cremation

The ceaselessly burning pyre at Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi is a living spectacle, where death asserts itself as the last witness to life. That cremation along the banks of the sacred Ganges on the steps of this ghat alone can liberate one’s soul from the endless cycle of death and rebirth is entrenched in the Hindu psyche. It is at Manikarnika Ghat that Lord Shiva whispers the ferryboat mantra into the ears of the dead before escorting their souls to heaven. So enduring is this belief that countless Hindu families…

As a 30-year-old architecture student in 2013, Katrina Spade began pondering her mortality. Specifically, what would happen to her body after she…

Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, displays a sample of the compost material left from the decomposition of a cow, left, and some of the combination of wood chips, alfalfa and straw used in the process. April 19, 2019Photo: Elaine Thompson (AP)When Howard Fischer eventually dies, he is going to be composted in Seattle. He’ll be wrapped in cloth, placed on a bed of wood chips, and then his family will cover him in alfalfa and flowers. After a ceremony, his body will go intoa hexagonal vessel with an internal…

Katrina Spade, the CEO of Recompose, poses with mulch made from a dead cow in 2019.Photo: Elaine Thompson (AP)In a few years, people in California will have a new choice for what to do with their loved ones’ bodies after death: put them in their garden.This weekend, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that makes human composting legal in the state beginning in 2027. The bill, AB-351, makes California the fifth state to allow human composting since it was first legalized in Washington in 2019 (Oregon, Colorado, and…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The National Funeral Directors Association has predicted that by 2035, nearly 80% of Americans will opt for cremation. When the first U.S. indoor…

At 1:05 a.m. on a crisp February morning in Boulder, 52-year-old Sheila Luna laid her head back on the hospital bed in her moonlit living room, closed her eyes and took her last breath. Her death did not come without warning. Ever since the day 14 months earlier when doctors diagnosed her with late-stage colon cancer, Sheila and her husband Charles had been planning for what would happen next. A quiet and pragmatic scientist who shifted to medical herbalism late in her career, Sheila had always felt at peace forging…

The cremation platform during the excavation of 1987. Credit: Ufficio Beni Archeologici di Bolzano A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Italy and one in the U.S. has found that a unique Bronze Age cremation site in modern Italy holds the remains of up to 172 people who were left to the elements. In their paper published on the open-access site PLOS ONE, the group describes their study of the bones and…