Going to hell in a basket casket

Photo: E Coffins USA

A new trend in burials --  biodegradable coffins -- is featured on British news site The Week. From woven willow to wool, the dead now have options that their bereaved don't have to feel guilty about. The caskets featured are much more attractive than the plywood box alternative which my dad has always said he wants used as his final resting place (and VOC-free).

Also noted in The Week story is that, contrary to a burial featured on a Six Feet Under episode, US cemeteries forbid going down under casket-free.

But for those interested in pursuing the matter, the Green Burial Council, based in New Mexico, has compiled a national list of green funeral providers here. And journalist Mark Harris' book Grave Matters also comes highly recommended for insight into the growing natural burials movement.

For more background on the beauty of a simple after-death, or rather, the horrors of embalming, see Jessica Mitford's classic, The American Way of Death Revisited (1998), first published as the American Way of Death in 1963. American Way was more concerned with what Mitford saw as funeral directors' exploitation of grief-stricken mourners, than with environmental costs. After dying herself, of lung cancer in 1996, Mitford was cremated, per her instructions, for a mere $475, according to a 1997 New Yorker piece, in which she was characterized as holding the dismissive view: “Nature, nature, how I hate yer.”