Dori wants his dead body either taxidermied or composted

KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson felt a little creeped out when he first heard about the idea of composting human bodies last year. But now that’s he’s had time for the idea to settle, his perspective has evolved.

“It actually sounds kind of cool to me,” he said. “If you had somebody that you loved and all of the sudden a beautiful tree is growing, in part, because of them … I can’t imagine working somebody I loved into the soil, but I think I’d love to look at the tree.”

Dori spoke with Katrina Spade, a Seattle-based architectural designer who is behind the Urban Death Project, which aims to provide Seattle residents with another alternative for dealing with death.

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Spade said the primary options after death – conventional burial and cremation – are fine for some, but that it seems strange that they are practically the only two options we have.

“I feel like death is a pretty amazing event, however horrible it sometimes is and however sad it is, it is still kind of incredible,” she said. “There is so much potential to do death and death care better from how we age all the way through.”

Spade said farmers have been composting livestock for almost 30 years and the Urban Death Project takes that principle of composting full-grown steer, horses, sheep and pigs and creates a system appropriate to the human experience.

Composting, she says, is “accelerated decomposition” because of the use of high-carbon materials, in this case, wood chips, and the addition of oxygen to the system, which speeds up decomposition. She says they are still figuring out the details of their system, but believes human bodies would decompose in about four to six weeks.

“One of the things I think is cool is there is no longer a body,” she said. “Essentially, the molecules have rearranged and you’ve got a totally new material at the end of this process. So it’s not like remains that you’ve got ashes that are really just crushed up bones. This is actually a full transformation from human into something else – basically from human to soil.”

The general idea is for loved ones to be able to use the composted body material in a garden or tree. If her vision comes to fruition, they will have composting systems in funeral homes around the city.

“In a way, it’s kind of like crematories are now where you’ve got the retort and a place for people to gather sometimes and you’ve got the system and the memorial sometimes in the same place,” she said. “So this is a little bit similar. But it’s about creating places that we don’t currently have in our city to have a little bit deeper relationship with death.”

She said the idea is still in the design phase and that she hopes to have a prototype for the system in the next year.

Dori surprised himself by liking the idea.

“I can’t really think of any great objection to this,” he said. “I know it’s odd and I know that it sounds strange to people, but I don’t know that it’s any stranger than rotting away in a box or having your earthly remains burned into char. I don’t know why some people consider this that much odder than the things we do now.”

Despite all this, Dori pointed out that Spade forgot one other option after death – taxidermy, which is the route he’s currently leaning.

“I want to be stuffed, I’ve decided,” he said. “And I want each of my daughters to have me for one week a month.”

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