23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 39Daniel Cossins is a features
writer at New ScientistAnother option is to donate your corpse to
medical science, where it can at least be of
use before it is cremated. Just be careful not to
perish during holidays such as Christmas when
medical schools tend not to accept bodies.
In any case, I have decided: a nice quiet death
at home, surrounded by family, followed by
a quick change into a mushroom shroud and
a woodland burial. Lovely. But then a colleague
reminds me that it isn’t just your corpse you
leave behind – there is your online legacy, too.Cyber funerals
I’m minded to ignore this. I don’t do much
in the way of social media and none of
my photos are stored in the cloud. But
James Norris, founder of the Digital Legacy
Association, leaves me in no doubt that it is
important. “It’s an altruistic thing,” he says.
“If you make no plans for your digital legacy,
your next of kin might have no idea about
the tranche of precious photographs on
Facebook, for instance.”
Curating your own digital legacy takes a bit
of work, I discover. Each platform has different
terms of service, which makes it doubly tricky
if you want to erase your online presence
entirely. A few companies promising “cyber
funerals” will do this for you but it isn’t cheap.
Either way, it is unlikely to be totally effective.
“We usually recommend people accept that
there is going to be a legacy online and do their
best to curate it,” says Norris.
Alternatively, you might decide that you
want to live forever (online). A company called
Eterni.me and an app called Augmented
Eternity both promise a version of “digital
immortality” by scraping your online data
to create a digital avatar capable of interacting
with people on your behalf after your death.
This is most definitely not for me.
In fact, I tend to agree with Hayden that
“ultimately, the value in thinking about death
is that it makes you value your finite life more”.
Now, I’m not saying I’m suddenly going to
live every day like it is my last. But this whole
exercise has had an impact, not least by
persuading me not to agonise over everyday
frustrations that are actually unimportant.
As a bonus, I also know that my mum would
very much like to become compost for an apple
tree. And I would gladly eat the apples. ❚Most of us fail
to acknowledge
death, let alone
see beauty in itsource of funeral advice. “But they’re mainly
just about making stuff with your ashes,” she
says. “For me, the most important change in
recent years is the rise of green burials.”
Cremation comes with a big carbon
footprint, while the toxic chemicals used in
embalming eventually leach into the ground.
People concerned about these impacts are
increasingly choosing biodegradable coffins
and woodland burials. The UK now has some
270 natural burial sites. This year, Washington
state made it legal to compost human bodies,
with a process called recomposition. You might
even don a “mushroom shroud”, a body suit
in which the threads are infused with spores of
fungi that can barely wait to start digesting you
to leave nothing but a pollutant-free compost.
Hall also alerts me to an eco-friendly version
of cremation. Technically known as alkaline
hydrolysis, it essentially dissolves the body,
reducing it to liquid and ash over several hours.
“ Ultimately, the
value in thinking
about death is
that it makes
you value your
finite life more”