Page 4 .RAIN October 1976 Pleasant Undertaking We're ge:tting closer to a world where we can die in peace and'. be buried with dignity, affirming the miraculous dance oflife · giving way·to life. Until the client got coldfeet at the last · minute, it lo_oked like Philadelphia was going to get a cemetery tlesigned exclusively for organic burials. Malcolm Wells, the architect'of the dream and the builder of'underground, homes and offices, te!ls about it: We make so many mistakes, most of us, even when we're trying hardest to do good; that simpk, direct acts of gratitude ·toward life-acts like the return of our own bodies to the living land that produced them-seem; sometimes, like the only un~ complicated and selfless acts we can ever perform. And then we find that it's virtually impossib1e even to arrange that final gesture without tearing whole families apart at their blackest · · hours; the·simple act of organic burial is virtually denied us . by archaic customs, by perversions of religious teachings and· . by existing laws. . . The anachronism of our S!ill trying to cheat death through . the use ofpoisons, .powders and waterproof vaults seems almost unbelievable today; especially when we see noble deaths.,- deaths for the sake of life-occurring all around us. Each radish we crunch, every steak we eat, even the drop of blood whisked away from our arm by a mosquito, dies in the support of this miraculous, continuing, fantastically interdependent life we s};lare-something we can never say about human deaths caught up in the undertaker-graveyard ritual. Admittedly, "under- . taker" and "graveyard" are now "funeral director" and "cemetery," but.the ritual goes unchanged, getting, if anything, steadily worse as more plastics and more phoniness ·creep into it. . But now, at last, the death-practices of the Seventies are .showing faint but hopeful signs of becoming dying practices by 1980. The ecology movement and growing national revulsions against poisons and plastics are creating whole new ind~s: tries and ~re changing some of the old ones. And funeral directors, those most conservative of conservatives, seeing greater · social acceptance and undiminished profits ahead, are cautiously starting to test the wind. . ·In a Philadelphia suburb, for instance, a new branch build- . ing is being desjgned, to be used exclu_sively for organic funer~ als, by a big-name funeral home chain. All ceremonies at the riew center (there will be no shortage of ceremonies) are slated to be positive, life~affirming, natural, reverent and, ·hopefully, on some occasions, even joyous. Instead of somber, muted organ music and hushed voices there'll be tributes to the miraculous life-death-life cycle that produced the life currently passing through death. Instead of the body lying ridiculously 6n display in a grotesque comedy of shined shoes and tufted satin-instead of its being poisoned, powdered arid painted in . a futile attempt to make .death look like sleep, it will be wrapped in simple burial cloths arid placed, for the services, on a slab just a few feet away from a great glass wall overlooking·a wild landscape teeming with life. (The small mammals and birds on the grounds outside :Will be fed near-the window to assure constant activit)' there; a life~spectacular · that will positively astound those to whom it is unfamiliar.) Instead of random, half-relevant Bible quotations, read by someone who in all likelihood hardly knew the deceased, he will be remembered through brief reminiscences by his friends, through biographical material, and through pictures. Following the ceremonies at the memorial center, the .guests will leave for the cemetery, where everything from the. carrying of the wrapped .body to the graveside ceremonies themselves will still further tend to emphasize the eternal . miracle rather than the temporal tragedy. · .And talk about organi~ gardens! The ~ew cemetery will be a mossy woodland filled with the sounds of birds and other animals going about the business of life. Such a cemetery will never have to expand to_make room for more and mote concrete burial vaults; with well-spaced trees as the only grave markers, there will be almost no limit to the number of burials possible. Human compost, like other kinds, returns very quickly to life again. The new cemetery can quite literally become the transitional repository for an endless number of lives.
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