Natural burials a fair-enough option
Kudos to the Invercargill City Council for, eventually, introducing the option of natural burials at Invercargill’s Eastern Cemetery.
For those who so choose, there’s no good reason why they shouldn’t have the option of being laid to rest in a way that invites, rather than artificially fends off, the natural processes of decomposition and a return of nutrients to the environment.
The council is far from an innovator in opening up part of the cemetery for burials in which bodied not pumped with artificial or toxic chemicals are encased natural wood, shrouds or harakeke flax paper, and buried less deeply, in the living topsoil layer, to make a gentle return to the environment. How many ardent gardeners out there have amiably regarded their compost heaps and chattily suggested to family and friends that you know what, it might be the better way to go?
What’s more it’s surely fitting for those who have tried to live in ways that contribute to, rather than detract from, the environment. Why not nourish a tree, some plants, even flowers, rather than be commemorated by a headstone. And with GPS keeping an organisational record of where the interment happens, families and descendants need not fear that they will lose track of the special place.
The overriding imperative here must be respect. Reciprocated respect. Because natural burials are not for everyone. Others will continue to prefer conventional burial. Or cremation, which back in the 1950s and 1960s was similarly a take-it or leave-it option; a simultaneously new and ancient way to go out. As with cremation, natural burials should be regarded as a legitimate choice. Then the passage of time, and increasing familiarity with the process, will determine their place in the cultural firmament.
What would be unseemly, and mean, would be for advocates of one practice to be sniffy of those who think differently. We can each reach our own decisions about which option is the more sensible, even sanctified. But such judgments become almost pharisaical in the face of personal grief and loss when people we love or care for die. That’s when what matters is to do right by them as best we can.
One final thought. Again this is a deeply personal decision, but whatever other choices we make we have a precious opportunity to do something good with our leftbehind bodies before they are dispatched to the earth or the sky.
We can be willing to bequeath lifesaving, or life-transforming, organs to others who desperately need them; and help impel changes in law and procedures that make more transplants achievable.