The great Boomer die-off cometh. There must be money in that somewhere; there are a lot of us (well, I missed the us-bus by ten days) and somebody’s got to put us all somewhere. See the funeral industry rubbing its soft white hands and salivating. But wait.
Is that how you want to go? Lowered into some manicured storage grid in a lead-lined hermetic container, veins full of chemicals and a face nudged into some pious smirk it never knew in life? Useless even to beetles and worms, not even returning a few pounds of fertilizer to the earth you gorged and shit your way through for however many years? At a fat profit to a commercial monopoly you don’t like or respect? One fed and protected by a razor-wired concentration camp of laws?
Not me. I want to leave my bones on some windy hilltop in the wild rice and Queen Anne’s lace, a purple thistle pushing through the ribs where my heart sunk back into the dirt, decommissioned by ants, beetles, and yeah, the worms. I want small varmints and birds to pick me apart, rain and sun to disappear me and no human eye to monitor the process. I want to give back at least that small part. Lyrical, I know, but. That’s my picture and maybe I’ll see it through.
I bet I’m not alone in this. I know I’m not. Already you know somebody who’s had their cremains blown off a rented boat over the bay, or scattered in the back field or a national park, with or without permit. That works, but you still pay up the waz for the cremation and it may not be what you really want.
What if you could go online and choose the nature-friendly farewell of your choice? At a quarter, or an eighth, of the price of a standard funeral?
Please browse our brochure.
The plains Indian burial - a slender pine platform open to the sky on a lone and level prairie, under your chosen blanket (or one from our selection), among your spirit totems, face to the wind and stars, as time and weather return you to the fund of all being.
The Viking pyre - a platform of native logs will be your vessel to Valhalla, surrounded by your friends and family and the songs of your life, as the sparks fly upward.
The Henge - nestled under a monolithic ashlar on the solstice, equinox, or ecliptic that guides your fate, your secret names inscribed on an amulet on your breast, perhaps to be found by some millennial spiritual descendents. Menhir, cromlech, dolmen, as your heritage requires.
The Bear Cave - in a grotto beneath granite boulders, marked with petroglyphs of your design or by our resident paleoartisans.
The Nazca - you lie at the center of a pattern of stones lined in a design that only manifests when seen from the sky...an image of your choice, or selected from a the cryptic Naza Lines of the ancient and mysterious civilization of Peru.
The Medicine Wheel - the sacred stone wheel of the Blackfoot, Lakota, Anishinaabe, Hopi, and other First Peoples, older than Stonehenge, will be your spirit-powered ship to the stars...
The Cairn -
The Paracus - desert only - wrapped in a textile of design so complex its weaving requires an implicit command of advanced trigonometry, you are left to mummify naturally in the healing sun. You will be recognizable for three thousand years.
The Ozymandias - for the 0.05% - we build you a 150 foot tall pyramid of native sandstone blocks, riddled with secret tunnels, at its heart a hidden sepulchre where you lie in state in a sarcophagus of solid gold. All secured by the most potent of curses.
The Dump. We truck your carcass out there and dump it. Fuck all that spiritual shit. Let the coyotes have it. (For $10 more we pass around a bottle of Jack and tell lies all night until we pass out. For another dime we let Jolene come along. We’re not paying for her Cuervo.)
And the Return - our simplest, cleanest, most natural and economic choice - you select the landscape of your deepest resonance, plain or hilltop, prairie or mountainside, woods or marsh, or any of many other locales, where you will give to the earth what you have taken from it - yourself.
You choose your invitees, your rites, your music live or recorded, your dances and chants, your eulogies; or choose from our comprehensive list of celebrants, experts, artists, musicians, hierophants, and resources gleaned from cultures and traditions across the globe and the universe. Full video and photographic records included as digital files or on optical disc. A memento medicine pouch provided with some selections. I have this condition.
Okay, just sketching it out here - I’m not into enterprise myself - any suggestions, ideas to contribute? This is copyrighted but not patented, feel free to use the concept.
Of course, there are those national, state, and local laws to skirt; I’m thinking you’d work with sovereign First Peoples – picture Wind River, Nanavut, the southwest - there’s plenty of open land and they have their own legal systems - negotiations for revenue sharing and employment will depend on earned trust. We will be honest and prices low, it’s the volume, the volume...they’ll be dying in droves and it won’t be long. They won’t all want to enrich the morticians in their mortuaries. (Transportation laws must be considered too.)
Feed the eagles, people, enrich the earth. Whatchy’all think?
