The End

One day I will own a hobby farm--10 acres, more or less, with horses, chickens and goats--and on that farm I'll have a rustic garden, where a braided creek will purl and tumble through thickets of wild raspberry. It's in this garden where I'll drink my coffee in the evening, watching fat bees as they make their last commute of the day. And it is my fondest wish that one day, in this garden, I will look up, clutch my chest, wet my pants and keel over dead.

Bury me where I fall.

In earlier years, I was indifferent to the disposition of my remains. I was, in fact, signed up to be a whole-body donor. It pleased me to think I might wind up the beloved cadaver of some first-year medical students. Perhaps they would give me a nickname--Frosty? Ole Blue Eye?--or take me to football games. They could position me on all fours and use me as a bicycle rack. I just didn't care.

My wife, however, would prefer that this mortal coil not shuffle off to some anatomy lab in Buffalo. So wither?

Well, if I must care, then I utterly refuse to submit to a traditional American burial. You would have to go back to the Egyptians to find a more ghoulish process than our standard practice of putting formaldehyde-infused bodies in ornate caskets, in concrete vaults, buried 6 feet under, there to "slumber" in some unhappy parkland until--I presume this is the hope--the Rapture, when the dead will rise from the grave, looking good.

For anyone looking into death, I recommend Mark Harris' recent book, "Grave Matters." Harris gives readers a slab-level view of embalming and traces the rise in so-called green burial. As he says, the typical cemetery is less an Elysian field than a toxic waste dump, the ground so tainted with mortuary chemicals that it is like a modern salting of the Earth.

In increasing numbers, baby boomers are choosing vastly simpler, cleaner and cheaper funerals, in which the deceased's body is put in a plain wooden box or wicker basket or even the evocative winding sheet and buried unembalmed in special cemeteries that serve as natural conservancies, perpetually preserved spaces that push back against development. Worms and microbes do the rest.

For a generation whose members have managed to politicize their every consumer choice, it's no surprise that funeral arrangements should be keyed to temporal and secular values: Call it death style. According to the Cremation Assn. of North America, about one-third of all Americans opt for the flame. We are, after all, a restless lot. Cremation allows the deceased loved one to be easily moved: ash and carry.