast, according to Wienrich and Speyer, creates a serious amount of air pollution (apart from the waste of wood for coffins) in the form of dioxins, furans, mercury and other chemicals in the plastics, glues and formaldehyde being burnt.
Our bodies however are just compost, or would be if the plants and insects they feed could get at them through the tough, sealed caskets we construct.
Visualizing our bodily return to nature prompts us to analyze the notion of owning our lives. We start with nothing, and what we leave behind is a trail of thoughts, words and actions. Our bodies however are just compost, or would be if the plants and insects they feed could get at them through the tough, sealed caskets we construct. As for where consciousness goes, that is for each of us to symbolize in an individually-designed leaving ritual or celebration for friends and relatives.
Canadians have a Natural Burial Cooperative based in Toronto. For $25.00 members purchase a share which includes a plot with a tree in a jointly-owned burial park. These parks have the virtue of preserving greenspace as well as providing a “dignified and environmentally safe way of being buried.” Environmentally safe means being buried in a bio-degradable coffin, and a park with human bones disintegrating in it is likely to be preserved from paving and development and is actually therefore a site of life rather than of destruction.
“In choosing how and where we are buried, each one of us can conserve, sustain, and protect the earth… the earth from which we came and to which we shall return,” says the co-op website. “A natural burial allows you to use your funeral as a conservation tool to create, restore and protect urban green spaces.”
The cooperative goes a step further by inviting people to donate or leave private acreages to be used as natural burial ground that will be nurtured into a fully functioning ecosystem of native plants and wildlife. This opens up a vision even more inviting to some than the traditional choir of heavenly angels: how appropriate if parcels of land we have polluted and damaged with construction and industry could be cleared and earmarked for human burial. Life substance from our crumbling bodies could nurture the soil anew and heal the land with the growth of plants and micro-organisms which we would feed at the bottom of the food chain – an act of collective reparation from the species that has more typically feasted at the top.
Order this book on Amazon.com The Natural Death Handbook
Visit: http://www.naturaldeath.org.uk/
382 Pages
GreenMuze.com Rating: 
Barbara Julian is a writer and reviewer who can't get over her old librarian's habit of telling people what to read — especially from among the ever-blooming crop of nature and animal books: http://www.animalit.ca/
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