In the fading afterglow of yet another birthday, this blogger considers The End. Listening to radio reports about 25-year projections of this or that program, the thought intrudes that this blogger very likely won't be around to see what happens in 25 years. And even if this blogger survives for 25 years, he won't give a flip about much of anything. Today's e-mail produced a pair of coments on The End; Wobegon Boy considers the down side of the obituary page and Slate's envirnomental writer weighs the ecological impact of burial versus cremation. As Woody Guthrie sang, as he anticipated an untimely end, "So long, it's been good to know you." If this is a (fair & balanced) benediction, so be it.
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[1] Wobegon Boy: NObits
[2] The Green Lantern: Greenmains
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Last Words — A Bit Of Advice: Stay Off The Obituary Page....
By Garrison Keillor
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I enjoy a well-crafted obituary as much as the next man, and now that people of my own generation (what????) are appearing there, the obituary page becomes closer and closer to my heart.
Yesterday I thought I might have to write one for my older brother after he slipped while skating and cracked his head open and was rushed to intensive care, and so I was reviewing a few salient facts of his life -- his long off-and-on romance with Natalie Wood, his invention of sunscreen, his real estate empire in the Caribbean -- but now he is conscious and showing signs of intelligence so it looks as if I'm off the hook.
I like to read English obituaries, which are more frank than American obits. Americans go to great lengths not to speak ill of the dead and lean toward the comforting eulogy, but the obituary is not meant to comfort. It is meant to take inventory of a life. And thereby remind us that we too are mortal and someday the world will look at us with a cool clear eye and measure our contribution to the common good. ("His weekly column was always neatly typed and contained very few serious grammatical errors.") To make the dead guy into a demigod does not serve the common good.
This morning I read the obituary of an English writer I'd never heard of named Edward Upward, who died last Friday at the age of 105. (In fact, he outlived his obituarist, Alan Walker, who died in 2004.)
Ed went to Cambridge and was a friend of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood and his career seems to have wilted in the heat of their brilliance. They became famous and he got a job teaching school. And then he joined the Communist Party, which is a heavy load of bricks to carry, and he married a hard-line Communist named Hilda, and he wrote an essay announcing that good writing could only be produced by Marxists, whereupon he suffered writer's block for 20 years. (Talk about poetic justice.)
"The middle decades were bleak for Upward," wrote Mr. Walker. "During a sabbatical year designed to give Upward the chance to write, he suffered a nervous breakdown." And then when he did publish again, he had become an antique. His autobiographical trilogy, "The Spiral Ascent," was received by critics like you'd receive a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman.
And then there was the problem of walking around with the name Edward Upward.
It is a sobering tale for a fellow writer to read, and the main lessons of Upward's life, as I see it, are these.1. Don't hang out with brilliant people who are likely to outshine you -- unless you are a satirist. In which case, do. And stand quietly in back and take notes.
2. Writers shouldn't join parties and especially not the Communist Party.
3. Avoid making big pronouncements such as "The only good art is Marxist art." You say it, feeling you're on the cutting edge of history, but it's only going to come back and bite you in the butt.
4. If you must write an autobiography, give it a better title than "The Spiral Ascent."
I am a satirist. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party. I might have joined if Natalie Wood had tried to recruit me, but she did not. I am a Democrat but mainly for the atmosphere and so I can meet normal people who do real work. I don't write essays or autobiographies.
And thanks to Edward Upward, I have decided not to take a sabbatical after all. You go off to the woods for a year and it puts you under terrible pressure to write "Moby-Dick" or something worthy of having had an entire year in which to write, and the longer you work at this masterpiece, the shabbier it looks, the whale turns into a guppy, and at the end of the year you have torn up almost everything you wrote and you are filled with self-loathing and bitter regret. No thanks. I am sticking to my post and recommend that you do, too. And stay off the obituary page as long as possible. One hopes for an opulent send-off but it's not going to happen, dear heart, and so you may as well go ahead and live your life because your obituary is bound to be a big disappointment. ♥
[Garrison Keillor is an author, storyteller, humorist, and creator of the weekly radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." The show began in 1974 as a live variety show on Minnesota Public Radio. In the 1980s "A Prairie Home Companion" became a pop culture phenomenon, with millions of Americans listening to Keillor's folksy tales of life in the fictional Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon, where (in Keillor's words) "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average." Keillor ended the show in 1987, and 1989 began a similar new radio show titled "American Radio Company of the Air." In 1993 he returned the show to its original name. Keillor also created the syndicated daily radio feature "A Writer's Almanac" in 1993. He has written for The New Yorker and is the author of several books, including Happy to Be Here (1990), Leaving Home (1992), Lake Wobegon Days (1995), and Good Poems for Hard Times (2005). Keillor's most recent book is a new Lake Wobegon novel, Liberty. His radio show inspired a 2006 movie, "A Prairie Home Companion," written by and starring Keillor and directed by Robert Altman. Keillor graduated (B.A., English) from the University of Minneosta in 1966. His signature sign-off on "The Writer's Almanac" is "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."]
Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.
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THE GREEN LANTERN: The Green Hereafter
By Nina Shen Rastogi
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I try to be as eco-conscious as possible when it comes to managing my household waste. But lately I've been worrying about what to do when I become waste. What's the greenest thing I can do with my remains when I shuffle off this mortal coil?
The Green Lantern applauds you for thinking ahead. End-of-life decisions are always fraught and emotional; researching your options now—and spelling them out clearly—helps ensure that your loved ones abide by your wishes when you're out of the picture.
If you're like most Americans, you're planning on being buried or cremated. Each comes with a set of environmental burdens, though many of these can be mitigated. (If you prefer to have your body tossed off a boat, the EPA has a set of rules it would like you to follow.)
Traditional burials are highly resource-intensive. There are coffins to manufacture and ship—sometimes across very long distances, if you choose an exotic wood like mahogany—and concrete vaults to build. (Many cemeteries require coffins to be placed within bunkerlike structures to prevent their neatly manicured grounds from collapsing.) In a Slate article from 2006, the founder of the Green Burial Council estimated that Americans bury more metal each year than was used to make the Golden Gate Bridge and enough concrete to build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit.
The embalming fluid used to keep corpses looking perky is another ecological bête noire. More than 800,000 gallons of the stuff are interred in Mother Earth annually, most of it containing carcinogenic formaldehyde. Finally, burying your bones 6 feet deep means that your corpse will decompose without the benefit of oxygen. Instead of producing carbon dioxide and water, as your remains would if they were buried in topsoil, your body will sludge-ify and begin leaking out methane—a greenhouse gas that, as the Green Lantern has pointed out before, is 21 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
Many people who choose cremation do so because it seems like the tidier choice: less muss, less fuss. If you have your ashes scattered or kept in an urn, you won't be taking up valuable land space. Going without a gravesite also means you cut out the emissions and fuel consumption associated with regular visits from mourners.
But crematories don't run on lollipops and puppy dog tails—most use a combination of natural gas and electricity to incinerate their occupants. One leading manufacturer told the Green Lantern that a typical machine requires about 2,000 cubic feet of natural gas and 4 kilowatt-hours of electricity per body. That means the average cremation produces about 250 pounds of CO2 equivalent, or about as much as a typical American home generates in six days.
Along with energy consumption, mercury emissions from vaporized dental fillings are the other commonly cited concern. Since the EPA doesn't monitor crematoriums, reliable data are hard to come by, but estimates range from 300 to 6,000 pounds of mercury released annually via cremation. At the high end, that would represent about 2.7 percent of America's current anthropogenic mercury emissions.
On balance, the Green Lantern believes that cremation wins by a nose. First of all, cremations are usually a single-time operation, whereas burial plots require ongoing maintenance. A private 2007 study commissioned by an Australian cemetery found that the average cremation at that facility produced roughly four times as much CO2 equivalent as a burial. However, when the long-term fossil fuel costs of lawn-mowing and general grounds upkeep were factored in, burials had a 10 percent greater environmental footprint.
With fewer variables to deal with, a cremation also makes it much easier for you—and your family—to quantify and redress its impacts. You can buy carbon offsets, for example, to make up for the equipment operation. And if you're truly worried about the mercury in your choppers, you can request that they be removed before you're incinerated. (Since you'll generally save money going the cremation route, you'll have extra dough to put toward these procedures.) Look for crematoriums in your area that have the newest equipment—they'll generally be more fuel-efficient and equipped with better filtration systems—and opt to meet your scorching end in a shroud or simple cardboard casket.
If you do decide to go with interment, there are plenty of ways to green up the process. Choose a simple, locally sourced, metal-free coffin and a cemetery that doesn't require a cement vault. (Even if you choose a biodegradable, recycled-paper burial pod, sealing it up in an underground tomb will keep both you and the vessel from composting properly.) Also look for a funeral home that will forgo embalming in favor of refrigeration or dry ice, or at the very least use formaldehyde-free preserving fluid. Contrary to what some funeral directors may suggest, embalmment is rarely legally required. The Green Burial Council's list of recommended providers is a good place to start your planning. (By 2010, they'll be certifying crematoriums, too.)
The absolute greenest option would involve a shroud made from biodegradable fabric and a cemetery that inters its inhabitants in shallow graves and has been designed with an eye toward preserving the local ecology. Right now, there are about 20 burial grounds in the United States that practice varying levels of eco-consciousness, but that number will almost certainly grow in coming years. If you decide to take your everlasting rest in one of these pastoral settings, keep in mind that you may have to factor in longer road trips. Ask your family to keep your graveside service small and to keep future pilgrimages to an absolute minimum.
If you can manage to stick around for a while, two new technologies have eco-geeks (not to mention sci-fi fans) excited. The process of alkaline hydrolysis involves liquefying your body in a solution of lye and water, resulting in a pile of bone ash and a bottle of biofluid that you can pour on your houseplants. One of its leading proponents, a Scotland-based company called Resomation Ltd., claims that the procedure has a carbon footprint 18 times smaller than a typical cremator. In the other procedure, called promession, a corpse gets freeze-dried with liquid nitrogen and then shattered into powder, Terminator-style. Neither of these options is commercially available yet, but both the Mayo Clinic and the University of Florida use alkaline hydrolysis to dispose of their teaching cadavers. So, you experimental types—why not turn yourself into the ultimate recycling project and donate your body to science? ♥
[Nina Shen Rastogi is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BA in English from Yale and an MA in Shakespearean Studies from King's College London and the Globe Theatre. Rastogi currently is a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow in NYU's cultural reporting and criticism program.]
Copyright © 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co.
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
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