The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you haven’t set up your funeral arrangements yet, nothing you really want to spend time thinking about while you’re healthy and mobile, not when you need every spare moment to cruise the internet. Chances are you haven’t even drawn up a will or one of those Do-Not-Resuscitate living wills so the Hippocratic docs won’t keep you on life support until the relatives are bankrupt. I haven’t done any of that either so I’m not casting the first stone, believe me.

But I was reading about a woman who wanted to be planted under a Gravenstein apple tree, her favorite fruit, great for pies and so she was launching a company, Recompose, that would compost your mortal coil, dust to soil, then spread on the garden you may or may not have. Nothing like a Grammy Pie, you’re thinking. And yeah, I get it, waste not want not, but it seems like an idea whose time has maybe not quite arrived if it’s even left the station.

We have a compost pile by our garden, toss in the kitchen scraps and the last of the garden when we do the fall cleanup, maybe some leaves and occasionally some manure, some wood ash and there’d still be room for grandpa. The squirrels forage there and probably some rats who check out what offerings we tossed in today. A lot of red worms, plenty of bugs that like decomposing vegetable matter. A regular ecosystem down there. And when it’s done composting, we spread it on the flowers and vegetables and fruit trees. Part of the cycle of life.

I kind of like the idea of returning to the earth, not with a silk lined casket, just toss the shovels of dirt directly and let nature do its job. Cremation, well, it’s cheap and sanitary and for those who like keeping a bit of the Loved One on the mantle, probably fine. We have a glassblowing buddy who makes little glass vessels using some of the ash, very elegant, nice paper weights. My mom is in a cheesy urn at the old man’s house. Kind of gives me the creeps, tell you the truth. My neighbor, Guitar Bob, keeps his papa in a coffee can, says he’s going to take him back to North Carolina someday. He won’t. His dad will end up in the Camano Island recycle with the bottles and cans and plastics, count on it.

It’s good, I guess, to have alternatives. No doubt the funeral homes will get a jump on this before the Gravenstein lady, show the bereaved the Cadillac compost bin with the imported French worms and the sterilized manure mixings. Maybe even provide the favorite fruit tree or an indoor house plant if eating dear old Uncle Fred makes the client queasy. If you can’t afford the Top End, they’ll have something akin to our own compost bin, sort of a mini-Potter’s Field. Hopefully without the rats, but then again, part of the Cycle of Life, right?

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