This week I’ll give you an overview of the many ways a body can be laid to rest — from traditional cremation to options like green burial, water cremation, and terramation. We’ll explore what can be done with ashes and how personal values shape these end-of-life decisions. Whether you’re new to these concepts or looking for what’s current, this episode offers a practical guide to body disposition in the U.S.

If you’d like more detail on what’s discussed here, there are several BLBD episodes with guests who go into more detail. Check out all my podcasts listed by category at bestlifebestdeath.com.

Transcript:

Hi, I am Diane Hullet and you’re listening to The Best Life Best Death podcast. And today it’s just me talking, which is a little weird for me ’cause usually I have someone else on the screen to kind of bounce things off. But I wanted to talk about body disposition and the easiest way to kind of give a big overview of that seem to me to just.

Talk about it and tell you about the five main body disposition methods. Now, I have to say, first off, I just don’t love the term body disposition. I find it so clinical and so weird, but you know, I’ve Googled it, I’ve thrown it into chat, GPT, and honestly, there aren’t that many good ways to say it. So, you know, you can say things like your final resting place or.

What we do with the body after it dies. But all of these are very cumbersome and so we end up just saying body disposition. Even though it’s kind of this weird clinical thing, I’ve always thought there are so many funny ways to talk about this. And I settled on the podcast title of pushing up Daisy’s 1 0 1 ’cause I always thought that was kind of cute.

So pushing up Daisy’s 1 0 1, what do we need to know about body disposition these days? I think what’s interesting is how much this field is changing and how much possibility is coming to all kinds of areas and states. And it’s a legal question, and it’s a cultural question, and it’s changing. So stay tuned.

I think you’ll find it interesting to hear where things have gone and where they might be going. So let’s start with the most common. Well, no, actually, let’s start by me telling you what five I’m gonna talk about and then you can decide if you wanna keep listening. So first of all, I’m gonna talk about cremation.

Second of all, I’m gonna talk about aqua mation, which is also called water cremation or alkaline hydrolysis. Third, I’m gonna tell you about ation, human composting. This is probably the most cutting edge, and it’s pretty interesting. We’ll talk about traditional burial and we’ll talk about green burial.

And those are kind of funny because you could, I don’t know if traditional burial really isn’t traditional burial, because maybe the most traditional burial would’ve been green burial. So, you know, we’ll get into that. So those five things, or what I wanna talk about today and. Have your pencils ready because I am gonna give you some ways to follow up.

So some resources to look at for each of these. Let me start out by saying the year that I started the Best Life, best Death podcast, I took some time to really specifically delve into each of these. And so I have podcast recordings about each of these and I, I’m not gonna go ahead and list all those here ’cause I’d be like BLBD number and I would.

Rattle off a bunch of numbers, but always know that you can go to the website, best Life, best death.com, and I’ve got podcasts broken out there by theme. So you can go to Body Disposition and you’ll see everything I’ve ever done about body disposition. I. Okay, cremation. The facts are that cremation involves burning the body at high temperatures, like 1400 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, and this reduces it to bone fragments.

Now, I think it’s important to note it doesn’t actually completely reduce it to the bone fragments that you get back that you might be familiar with, what we refer to as ashes, they actually put the bone fragments through something called a cremator. And they grind it up a little bit more and then we get ashes back.

The process typically takes two to three hours, and it results in three to seven pounds of ashes. Over 56% of Americans currently choose cremation, making it the most common option in the us It uses natural gas, it produces carbon emissions. And I think those are just relevant for people who are curious about the environmental impact of what they’re choosing for body disposition.

Now, a great book, if you’re interested in kind of having an insider peek at cremation is the book that Caitlin Doty wrote called When Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. It’s funny, it’s gritty, no pun intended, and it’s just a, I found it to be just a, a delightful read. If you don’t mind something a little bit. Internal to the funeral industry, if you will.

Okay. Major sources of information about cremation are look it up in your area. Secondly, the Cremation Association of North America. That’s Canada, and you can find out mo**@cr******************.org. Another big one is the National Funeral Directors Association. www.nfda.org. Okay. That’s what I got on.

Cremation very common In Arizona, it’s over 90% of people who are cremated, so that tells you something interesting. Now, I think it’s also worth noting that there is cremation that uses a funeral home as kind of the go-between. And there is also what’s typically called direct cremation, where you are picked up by the crematorium and directly cremated.

So you’re not going through the the middleman, the middle business. And depending on what your needs are, depending on where you live, depending on your relationship with a local funeral home, you have to figure out what it is that you choose. But I think it’s important to know that those are kind of two different angles of that.

Okay. Cremation check. Let’s talk about aqua, also called water cremation. This is kind of interesting. This has been around for a long time, but it wasn’t as commonly used with humans until more recently, as far as I know. Here’s the facts on Aqua Mation, it uses water and lie alkali and heat to break down the body, so it mimics natural decomposition.

It leaves bone fragments, which are then turned into ash in a cremator again, and it also leaves sterile liquid that can be returned to the environment. In other words, it can literally be liquid fertilizer that’s poured on a beloved tree or beloved garden. It uses 90% less energy than flame cremation and releases no CO2 and it’s legal in 28 US states.

Did you, I bet you haven’t even heard of this, necessarily legal in 28 US states as of 2024, and it’s growing in acceptance. So major, major ways to learn more about that. The Cremation Association of North America, again, has some real basic factual information on it and they qualify it under their umbrella.

Of cremation so you can find it more there. I also like a local place called Be A Tree. Be A Tree is in Denver, Colorado and they have good information on their website about this process. So be a tree.com. I have a feeling that if you look this up on the internet in your area, you will find somebody who offers this process.

And I think it’s kind of an interesting one. Why isn’t it more common? I’m not sure. Why. Is it less familiar like it’s legal in 28 states and we maybe knew or didn’t know that? I don’t know. I’d be curious maybe. The funeral industry hasn’t quite gotten behind it in the same way, or maybe I’m wrong about that.

So check that out. If that’s of interest to you. To be essentially liquid fertilizer, water that can return to the earth with a little bit of a a cremated bone remains. Also, I should add, one of the interesting things to me on the Best Life, best Death podcast episodes that I did, I interviewed a lot of different people who do different things with cremated remains, and so everything from parting stones, which turns cremated remains into rocks to.

Gosh, artful ashes, which does incredible blown glass with just a little bit of cremated remains like maybe a tablespoon or a teaspoon, is all you need to create a beautiful blown glass piece of art. There are so many different urns and artists making beautiful urns, so there’s, there’s a lot to explore.

If you have cremated remains don’t do what I’ve been known to do, which is they stay in a box in your house for the longest time. Raise your hand if you’ve got some cardboard boxes with cremated remains of either pets or people. I think we can do better by our loved ones by doing something more than just the cardboard box in the back of the closet or the garage.

I. Don’t you agree? Okay, moving on. Number three, Terra Nation. Interation is human composting, and that’s sort of the most graphic way to say it but Terra Nation I think is a beautiful way to say it because Terra of course means earth. So this is returning a human body to the earth. It’s also called natural organic reduction.

No NOR. One of the more interesting things I did in the last couple years is I went to an Earth Day conference in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I had a booth at the Earth Day Conference in which I set up a little sample of natural organic reduction. Someone who had agreed that there human composted remains could be used in this kind of educational way.

I had. This material from the natural funeral in Lafayette, Colorado. And it was really, really interesting to have people come up to my booth and here they are at Earth Day and they’re talking to, you know, scientists and environmental organizations, and there I am talking about natural organic reduction.

And people were very intrigued and they said, oh, I’ve never quite seen a booth like this and I don’t know anything about this. And so it was, it was an interesting way to kind of spread that word. So in interrogation, the facts, the body is placed in a vessel with a bunch of organic material. And each one of the main interation processors or service providers, I guess would be the way to say it, has their own recipe for what that looks like.

But it’s things like woodchip straw and microbes. Sometimes there’s kind of a tea that they pour in that has lots of bacteria and these. Natural materials break the body down over 30 to 60 days and it produces a nutrient rich soil that can be used for conservation. Some places have a relationship with actually a conservation area where they take these, these dirt.

Compost piles essentially to those places, or they can be given back to families to use. It uses an eighth of the energy of cremation and avoids carbon emissions, and it’s legal currently as of 2024 in eight US states, including Washington, Colorado, and California. And there’s really good information about this.

Recompose is kind of the grandmother, if you will, and the the forerunner of this recompose do life. Another big one up in the Pacific Northwest is return home, www return home.com. And here in Colorado we have the natural funeral, natural funeral.com. So. I think this is one that’s really worth watching.

People are very intrigued by it. I went to the first human composting conference in Denver a couple years ago, and they did such an incredible job at this conference, they. At the beginning of the conference, they did kind of a mockup of what they call a laying in ceremony. So it was kind of tongue in cheek and a little bit funny.

Here’s this room of 200 to 300 people, and a group of people went up to the front, a pre-organized group, and one of them pretended to suddenly die. And they were a tiny person, so they were able to easily be lifted and put into the, the, it a vessel. And then they did a laying in ceremony of kind of a formal ceremony with poetry and words spoken and music, and said, this is like a funeral for this person where we’ve laid them in this vessel.

Then at the end of the conference, they had a vessel again, which someone had agreed to. Their remains being used in this way for educational purposes, and they. Undid. They did a laying out ceremony where they undid the vessel and poured the material onto a tarp. A big, you know, a big tarp laid in front of the room.

And I swear, we, we all were like, this, this can’t be real. This is like soil you’d buy at a you know, a a a garden store. And yet that’s exactly what it was, was composted human remains, this incredible rich brown just incredible soil. So talk about returning to the Earth. It was really quite an example.

Now, on the other hand, the thing I’m gonna talk about next, which is green burial. There are folks who would say, yes, interation does return you to this composted state where you are dirt. But it also takes, you know, essentially a warehouse of some kind where these vessels are carefully monitored for heat and.

Things like pacemakers or implants of any kind have to be taken out. And they do break up bone fragments so that they can fully compost. So bones won’t completely compost by themselves, but they can be broken up partway through the process and put back in, and then they become part of the entire compost.

So that is a little different. That does take some warehousing and human intervention that is different than green burial. Which is a complete return to the earth. Okay, so let’s talk about burial. Traditional burial, I’m gonna call it, although as I said at the beginning, it’s kind of funny ’cause is this really traditional or is this more like quote unquote, traditional since the 1940s, 1930s in the us?

Actually even before then, because it was really the civil war in the United States that put embalming on the map. So number one, soldiers were embalmed in order to get them back to their homes. And number two, when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he was embalmed and. His body was placed on a train and he traveled through the US.

Millions of people turned out to see Abe Lincoln pass through their town, and so that kind of started this whole path towards embalming because it was seen as a way to preserve the body. And, you know, embalming absolutely has a place. I did a beautiful podcast with a professional embalmer in Arizona, and she talks about the importance of embalming for many, many reasons and many cultures.

And at the same time, there’s also people who question the value of embalming. Does a body have to be embalmed to be buried? It does not. So traditional burial. Which I’m calling traditional burial typically involves embalming, typically involves a metal or wood casket and a concrete burial vault. What’s interesting about these concrete burial vaults is that one of the reasons they put them in the ground in cemeteries is so that the ground does not collapse.

As the body decays and decomposes and as the vessel that the body’s in decomposes the ground can become indented. So. They in part put these concrete burial vaults so that graves don’t merge into one another, side to side, and also so that there’s a flat surface up, up above. So. Traditional burial involves putting the person into a casket and then putting them into a concrete burial vault and embalming.

You know, it uses toxical toxic chemicals like formaldehyde that can leach into the soil, but these concrete vaults are also pretty darn stable, and so not much leeches in each year. In the US burials do use a huge number of board feet, like millions of board, feet of wood, millions of tons of concrete.

Loads of embalming fluid and burial plots can be expensive. Save 2000 to $10,000 for a plot plus services. The major sources to find out more information about this are the Natural Funeral Directors Association, NF d.org, and the Funeral Consumers Alliance. www.funerals.org. And I think, you know, this is very much to my mind a generational piece.

So absolutely there are people who would choose this. My own grandparents had traditional burials, and I think that might be a more. I don’t know, over 70, over 80 years old kind of thing. Currently, I think most people under a certain age would not choose this unless the embalming was important for them, or again, culturally, if this was an important way that a family just does this because this is what their community does, so be it.

I have no problem with it. It just is what it is. Okay. Green burial in contrast is where the body is buried without embalming in a biodegradable casket, such as a willow casket, or literally a pine box or a shroud, and there is no burial vault, this allows for natural decomposition returns nutrients to the soil.

It’s cheaper than traditional burial. I think it might be cheaper than cremation, but I’d have to look in that into that. And it might depend on your area, but it does eliminate embalming vaults in the bigger, more expensive, non biodegradable caskets. Some green burial sites double its conservation land, so they protect forest and meadows and planes.

And this is kind of interesting. So green burial. Just varies region to region. Whether you have a green burial site that’s very specifically just that, or you have a, a cemetery that’s kind of a hybrid, or whether you have a conservation site that allows for green burial. So one of the best sources for this is the Green Burial Council.

That’s green burial council.org. And in fact, they have an interactive map where you can look at your area and see what green burial is available where you live. There’s also the Conservation Burial alliance, conservation burial alliance.org. Now. Next week on the Best Life Best Death podcast. I’m actually talking with a leader in the Green Burial Council, and I think you’ll find that conversation really interesting.

So I hope that these facts about different ways to do something with a body once it is died I. I hope this gives you a little more information. I think what’s important to know is that at this time, I’m recording this in 2025, there is a lot of choice about what you do with your body. Now, choice may depend on your values and choice may depend on your family’s values and choice may depend on whether you die suddenly or you die with something that’s expected and you have time to make a choice.

But there’s a lot of. Different possibilities out there. And I think it’s kind of interesting to learn about, there are good articles online, there are good websites you can learn about this. And I think that this is, I wanna call it like the easy path in to thinking about the end of life. So there are some topics that are maybe a little harder to get into.

Thinking about what you’d like to have done with your body, thinking about where friends or family might be able to visit you. This, this might be something you’re curious about or it might be something you feel strongly about, or it might be something that’s the opposite that for you, you just really don’t know.

As though one person said to me, I don’t know, surprise me, well, surprise me, doesn’t help the people who are left behind. So consider. Thinking this through for yourself, making a plan, doing a little advanced information gathering, and then letting your family know. You’ve been listening to the Best Life Best Death podcast, and I’m your host, Diane Holit.

Thanks so much for listening. As always, you can find out more about me at Best Life, best death.com. And as a little side note, if anybody’s listened this far, you might find this kind of humorous. I almost always record episodes pretty well in advance, but today I am recording this on Wednesday, April 2nd, and I’m hitting.

Up and this is going uploaded right after I get done recording. So this might go down in history as the Best Life Best Death podcast that got recorded at the last minute. Don’t let your body disposition plans be last minute like this podcast. Thanks for listening.