From Here to Eternity Read online

  In February 2015, that first donor body, a seventy-eight-year-old female (we’ll call her June Compost) was laid in a bed of pure woodchips at the bottom of the hill at FOREST. A month later, the body of a second donor, a larger male (we’ll call him John Compost) was placed at the top of the hill in a mix of alfalfa and woodchips with a silver tarp pulled over the mound. The experiments were not overly sophisticated. The sole question that these two donor bodies were answering was, “Will they compost?”

  At FOREST today there was a brand-new donor body to worry about, set to arrive at the facility in an hour. His name was Frank, a man in his sixties felled by a heart attack earlier in the week. Before his death, Frank chose to donate his body to the human decomposition facility.

  “Does Frank’s family know about the whole composting thing?” I asked Dr. Johnston.

  “I talked to the brother, Bobby, several times,” Dr. J explained. “I made it clear, ‘You can say no to this, and Frank will be used for regular forensic study.’ But the family insisted this is what Frank would have wanted. To be honest, by the time you sign up to donate your body to a place like this, you’re up for pretty much anything.”

  To prepare for Frank’s arrival, we had begun shoveling and hauling a giant pile of pine and maple woodchips up the hill in five-gallon painter’s buckets. The physical exertion didn’t faze Katrina, who was tall and lean with a short pixie haircut. Even in her late thirties she reminded me of the popular soccer player from high school, and practically bounded up the hill with the buckets.

  One of the undergraduates, a blond, strapping young man, could haul four buckets at a time, two in each hand.

  “You are a student here?” I asked.

  “Yes ma’am, I am. A senior in forensic anthropology,” he drawled. For self-preservation I attributed the “ma’am” as a Southern thing, rather than a sign of my advancing age.

  Hauling woodchips in the North Carolina sun (at which I made a valiant effort, I would like to add) seemed like manual labor, and didn’t give me the same sense of deathcare Zen as raking the ashes out after a cremation.

  By 11 a.m. we had created a two-foot base layer of woodchips at the top of the hill in the pen. It only lacked a willing victim, our man Frank. As if on cue, a navy blue van rolled into the parking area. Two men entered the facility wearing pressed khakis and matching blue polo shirts with Crowe Funeral Home logos. They were a father and son funeral team, the elder Crowe with white hair, the younger Crowe with blond.

  The Crowes had never been to the FOREST facility, so Dr. Johnston began by giving them a tour. I could see their faces scrunch in confusion, calculating exactly how they were going to get the donor body Frank up multiple embankments and through the undergrowth. The elder Crowe broke the news to Dr. J: “He’s a bit of a bigger fella.”

  People die in inconvenient places all the time (armchairs, bathtubs, backyard sheds, the tops of high perilous staircases). But funeral directors usually remove bodies from these places, not deposit them into these places. Funeral work prides itself on taking a dead body from chaos to order, not the other way around.

  I asked the elder Crowe if this was one of the strangest removals he’d done in a while.

  He looked over his shoulder, and with a dry tone, rewarded me with a “Yeah.” Full stop.

  Calculations were made for a route that provided solid footing without disturbing the other residents of the FOREST facility. On their messy journey to skeletonization, the donor bodies are disturbed by rainwater and small creatures. At FOREST, it was all too easy to accidentally tromp on someone’s rogue fibia if you didn’t take precautions.

  The elder and younger Crowes pulled a stretcher up to the entrance gate, with Frank’s electric blue hospital body bag riding on top. The vibrant blue color stood in stark contrast to the muted greens and browns of the North Carolina summer. The toe tag attached to the bag read “Western Carolina University – Urban Death Project.” Katrina flipped the tag to take a look. Her mouth tugged up in the smallest smile. She later told me she felt a jolt of legitimacy to see that name in print.

  Father Crowe chatted with Dr. Johnston. To my surprise, his inquiries weren’t along the lines of “Tell me again what y’all crazy-quacks are trying to do out here?” but had already moved to “So, are you using alfalfa to release nitrogen faster?” Father Crowe was a composter himself, and was well versed in the technicalities of the process. In a corporatized funeral industry, where I’ve heard a natural burial described as a “hippie myth that our clients would never want,” it was a joy to see a more traditional funeral director present himself as an unexpected ally to a somewhat radical idea.

  Unfortunately for Katrina, winning over the funeral industry won’t be her only challenge. Mike Adams, a popular blogger (also an anti-vaxxer, 9/11 truther, and Sandy Hook shooting skeptic), wrote about Katrina in an article shared almost 11,000 times on Facebook. Adams viewed the recomposition project as being solely geared toward growing food for the urban populace. Since the new world order would need a steady supply of human compost to keep people fed, it would surely lead to “the forced euthanasia of the elderly so that their bodies can be tossed into the composter.” Adams claimed that the project would be “used by the government to greenwash mass murder.”

  Knowing Katrina, a Seattle-based eco-enthusiast with a partner and two children, the idea of her masterminding mass murder seems preposterous. But the public relations issue remains: for every person who believes it is destiny for their body to nourish the earth, there is a person who thinks Katrina’s plan represents society at its most debauched and depraved.

  Soon enough the struggle to get Frank up the hill began. It was a team effort, starting with a lengthy feet-first vs. head-first debate. At one point I looked over and saw a skull gazing down from its perch at the top of the hill, observing the absurdity of us living folk below.

  When Frank finally arrived at the top of the hill (head-first), the blue body bag was laid on the bed of woodchips and unzipped, revealing a tall, sturdy man, naked except for underwear and socks. We rolled Frank over on his right side and gently wiggled the bag free, so it was man on woodchip, no turning back.

  Frank had a white goatee and shoulder-length hair, and his left arm was draped almost elegantly behind his head, “draw me like one of your French girls” style. Tattoos covered his torso and arms: a wizard, serpents, religious symbols, a T-Rex galloping across his chest. The ink added bursts of color to the forest floor.

  The undergraduates retreated down the hill to gather more alfalfa mixture, and I was left alone with Katrina for the first time all morning.

  She gazed down at Frank, her eyes wet around the edges. “This man, he’s here on purpose. You know? He wanted to be here.”

  She paused, took a breath before continuing, “I am filled with gratitude.”

  Katrina took a handful of green alfalfa and wood chips, and placed the mixture over Frank’s face, the first part of his body to be covered.

  I joined in, and the two of us blanketed the mixture down his neck and around his arms, almost tucking him in. “We’re making a little nest for him! It looks comfy,” Katrina said.

  She stopped, scolding herself. “Dr. J wouldn’t want us to be this sentimental with the bodies. Cut it out, Katrina.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Earlier in the day Dr. Johnston had told me a story about a man in his eighties who donated his body to FOREST. After he died, his wife and daughter drove his body to the facility in the family truck. They were even allowed to pick a spot in the underbrush for him. Then, only six months later, his wife died. She requested that her body be laid out in an area next to her husband. That request was honored, and man and wife decayed into the earth side by side, together as they had been in life. So much for no one being sentimental.

  Dr. J was unapologetic in this attitude. “I like to call the donors ‘Mr. So-and-So’ or ‘Mrs. So-and-So.’ Call them by their real names. I don’t see a reason not to. It’s still them. Oth
er facilities disagree with me and say it is not keeping professional distance. I totally disagree. It humanizes the bodies. I meet some of these people before they die. I know them. They’re people.”

  Dr. J’s approach is part of a new wave in scientific donation practices, where a donor body is considered a person, not a nameless cadaver. Ernest Talarico, Jr., is the associate medical director at Indiana University School of Medicine–Northwest. Bodies are donated to his medical school to be dissected by young students in anatomy labs. When Talarico first started with the program, he found himself uncomfortable with the mind-set that the donor bodies were anonymous pieces of flesh, referred to only by numbers or nicknames.

  Talarico set up a memorial service, held every year in January, for the program’s six donor bodies. In attendance are the first-year medical students and, astonishingly, the families of the donors. Rita Borrelli, who donated the body of her husband to Indiana University, was shocked to get a letter from the students saying they wanted more information on his life. “They even wanted pictures. I was crying so hard I could barely finish reading the letter.”

  Participation by the family is optional, but allows the students to work through the almost insurmountable task for a modern doctor—honest conversation about death with a family. The students even call their donor body “their first patient.” In a profile of the program by the Wall Street Journal, first-year medical student Rania Kaoukis explained that “it would have been easier to think of the body as a number. But that isn’t what makes good doctors.”

  With the advent of this enlightened outlook, I asked Dr. J if she would be donating her own body to the FOREST facility when she sloughed off her mortal coil. The answer was yes, in principle. But she was worried about her students. Knowing the donor’s personal history and referring to the body as Mrs. So-and-So was one thing. Watching your professor decompose before your very eyes was another. But Dr. J’s real barrier was her own mother. Her mother was wholly against the idea of the decomp facility, coming from a generation where a decent funeral meant a wake in a church. She wouldn’t donate her body if her mother was alive and uncomfortable with the idea.

  Recently, however, Dr. J’s mom, musing on what she would like for her own body, announced, “I don’t understand why we have to go through this whole cremation or burial rigamarole. Can’t we just be brought out to the forest and allowed to decompose naturally?”

  “Mom?” Dr. J replied.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “You know that’s what I do, right? That’s what the FOREST facility is? A place you decompose in the woods.”

  Frank’s woodchip pile now rose three and half feet. It looked like a Viking burial mound. The strapping blond undergraduate hammered in a wire fence around the mound’s lower half to prevent the mulch mixture (or, God forbid, Frank) from escaping and rolling down the hill. This was a far cry from what the recomposition process would end up looking like in an urban setting, but with the birds and cicadas chirping and the speckled sunshine through the trees, I could only think that this would be the perfect place to putrefy.

  The volunteer group, covered in sweat and wood dust, reentered the body pen. This time they were hauling water in recycled Tidy Cats litter containers. Twelve gallons were poured over the mound to create moisture to invite microbes and bacteria to the mix. As photos were taken to document the procedure, someone recommended removing the Tidy Cats labels so it wouldn’t appear as “Human composting, brought to you by Tidy Cats!”—an association neither side would relish.

  Katrina looks to this portion of the process, when the water is poured on top of the mound, as a future ritual. She doesn’t want the Urban Death Project facilities to share modern crematories’ allergy to family involvement. She hopes that pouring the water on fresh woodchips will give the family the same sense of power as lighting the cremation pyre, pushing the button to start a modern cremation machine, or shoveling dirt onto the coffin. As we poured water onto Frank’s mound, it felt like ritual. It felt like the start of something, for Frank and perhaps for society.

  AFTER EATING LUNCH at the town sports bar (we didn’t explain to the cheerful blond waiter why we were covered in woodchips), we returned to FOREST. Frank wasn’t the only reason we had come to the facility. There was still the matter of June and John Compost, the original donor bodies. Today we would uncover their mounds to see what, if anything, lay beneath.

  Trudging back up the hill, Dr. J turned to Katrina and announced, “Oh, I forgot to tell you, the cadaver dogs completely ignored the mounds.” Katrina’s face lit up.

  In her career as a forensic anthropologist, Dr. J had consulted on countless missing person cases, usually centered in the dense woods of the surrounding mountains. After witnessing firsthand the difficulty officials had in locating the dead, Dr. J opened the FOREST facility to law enforcement and search and rescue volunteers with their cadaver dogs. It is a huge benefit to the trainers to have access to real decomposed bodies, in conditions similar to how they might be found in the wild. After a week of training at the FOREST facility, Dr. J sends the trainers home with a sample of what she calls “dirty dirt”—soil from underneath the decomposed bodies, which the officers can continue using for instruction back home. “You should see how thrilled they are when we give them vials of dirt or bits of decomp-soiled clothes. It’s like Christmas,” Dr. J told me. As the old carol goes, “. . . my true love gave to me, two turtle doves and a dirt vial from under a body.”

  Why would the cadaver dogs ignoring the composting mounds be a big deal? The dogs work by smell and have no trouble sniffing out bodies laid out in the open, or even those buried in shallow graves. But inside a compost pile, the moisture, aeration, carbon, and nitrogen are balanced to trap the odor within the pile. Katrina is aware that the public will not accept this new method of body disposal if the recomposition facilities, meant to be places of grieving and ritual, reek of human decay. The dogs’ complete lack of interest in the body-mounds was great news for the future of the project.

  It was decided that the male donor, John Compost, would be uncovered first. He was a tall, burly gentleman in his mid-sixties who had died in March, meaning he had been inside his woodchip and alfalfa pile for five months. His position at the top of the hill meant more direct sunshine, and a higher overall ambient temperature. The whole mound had been covered in a silver tarp.

  Digging right into the mound with full-sized metal shovels and spades would run the risk of destroying whatever might be inside. So we used small hand-held shovels and heavy plastic rakes instead. As we cautiously dug into the pile, the bright purple and yellow color of the shovels made us look like children building a morbid sandcastle.

  Then, all of a sudden, we hit bone. Dr. Johnston stepped in and used a delicate brush to dust off and reveal the man’s left clavicle.

  Katrina was crushed by this discovery. “I won’t lie. I wanted there to be nothing there. I wanted us to dig and dig and just . . . soil.”

  Dr. J smiled. “See, I did want something to be there.”

  “Wait,” I asked, “we’re going for the four-to-six-week complete body compost here, why did you want there to be bones?”

  Katrina piped in, “Because Dr. J has different motives, she wants the bones.”

  Although Dr. J was enthusiastic about Katrina’s project, as far as she’s concerned there are never enough skeletons. Forensic collections, like the one she runs at Western Carolina, have nowhere near the amount of bones they need. A collection requires a large enough sex and age range to create true, beneficial comparison.

  Dr. J believes if she can nail the right removal time from the mounds, she can develop a system that will take a human from flesh to skeleton much faster than the current method—laying them out and waiting for bugs, animals, and nature to do their work.

  On the day John Compost was first put in the woodchips, a layer of vivid green alfalfa had been spread over his body in an attempt to raise the temperature of the mound—which
it seems to have done. But composting also needs moisture to work, and as we pulled off more of the pile, it became apparent that the alfalfa layer had had the effect of zapping the moisture from his body. John Compost was essentially mummified, his white papery flesh still stuck to the bones along his iliac crest and femur, which I brushed clean in soft strokes. Harsh body composting lesson number one: don’t overdo the alfalfa layer.

  Dr. J discovered something interesting as she uncovered his head and the top of his right shoulder, the only body parts not covered in the alfalfa. Heavy spring rains had trickled down from the top of the hill and underneath the tarp, soaking that area. Here, far from being mummified, the bones were clean, dark—no flesh to be found. In fact, on his sternum were the beginnings of Swiss cheese-like holes, where even bone had begun to decompose.

  Despite that encouraging discovery, John Compost was far from transformed into rich, dark soil, as Katrina had hoped. John had been encased in that mound for five whole months, and there he was, still hanging out, mummified. Livestock composting of a full-grown steer can take as little as four weeks when mechanical aeration is involved. Offal from a butchery only takes five days. Human composting had a long way to go.

  Dr. J was unfazed. “You learn a little bit each time,” she shrugged, and signaled us to begin covering John up again (after adding more water and dismantling the ill-fated alfalfa layer).

  The experiments being done at FOREST recall Italian anatomy professor Lodovico Brunetti’s attempts in the late 1800s to create the first modern cremation machine. Brunetti’s methods were very on-brand for the Industrial Era, employing what scholar Thomas Laquer called an “austere technological modernism.”

  Brunetti presided over multiple failed experiments, but those experiments represented “the beginning of a new era in the history of the dead body.” After all, industrialized cremation machines are today the dominant mode of body disposal in almost every developed country.