As Wayne Dodge lay dying in the summer of 2021, he considered carefully how he would like to be buried. The seventy-one-year-old doctor was environmentally conscientious and civic-minded. He wanted his remains to be deposited in a manner respectful to the Earth and comforting to the Seattle community of which he had been an integral part since the Eighties. Earlier that year he had suffered a nasty fall and fractured his fifth cervical vertebra, an injury which left him paralyzed below the chest. He could not move, but he could think. And in those straitened circumstances, his thoughts tended toward death and the ground in which he would lie.
One day his sister, Marie Eaton, showed him a video presentation made by Katrina Spade, a local activist who only two years before had successfully lobbied in the Washington state legislature for the legalization of a novel burial process. It was called human composting—though Spade prefers the term recomposition—and it entailed exactly what one might expect from its name. After death, a human body is sealed in a large vessel filled with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. The vessel is rotated periodically for about two months as the micro-organisms in the body and the plants work together to break down the flesh and bones. By the time the process is complete, only common soil remains. Spade was just then opening Recompose, the nation’s first human composting facility, in the Seattle industrial district. She was looking for clients. Marie suggested the procedure might be right for Wayne. He was a gardener, after all—before the fall, he had tended to more than fifty potted Japanese maples on his back porch—and had always been eager to share his gift for cultivation with his neighbors. If he became dirt, he could quite literally give himself back to the Earth and the community.
“Oh yeah, that’s for me,” Wayne agreed.
Wayne died that September after developing a urinary tract infection and aspiration pneumonia, against which even powerful prescription antibiotics were useless. Marie was with him on his last night. She sang to him as he drifted in and out of consciousness. The next morning she and Larry Kreisman, Wayne’s partner of nearly forty years, washed and dressed him. Then family, friends, and colleagues paid their respects. There were many well-wishers: Wayne had worked in health care for his long career, and notably had led his company’s response to the A.I.D.S. crisis. Now that he was gone himself, those whose lives he had affected paid tribute. It moved Larry to tears. “I’d like to think he was somehow listening in the next room,” he wrote in a note shortly afterward to those mourning Wayne’s death.
There was still the business of the burial. Wayne’s body was removed to Recompose—with pandemic lockdowns still in place, his family could not be present—and laid in a large white vessel filled with a mixture of organic material. (Wayne’s granddaughters sent wildflowers and tree branches to give the wood chips, alfalfa, and straw a more personal touch.) Then the micro-organisms got to work. For about two months they burned through Wayne’s body, devouring his flesh with such thermophilic intensity that they brought the temperature inside the vessel as high as one hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, the staff at Recompose monitored the vessel’s internal heat. Every time the temperature began to cool, they rotated the vessel, shaking loose the clumps of disintegrating tissue and allowing the microbes to feast once again. At last a staff member rotated the vessel and the temperature within did not rise. Wayne’s body had decomposed. The vessel was opened. The remains of Wayne’s bones were removed. These were mechanically reduced—ground—and stirred back into the mix. The slush was transferred to a curing bin, where for another few weeks the soil settled and its pH levels evened out; and soon the new Wayne was presentable for his loved ones.
Marie transported the soil out of the facility by the truckload. There was a lot of it. When using Recompose’s methods, a human body produces a cubic yard of compost, enough to cover the bed of a pickup truck. Wayne’s compost weighed about a thousand pounds—more than any one gardener could hope to use in her backyard, unless she were working on the scale of Beatrix Farrand. So Marie had it bagged up and distributed among Wayne’s family, friends, and neighbors. Everyone who had loved Wayne was invited to take a bucket of compost home and place it under a Japanese maple, or some other special place in their garden. In this way, Wayne came to be buried all over Seattle.
“I still talk with him every time I am weeding underneath my own Japanese maples,” Marie said in a testimony. “I love thinking of him spread under the roots of so many trees all across this country.”
Wayne was one of the first clients at Recompose, and his story, lovingly retold as if a fable, is a favorite among human composting proselytes. I first heard it when I visited the facility in Seattle this April during a tour the company hosted to promote its services. There were about twenty of us, mostly industry professionals (estate planners, funeral directors, representatives of the emerging “death doula” industry), as well as several elderly people considering human composting for themselves. We all gathered in Recompose’s headquarters, located in an old warehouse next to a shipping yard—about a mile from the original Costco—and furnished in that neutral-toned Scandinavian style favored by disrupters the world over. The front office was closing up, but soft music still filtered into the room through concealed speakers. Everywhere smelled of cedar. While we waited, I shuffled through the literature left out for prospective clients. Much of it was written in Silicon Valley patois, and were it not for the knowledge that Recompose is a full-service funeral home, I would have mistaken it for a tech start-up. This is in part by design: the company presents itself as a force that through legal advocacy and technological innovation will do for the funeral industry what Microsoft did for computer software. “Together,” one of the flyers declared, “we are cultivating enduring change on a large scale.”
At last our guide for the evening, Laura Cassidy, entered the room and introduced herself. She laid some ground rules for the tour: while Recompose is a space for learning about an exciting new form of death care, she said, it is also a hard-hat zone, where serious industrial work occurs. It is as much factory as funeral home. She pointed out the main areas we would be touring: a reception room for family members, a gathering space for funerary rites, and, in the back, the Greenhouse, where all the action takes place. Because of the sensitive nature of the work, we would only get a peek inside. “You’re not going to see any composting happening,” she assured us. “You’re not going to see any dead bodies.” But, she continued, we would be able to feel the composting happening all around. In the Greenhouse, many people are overcome by the sensory change, an overpowering effect of the musty mixture of wood chips, alfalfa, and straw, all piled on top of a biomass in a state of wet decay. “If you’ve been in a barn, it will remind you a little bit of that,” she offered. She informed us of Recompose’s strict “no pictures” policy in the Greenhouse, and we began the tour.
The first place we visited was a reception room. But there were no heavy carpets or overstuffed couches, no dais on which an open casket might be displayed. Instead it was plain and windowless, lit only by fluorescent floor lamps. A piece of tree bark hung on one wall where a typical funeral home would have placed a cross. On the opposite wall was a sink and a medicine cabinet filled with soaps, brushes, and essential oils. In the center stood a gurney on which staff members had placed a dummy corpse covered by a shroud. Here, our guide told us, is where family members can wash and anoint the loved one’s body before it is loaded into the vessel. Washing a corpse, brushing its hair, clipping its nails—these are old practices, she said, and salutary ones because they allow us to confront death in exactly the way an embalmer seeks to conceal. (Besides, the toxic chemicals pumped into an embalmed body preclude it from composting.) Recompose has refrigerators in which it will store bodies for up to four weeks for families who want to offer this more intimate goodbye. If the body is kept any longer than that, staff will have an honest conversation with the family about the realities of rigor mortis. Those in the room shuddered, and leaned in to hear more.
The other room we visited, the gathering space, was of a piece with the first. While it was lighter and airier than the reception room, it too was sparsely decorated;only the green stained glass gestured at the fact that it was a funeral chapel. This was unsurprising. The Pacific Northwest is one of the least religious regions in the United States. One thing about the room did stand out, however. In the center of the back wall was a large white hatch, shaped like a ship’s portal. Our guide opened it, and immediately the air was filled with a smell not unlike fresh manure. She explained that this was the door to the other side: after a final goodbye, during which the body is laid in a vessel and family members add biodegradable material as on a funeral pyre, it is pushed through the wall for processing. She invited us to gather around and peer through the dark tunnel. I crouched down and saw through the small hole on the other side what looked like an ordinary warehouse, except for a massive, shining structure that resembled a large honeycomb, each of whose constituent hexagons contained a white vessel. This was the Greenhouse.
And inside, it did smell like a barn. To be more precise, it smelled like a barn after a rainstorm. Composting is a mucky business, more mud than soil, and there is always an element of uncertainty involved. The staff at Recompose attempt to make a recipe of “browns” (the plants) to match evenly with “greens” (the human body) such that every corpse breaks down speedily and without outside intervention. But it’s not an exact science, and some bodies require more curing than others. Our guide encouraged us to think of it as a re-creation of what occurs on the forest floor. “It’s what’s happening when the leaves fall off the trees in the autumn and begin to decompose on the ground and nourish the trees around them,” she said. And unlike an Amazon Prime order, she pointed out, no one can say absolutely for sure when the completed product will arrive.
I looked up at the honeycomb, silently counting. There were thirty-three vessels, and it seemed more could easily be added. Our guide said that twenty-six were currently in use. Another fifteen hundred people have signed up for the program, some of whom are closer to death than others. About a third of the clientele come from outside Washington. (Many of them have little choice: the practice is only legal in twelve states.) Very often Recompose will mail the dirt back to the family. Our guide admitted that while flying in cadavers and shipping out soil reduces the promised ecological benefits of human composting right now, in the long run the planet will be better for it because Recompose is raising awareness for a worthy cause. The company predicts that in the next few years as many as ten more states will legalize human composting. And, thanks to venture capital investment, it may soon be a billion-dollar industry, with Recompose at its center. The company, whose services are by no means cheap, stands to make a killing as the industry grows. Already it is preparing to institute partnerships—somewhat akin to fast food franchises—to license its patented composting program and nearly fifteen years of data collected into the course of research and composting.
Before we left the Greenhouse, our guide directed our attention to a large pile of dirt on a tarp. She invited us to touch it. It was not, she stressed, the product of a dead body—just ordinary compost. While we ran our hands through the dirt, she explained what becomes of the bodies transformed in the wall of vessels behind us. Some are sent home to their families. Others are donated to state parks in need of fresh soil for reforestation efforts. (Recompose says it works with three such parks in Washington.) Most are some mixture of the two. Since Recompose produces so much more compost than most people can use, the majority of families opt to donate most of the soil to a state park and take home only a few bags. Pickup day is always different. Sometimes it is a casual affair. Family members roll up behind the Recompose facility in their S.U.V.s or pickup trucks, morning coffee in hand, and begin loading up the bags as if this were just another Home Depot run. For some, though, the horror of the grave is overpowering, and they load the bags into their vehicles with all the solemnity of a casket rolled into a hearse.
A woman behind me cut off our guide with a question: “So if you want a full load in the back of a truck, does a front-loader just . . . pick it up and dump it in?”
She looked down at the dirt dubiously. Some of it had strayed off the tarp and onto the floor.
“That’s right.” Our guide nodded her head vigorously. “That’s right.”
But, noticing the looks of discomfort on our faces, she elaborated. Of course Recompose does its best to preserve all the soil of a loved one. If someone plans to come with a pickup truck, the company recommends lining the bed with a tarp. And when the front-loader dumps the soil it does so slowly, carefully. Finally, the family is asked to batten down everything with another covering. Sensing that the tour needed to be steered in a less distressing direction, our guide changed the subject and recounted in brief the story of Wayne and Marie. She concluded with the scene of Wayne’s community, happily digging into his remains: “. . . everyone came with buckets and wheelbarrows, so they could continue gardening with Wayne.” Everyone smiled.
I left Seattle puzzled. This is a common response to human composting and really any outré burial practice. Most people in the United States are accustomed to the so-called traditional burial or, more recently, cremation. The traditional American model, however, dates back only to the Civil War, when many men died on the battlefield, far away from home. Their bodies were injected with chemicals that staved off the effects of decomposition such that when they were sent back home the cadavers still appeared fresh. Over the course of the late nineteenth century, this rudimentary form of modern embalming developed into an intricate—and very expensive—ritual built on the vain idea that after death, the body should be preserved to appear as if were still alive. But as anyone who has been to an open-casket funeral knows, it never works out so neatly. An embalmed body does not look like an incorrupt saint; it somehow appears even more dead than before. This aspect of the American funeral industry is memorably satirized in Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One—in one scene, an embalmed parrot is given an open-casket funeral—and straightforwardly savaged in Jessica Mitford’s book The American Way of Death, which sought through an investigation of the funeral industry to expose the “huge, macabre and expensive practical joke” morticians were playing on the American public.
The American Way of Death is still the authority on the excesses of the traditional funeral industry and on the strange, peculiarly American expression of the deep human desire for the body to endure in perpetuity. But to read it now is to encounter a dated document. Mitford’s work was first published in 1963 and updated in 1998, and since then the way people dispose of their loved ones’ remains has changed radically. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, twenty-six percent of Americans who died were cremated. In 2020, that share had risen to fifty-six percent. By 2045, it is expected to rise to more than eighty percent. Part of the reason is that cremation is vastly cheaper than traditional burial—only a thousand dollars to the ten grand something more elaborate will likely entail—and Americans are not as rich as they once were. But wealth doesn’t explain all of it: people have always spent lavishly for burials, no matter how poor they are. Why stop now? There are many theories. Christians, and especially Catholics, attribute the dominance of cremation to declining religiosity and a lack of respect for the human body. (The Church officially opposed cremation until 1963 and even now quietly discourages it.) Some sociologists identify it as the expression of ancient indigenous folkways long suppressed by Western death rituals. The strangest theory I have encountered is that of Shannon Lee Dawdy, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, who speculates that the sustained rise of cremation is directly attributable to the events of September 11, 2001. “It is as if the televised mass trauma of the collapsing Twin Towers jolted us away from our attachment to the beautiful corpse, to once again embrace the principle of ‘dust to dust,’” she writes. “We had no choice. So many victims were already dust.”
That last theory, unlikely in its factual analysis, is nevertheless compelling in its way. While Mohamed Atta & Co. did not seek to bring about a renaissance in cremation, their aim was the same as that of those signing up for services at a crematorium: total annihilation. The expression was different, but the urge similar. Most people have it somewhere within them, that desire for physical annihilation, the “insatiable and sweet craving for the secrets of night and death,” as Nietszche had it. It can be a comforting thought. After all, people believe all sorts of things about the afterlife. There is no consensus on what comes next. But when they think about the wrecked bodies we leave behind, an increasing number of people agree: life is disappointing and frustrating enough as it is; better to be pulverized than artificially preserved. That the former is relatively inexpensive only adds to its allure.
For others, though, often the less romantically inclined, the thought of annihilation after death—the cosmic meaninglessness of ashes scattered to the wind—is deeply unsatisfying. (Here I leave aside those who object to cremation for religious reasons.) To these people, novel burial practices such as human composting can have a powerful attraction. For in turning the body to dirt, the meaning of death is salvaged, made useful, even improved upon. When Spade was first shopping around the idea in 2011, under the aegis of the Urban Death Project, she advertised human composting in terms of responsible citizenship. Cities are running out of room for graveyards, she said, and the Earth cannot tolerate the estimated three hundred sixty thousand tons of carbon dioxide released into the air annually because of cremation. Our bodies eventually become dirt anyway: why not speed up the process and produce a tangible good?
In its initial conception, human composting was to be a grand community project, whose products would be used to revivify the Earth, bringing forth flowers, trees, and food. Spade envisioned a great mingling of bodies for the sake of a cause much larger than any one person. “Once they become composite material, there will be mixing and finishing and that’s when that material is no longer one person,” she told a Seattle newspaper in 2015. “You’ll be getting your grandmother, but you’ll also be getting your grandmother’s neighbor.” That idea, understandably, revolted many people, not because of the composting in itself, but because it dispensed with the individuality of the deceased. In those early days, the Urban Death Project would frequently receive comments on its website slinging abuse. One read: “This MUST be a joke. If not, there’s only one word which could possibly describe your activities: SICK.” Another got more to the point: “A pile of bodies is usually called a ‘mass grave.’ Please stop what you’re doing.” When the Urban Death Project became Recompose, it did stop—or rather it retooled its emphasis to what I saw on the tour, composting bodies in individual vessels and stressing only the practical benefits of producing more soil for the Earth.
Still, there is something unsatisfying in all this. Human composting is a peculiarly American project, in that it can only justify its reasons in terms of improvement, productivity, and marketing science. And as it happens, the only significant opposition to the practice rests on these same grounds. When Spade shepherded her proposal for legalization through the Washington state legislature in 2019, local Catholic authorities spoke out against human composting, saying that “disposing human remains in such a manner fails to show enough respect for the body of the deceased.” But as this is already the Church’s argument against cremation—one that many of its members don’t even take seriously—little attention was paid to the protest. And in the other states where human composting has been legalized, Catholic leaders have said much the same. The Church in California, however, formulated what I think is a more interesting argument. When that state’s legislature legalized human composting in 2022—using Spade’s research and advocacy in Washington as its guide—the bishops in the state countered that while the practice violated the “virtually universal norm of reverence and care towards the deceased,” the real problem was one of inappropriate economics. Human composting treats the human body as yet another “disposable commodity.”It is hard not to think along the lines of commodities when considering that the bulk of the compost produced at Recompose ends up on Bells Mountain, a trail in southern Washington that runs through several active logging sites. Pictures of the state park hang prominently in the company’s lobby, to remind prospective clients that their remains will be put to work, hard work. Bells Mountain, like many trails in the Pacific Northwest, is a torn-up place, first by the logging industry and then by off-roaders, who screech through its valleys, ripping apart the soil and leaving profane tracks in the mud. It is here where the composted dead find their final earthly home, serving out a sentence on an ersatz Mount Purgatory, feeding the forests stripped for commercial interest and repadding the ground ravaged by the gluttons of pleasure.
