Vanessa Praça-Correa I have thought about this question for decades. From the very start of thinking about this I immediately ruled out burial. To have my dead body stuffed into a box and buried with a tombstone above ground just seems like the most disgusting and deplorable way to kick the bucket. The very notion of cemeteries is so very wrong to me on so many, many levels.

Several decades ago when I was studying Lakota spirituality I became enamored of their funerary procedures. They built a wooden funeral pyre, set the dead body upon it and set it on fire, the essence of that dead body’s spirit rising with the smoke up to the heavens and the Creator.

But that’s a lot of carbon going up into the air. Wouldn’t it be better for that carbon to go into the earth?

In my studies of planetary spiritual practices I thought I found the perfect way to kick the bucket when I read about the funerary practices of the Zoroastrian religion (one of the very oldest religions on the planet). Like the Lakota — and other spiritual systems — the Zoroastrians built a funeral pyre upon which they placed the naked body. But instead of burning it, they just let the body lie upon the pyre to be eaten by buzzards. The relatives of the deceased person would gather and pray daily around the pyre until there was nothing left but bones.

Man, I thought this was really cool. There is no tombstone and there is no carbon being released into the atmosphere. But what I didn’t like was all the relatives gathering around the body as it was being devoured by vultures. Plus there was all that wood used to build the funeral pyre.

So a few years back I finally decided on just how I wanted to kick the bucket. I decided that I wanted my dead body to be stripped naked and taken out into the middle of the desert and just dropped off onto the ground.

My body would provide some meals for vultures and coyotes and countless bugs until there was nothing left but bones. Those bones would then be bleached by the relentlessly hot desert sun (I’m a solar freak and this turns me on) until my bones would eventually break down and provide nutrients to the soil to help feed the plants of the desert.

I would be providing meals for animals and nutrients for the plants. My carbon emissions would not be going into the atmosphere but rather into the soil and environment. Eventually there would be nothing left just as there was nothing there before I was born. I would have come into and gone out of life in the most natural way possible. There would be no epitaph, no memorial, no popcorn, and nothing to lay claim to anything that was nothing more than a life. Plus, there would be the extra added bonus of pissing off all my relatives.