'My Brother Didn't Want a Burial. He Chose to Put His Body to Good Use'

I distinctly remember the day my younger brother, Wayne, first came home from the hospital. I was 4 years old and sitting on my front steps when my mom laid that little baby in my arms, and I thought: He's mine. Wayne and I were close our whole lives. I could talk to him about anything.

I was there with Wayne when he passed away from complications of a severe spinal cord injury in September, 2021. The assisted living facility where he lived only allowed one person to be there at a time, due to the pandemic. In the middle of the night, while I sat with my brother, there was this terrible silence and I knew he had stopped breathing. When the spirit leaves the body, it is so profoundly silent. I called Wayne's husband, Larry, and we called the rest of the family.

Wayne and I had talked about what he wanted to happen to his body years previously. I'm a volunteer at the Palliative Care Institute at Western Washington University, which was how I first heard about a cutting-edge body disposition alternative to cremation or traditional burial. Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, came to the Institute to give a presentation on her company, which composts bodies and turns them into soil.

Wayne was a passionate gardener—he had a huge collection of Japanese maple trees in his back yard, some of them planted in the ground and many of them in pots. When I told Wayne about human composting, he told me that he was interested in that choice for the final disposition of his body.

I agreed with that decision. I think there are significant problems with traditional burial—all those chemicals used to embalm people, and the lead-lined coffins. Cremation is no longer a viable choice for me, either, as a person who cares about the planet. Wayne was a great steward of the land that he tended, and I think sustainability was important to him, too.

The compositing process seemed like a wonderful alternative: to allow your body to give back to the land and nurture it.

The composting process

Composting is an ancient process—the same one that has been used by farmers for years. If a cow died out in the field somewhere, farmers typically layered biomass of some kind, like grasses and sawdust, over that body and allowed it to decompose naturally on the field.

In the Recompose process, hexagonal cylinders receive the body and layers of biomass and rotate until the body has completely decomposed. In total, it takes between six and 10 weeks for the body to turn into soil.

One particularly lovely thing about the process was that the company allowed us as a family to collect some of the biomass: the wildflowers, grasses and branches. So Wayne's granddaughters, who were 3 and 6 years old, had the chance to gather flowers that would be included in the ceremony. They couldn't physically be there, but the gifts that they sent along would be.

Wayne had a large fern in the kitchen of his home, that he had nurtured for 50 years, which went into the cylinder with him, too. That had a special meaning for us as a family—that this thing that Wayne had tended carefully all his life could go with him to wherever spirits go.

At the end of this process, you are left with a whole truckload of soil. You can take it yourself or you can take an honorary container of it—about the size of a cremation urn—while the rest of it goes to a dedicated forest reclamation site.

We chose to take it all. We borrowed a pick-up truck from a friend and Recompose used a forklift to pour the soil into the back of the truck. Although it was an industrial action, it was done with such grace and caring by the staff and it felt very sacred.

Planting trees to remember my brother

We took the truck back to Wayne's home and parked it in front of his house. We had contacted around 40 of his friends to come and take a container or two of soil. Some people took one of his Japanese maples, too. Wayne is now under many, many Japanese maple trees all over the Seattle area.

There was some soil left in the truck and I brought that back to my home, and now I have maybe five or six Japanese maples in my yard, and Wayne is under all of them. We planted a special tree in his honor, too, which was quite beautiful.

We decided to keep the soil instead of donating it because Wayne was a gardener, and he had a wide circle of friends and people who deeply cared about him. I think there is something really powerful about having that soil—having a physical part of him with us.

I miss Wayne so much because we were so close and could talk about anything. There are times now where there's some family problem, or some puzzle that I'm trying to figure out, and I wish I could talk to him. And then I go out into the garden and I kind of do talk to him, and ask, "What do you think about this?" It keeps him close in my mind and heart.

When I heard that New York has become the latest state to legalize the human composting process, I was thrilled; I think it ought to be an option in every state—primarily for environmental reasons, but I also think that there are other people like me and my family for whom this choice has meaning.

To me, it's an option that feels very natural. The traditional burial process of embalming and putting people in lead-lined coffins seems as though we are fighting the idea that someone has died by preserving the body and slowing down the decomposition process. Whereas this composting process, to me, is an acknowledgement that we are part of the cycle of life and death that goes on all the time around us.

When I go out and put an apple core in my compost pile, I'm participating in that same process; putting its remains in the compost so it becomes soil again to go back and nurture the apple tree it came from. There's something beautiful in that to me, and that's what I want for my body.

When the spirit no longer needs this body, why shouldn't I go back to nurture the earth that has given me food and sustenance, delight and joy?

Marie Eaton, 76, is a retired faculty member from Western Washington University who is now the community champion for the university's Palliative Care Institute.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

As told to Newsweek's My Turn deputy editor, Katie Russell.

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