Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: Bury me deep in love

My dad’s grave sits like a relic in time, it eerily marks the moment when his life stopped. A blackened concrete rectangle that protects the coffin that is buried deep below. A coffin made of beautiful, wasted, timber where his dead body was placed and lowered into this hole. There is a simply inscribed headstone that says his name, and announces his short life. There is a rusted cage that holds a broken dove, with an inscription that says ‘From your loving children, Mandy and Cameron’.

It wasn’t from us. I was six, my brother was six months old. We weren’t at the age where we had capacity to order ornamental memorial doves. I still don’t get the point. I have been there only a handful of times, but have never felt any sense of connection. Actually, I feel the opposite. I feel disconnected from my familial grief. I feel nothing in this desert of frozen sorrow.

This place to me denotes a brutal, almost impersonal, attitude to death. It’s a memorial to our struggle with mortality. It makes death ‘other’. It’s us burying what scares us and not facing the simple, mystical and beautiful process of passing. I think we often miss what is in plain view. It’s not called ‘passing’ by accident. We are supposed to leave. Instead, cemeteries stand as memorial to our denial, to us grasping at the ephemeral. The hand from the grave is not theirs, it is ours. Traditional cemeteries make me sad. It’s a frozen tribute to all the loss. It feels like a grief that never moves on. And that is sadder than death.

Graveyards are beautifully gothic, in a Nick Cave kind of way. But it is an inefficient way of managing dead bodies. And grief. There are ways so much better for the planet, and for us. We can’t keep burying our dead in the middle of, or on the edges of our villages and cities. We are running out of room – and quite frankly it’s just not sustainable.

Cemeteries are terrible for the environment. They use a lot of space, they require lawn maintenance, they need water and have acres of impervious surfaces. And they put toxins into the ground. Coffins used to be lined in lead and designed to slow down decomposition. Why? Bodies eventually decompose – why are we interrupting a very natural process and slowing down what is bound to happen? Dead people, as far as I can tell, aren’t coming back.

No one has ever come back from the dead – except maybe Jesus – and he was wrapped in a shroud… possibly pioneering one of the first Green funerals. Why do we hang on to a process that is rooted in preserving the body? Cremations are slightly more efficient than traditional burial but they fill the air with noxious gases – so burning isn’t good either.

Natural burial is the only way to go. I would love to be able to connect with the memory of my father in a forest. Not in a bleak garden of marble, concrete and decay. Our bodies are an intelligent design. When we are finished we are designed to break down and go back to the earth. To become the earth. It’s actually incredibly beautiful when you think about it.

As clever as AI is, they haven’t created such efficient disposal for their redundancy.

My favourite green death is the one created by Jae Rhim Lee, who created the mushroom burial suit. It’s made from organic cotton and seeded with mushroom spores. The fungi help the body break down, quickly turning the body into nutrient rich soil. We become shrooms. We share nearly 50 per cent of our DNA with fungi, and fungi, it turns out, are genetically more like humans than plants. So maybe one day, instead of being dead in a box deep in the ground, our body will grow a tree, or spawn a mushroom called Dave or Sandra. And a small nibble at the edges is the Alice through the Looking Glass key to the doorway of a more enlightened dimension where we finally make peace with our death.