5 Things You Need to Know About Death | Explorer

In the United States, we are so far removed from that. We really are a death-denying culture; it's just not something we think about. It's not something we take seriously. I think the role of the funeral director many times is to take folks who have never thought about the realities of death, and now all of a sudden they are dealing with it. They're not prepared for the types of emotions that they're going to be feeling. You feel grief less than any other emotion during your lifetime. They are again looking for guidance; they're looking for somebody to take their hand and lead them in this journey.

If you take the opportunity to get a little closer to death and understand that there's a lot of opportunities out there to do what you really want with yourself, with your body, with what you want to do with your body once you've, you know, ceased to exist in this world, there are some amazing things that you can do. You can go into diamonds, you can become a coral reef, you can get shot into outer space. These are things you can do with your ashes. But now they're coming up with amazing things that you can actually do with your human remains.

You know, you can be with the green burial concept where you're returning your body to earth to nourish the earth. You can be put into a mushroom suit where the fungus of the mushroom will actually help to expedite the decomposition of the human body. You can become the roots of a tree and allow your body to become the nutrients that that tree needs to begin growing and living.

What makes a green cemetery different from a conventional cemetery is that we don't bury anything unnatural or toxic or chemical into the earth. So bodies are not embalmed. We don't use any metal or plastic caskets. The idea of a natural burial park is that you look around and you can't tell that people are buried here. You can't see the graves; you feel they're just in the preserve. We don't allow any upright headstones or any decorations. You can just have a flat natural stone like this which is engraved. The idea is just that everything that goes into the ground needs to be readily biodegradable.

The Anthropology Research Facility is the very first type of laboratory of its kind. It is a natural laboratory for human decomposition. We place donors out in the open on the surface of the ground and also some that are buried. Some of the research we do here directly helps law enforcement find out where somebody might have come from geographically, even if you don't know who they are. Clues like that are extremely helpful in solving a case, especially a case where we have recovered remains and we simply have no idea who this person was.

A chronic is the goal of preserving the patient until a point where science and technology may be able to repair the cells, revive the patient, and allow us as an organization to help to rehabilitate them. We have very good evidence that under decent conditions, we are in fact preserving those structures. So, it should be possible not just to bring back a body, but you, your personality, your values, your memories—everything about you.