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Prepare to die
Prepare to die It’s never too soon to start contemplating your own demise, finds Daniel Cossins
A teenager muses on mortality at a Bangkok death cafe
I
F YOU planted an apple tree in the ground where your mum had been composted, would you eat the apples?” It isn’t a question you hear every day. But that’s the whole point of a death cafe: to get people talking about something we typically choose to ignore. I had come to the end of the line, the London Underground’s District Line, to get my first taste of the experience. Fuelled by tea and cake, the conversation meandered from powers of attorney and whether a sudden death is better than a terminal illness to living wills and biodegradable burials – hence the apples. But I wasn’t here to think about what to do with my mother. The assignment was to embrace the end of my own life. Honestly, it felt a bit daft to begin with: I’m 37 and, as far as I know, in good health. As it turns out, though, that first visit to a death cafe was the start of a brief journey that would open my eyes – not only to what I can do to prepare, and the adventures my cadaver might enjoy, but also to how the very act of contemplating death can improve my life. We are all going to die, and we know it. Yet people don’t generally think about death, never mind discuss it. That might be because it is far removed from most of us. In the West, death is outsourced: the dying itself is medicalised, while the aftermath is sanitised and stage-managed. Or it might be the result of deep-rooted fear. According to the influential “terror management theory”, a desire to transcend death is the driving force behind all manner of human behaviours, from art to belief in the afterlife. Either way, brushing it under the carpet isn’t doing us any good, says psychologist Mireille Hayden, co-founder of Gentle Dusk, which seeks to lift the taboo around discussing death. “It tends to isolate people facing death or bereavement because nobody knows how to talk to you,” she says. “It also makes it difficult for your relatives when the time comes because in most cases the family have never discussed what the dying person wants.”
Take back control LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Above all, our inability to confront death means we lose control over one of the most significant events we will face. For instance, although some 70 per cent of people in the UK say they would prefer to die at home, only 24 per cent get that wish fulfilled. That might help explain the increasing demand for end-of-life doulas, people who are trained to support those who are dying and their families. Hayden is one. The services she provides range 38 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
MARIA IONOVA-GRIBINA
“
from companionship and advice on pain relief to helping people with terminal illnesses make video messages for their children. When I ask what I can do, she says the first step is to complete an “advance care plan”. The template she gives me asks how I would like to be cared for in old age, where I would prefer to die and what is important to me in those final days. I find it hard to engage. I suspect I am failing to manage my terror. But then I reach the question about what I want to do with my lifeless body, and I’m keen to find out more. Until recently, there were just two main options: burial in a cemetery or cremation. Now, people are waking up to a world of possibilities. You can be made into a firework, a diamond or an artificial reef, for instance, or float gently towards space beneath a helium balloon. Such alternatives are certainly flamboyant, says Fran Hall, CEO of the Good Funeral Guide, an independent, non-profit
Most of us fail to acknowledge death, let alone see beauty in it
Another option is to donate your corpse to medical science, where it can at least be of use before it is cremated. Just be careful not to perish during holidays such as Christmas when medical schools tend not to accept bodies. In any case, I have decided: a nice quiet death at home, surrounded by family, followed by a quick change into a mushroom shroud and a woodland burial. Lovely. But then a colleague reminds me that it isn’t just your corpse you leave behind – there is your online legacy, too.
Cyber funerals
source of funeral advice. “But they’re mainly just about making stuff with your ashes,” she says. “For me, the most important change in recent years is the rise of green burials.” Cremation comes with a big carbon footprint, while the toxic chemicals used in embalming eventually leach into the ground. People concerned about these impacts are increasingly choosing biodegradable coffins and woodland burials. The UK now has some 270 natural burial sites. This year, Washington state made it legal to compost human bodies, with a process called recomposition. You might even don a “mushroom shroud”, a body suit in which the threads are infused with spores of fungi that can barely wait to start digesting you to leave nothing but a pollutant-free compost. Hall also alerts me to an eco-friendly version of cremation. Technically known as alkaline hydrolysis, it essentially dissolves the body, reducing it to liquid and ash over several hours.
“Ultimately, the value in thinking about death is that it makes you value your finite life more”
I’m minded to ignore this. I don’t do much in the way of social media and none of my photos are stored in the cloud. But James Norris, founder of the Digital Legacy Association, leaves me in no doubt that it is important. “It’s an altruistic thing,” he says. “If you make no plans for your digital legacy, your next of kin might have no idea about the tranche of precious photographs on Facebook, for instance.” Curating your own digital legacy takes a bit of work, I discover. Each platform has different terms of service, which makes it doubly tricky if you want to erase your online presence entirely. A few companies promising “cyber funerals” will do this for you but it isn’t cheap. Either way, it is unlikely to be totally effective. “We usually recommend people accept that there is going to be a legacy online and do their best to curate it,” says Norris. Alternatively, you might decide that you want to live forever (online). A company called Eterni.me and an app called Augmented Eternity both promise a version of “digital immortality” by scraping your online data to create a digital avatar capable of interacting with people on your behalf after your death. This is most definitely not for me. In fact, I tend to agree with Hayden that “ultimately, the value in thinking about death is that it makes you value your finite life more”. Now, I’m not saying I’m suddenly going to live every day like it is my last. But this whole exercise has had an impact, not least by persuading me not to agonise over everyday frustrations that are actually unimportant. As a bonus, I also know that my mum would very much like to become compost for an apple tree. And I would gladly eat the apples. ❚
Daniel Cossins is a features writer at New Scientist
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 39
A teenager muses on mortality at a Bangkok death cafe
I
F YOU planted an apple tree in the ground where your mum had been composted, would you eat the apples?” It isn’t a question you hear every day. But that’s the whole point of a death cafe: to get people talking about something we typically choose to ignore. I had come to the end of the line, the London Underground’s District Line, to get my first taste of the experience. Fuelled by tea and cake, the conversation meandered from powers of attorney and whether a sudden death is better than a terminal illness to living wills and biodegradable burials – hence the apples. But I wasn’t here to think about what to do with my mother. The assignment was to embrace the end of my own life. Honestly, it felt a bit daft to begin with: I’m 37 and, as far as I know, in good health. As it turns out, though, that first visit to a death cafe was the start of a brief journey that would open my eyes – not only to what I can do to prepare, and the adventures my cadaver might enjoy, but also to how the very act of contemplating death can improve my life. We are all going to die, and we know it. Yet people don’t generally think about death, never mind discuss it. That might be because it is far removed from most of us. In the West, death is outsourced: the dying itself is medicalised, while the aftermath is sanitised and stage-managed. Or it might be the result of deep-rooted fear. According to the influential “terror management theory”, a desire to transcend death is the driving force behind all manner of human behaviours, from art to belief in the afterlife. Either way, brushing it under the carpet isn’t doing us any good, says psychologist Mireille Hayden, co-founder of Gentle Dusk, which seeks to lift the taboo around discussing death. “It tends to isolate people facing death or bereavement because nobody knows how to talk to you,” she says. “It also makes it difficult for your relatives when the time comes because in most cases the family have never discussed what the dying person wants.”
Take back control LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Above all, our inability to confront death means we lose control over one of the most significant events we will face. For instance, although some 70 per cent of people in the UK say they would prefer to die at home, only 24 per cent get that wish fulfilled. That might help explain the increasing demand for end-of-life doulas, people who are trained to support those who are dying and their families. Hayden is one. The services she provides range 38 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019
MARIA IONOVA-GRIBINA
“
from companionship and advice on pain relief to helping people with terminal illnesses make video messages for their children. When I ask what I can do, she says the first step is to complete an “advance care plan”. The template she gives me asks how I would like to be cared for in old age, where I would prefer to die and what is important to me in those final days. I find it hard to engage. I suspect I am failing to manage my terror. But then I reach the question about what I want to do with my lifeless body, and I’m keen to find out more. Until recently, there were just two main options: burial in a cemetery or cremation. Now, people are waking up to a world of possibilities. You can be made into a firework, a diamond or an artificial reef, for instance, or float gently towards space beneath a helium balloon. Such alternatives are certainly flamboyant, says Fran Hall, CEO of the Good Funeral Guide, an independent, non-profit
Most of us fail to acknowledge death, let alone see beauty in it
Another option is to donate your corpse to medical science, where it can at least be of use before it is cremated. Just be careful not to perish during holidays such as Christmas when medical schools tend not to accept bodies. In any case, I have decided: a nice quiet death at home, surrounded by family, followed by a quick change into a mushroom shroud and a woodland burial. Lovely. But then a colleague reminds me that it isn’t just your corpse you leave behind – there is your online legacy, too.
Cyber funerals
source of funeral advice. “But they’re mainly just about making stuff with your ashes,” she says. “For me, the most important change in recent years is the rise of green burials.” Cremation comes with a big carbon footprint, while the toxic chemicals used in embalming eventually leach into the ground. People concerned about these impacts are increasingly choosing biodegradable coffins and woodland burials. The UK now has some 270 natural burial sites. This year, Washington state made it legal to compost human bodies, with a process called recomposition. You might even don a “mushroom shroud”, a body suit in which the threads are infused with spores of fungi that can barely wait to start digesting you to leave nothing but a pollutant-free compost. Hall also alerts me to an eco-friendly version of cremation. Technically known as alkaline hydrolysis, it essentially dissolves the body, reducing it to liquid and ash over several hours.
“Ultimately, the value in thinking about death is that it makes you value your finite life more”
I’m minded to ignore this. I don’t do much in the way of social media and none of my photos are stored in the cloud. But James Norris, founder of the Digital Legacy Association, leaves me in no doubt that it is important. “It’s an altruistic thing,” he says. “If you make no plans for your digital legacy, your next of kin might have no idea about the tranche of precious photographs on Facebook, for instance.” Curating your own digital legacy takes a bit of work, I discover. Each platform has different terms of service, which makes it doubly tricky if you want to erase your online presence entirely. A few companies promising “cyber funerals” will do this for you but it isn’t cheap. Either way, it is unlikely to be totally effective. “We usually recommend people accept that there is going to be a legacy online and do their best to curate it,” says Norris. Alternatively, you might decide that you want to live forever (online). A company called Eterni.me and an app called Augmented Eternity both promise a version of “digital immortality” by scraping your online data to create a digital avatar capable of interacting with people on your behalf after your death. This is most definitely not for me. In fact, I tend to agree with Hayden that “ultimately, the value in thinking about death is that it makes you value your finite life more”. Now, I’m not saying I’m suddenly going to live every day like it is my last. But this whole exercise has had an impact, not least by persuading me not to agonise over everyday frustrations that are actually unimportant. As a bonus, I also know that my mum would very much like to become compost for an apple tree. And I would gladly eat the apples. ❚
Daniel Cossins is a features writer at New Scientist
23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 39