Compost me. I Want to Be a Tree

I just finished reading Stiff by Mary Roach recently, and it got me all hyped up about having my corpse freeze dried, mashed up and turned into compost so I can grow a tree. I informed my partner about this and his response was, "We'll see." WTF do you mean we'll see? WHEN exactly will we see?

When I was a kid I used to love to wander through cemeteries, mostly with my dad.  We'd go to the famous Black Angel Cemetery in Iowa City and walk through.  He'd point out the unmarked graves over to the side that belonged to the unclaimed bodies, the elaborate white gates that marked the entrance to the baby cemetery on the hill (I can't remember what it was called, but it had it's own name, and I swear to God it was something like "Baby Land." I'm going to find out, cuz I really hope I'm wrong on that one.) When I was seventeen a friend of mine's baby died of SIDS, and she was buried there in that cemetery.  I remember the tiny coffin-- it was like a toy coffin, if such things existed.  She found the baby, just a month old, in the morning.  She had died in the night.

The first funeral I ever attended was for my Great-Uncle Bert.  I was four, and all I remember is getting pinched by my mother when my brother and I wouldn't stop fighting and sliding up and down the pews.

There is a cemetery about a mile down the gravel road from where my sister used to live.  I'd let my little nephews drive (they were probably three and six, and they sat on my lap and steered the car) down there some days.  My little nephew would cross through the wrought iron gate and climb the hill with his hand clutching my pants, confirming what I already knew-- that he could see dead people. "Sanctuary," he called the cemetery. "Sanctuary!" Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame had just come out.

I've never been too much troubled by cemeteries.  One of my high school friends convinced us that there was a haunted cemetery in Cedar Rapids, a good half an hour drive away.  So, we dutifully loaded up my car and drove up there in the dead of winter.  For some reason the cemetery gates were open, despite the fact that it was night time.  I drove my car slipping up and down the little snow covered roads of the cemetery, waiting for the promised nudge of a dead hand against the bumper.  It didn't happen, and I was disgusted that we had wasted perfectly good drinking time.

After my dad died, about a year later, I got a call from the people who owned the Bohemian cemetery where he's buried.  It turns out they put him in the wrong place-- he didn't own the plot where he was laid for his eternal rest.  Either we had to find the person who owned it and get permission for the plot, or my dad would have to be moved.  I made many phone calls to distant cousins (the cemetery is tiny, and almost everyone over on that side is some kind of relation) until we found out that the cousin who owned the plot had died years before and been buried in California. (Here's a bit of corpse law-- if you choose not to use the plot you buy, you lose your rights to it.  Bear that in mind.)  I spent many hours picturing the moving of my dad's steel colored coffin, and imagining what he might look like now, a year after dying (not that they would open the coffin, but still).  It grossed me out.  It still does.  Why would a person want to be stuck in the ground to slowly rot away? Compost me.  I want to be a tree.