Angry in the Great White North

Most people who choose to be buried when they die are embalmed, then placed in a casket that sounds like it could double as a bank vault -- metal linings and welded seals and so on and so forth. Honestly, I've never understood how burial had become so elaborate.

Well, the eco-crowd have a new way:

Tommy Odom's remains lie on a steep wind-swept hill at Forever Fernwood, beneath an oak sapling, a piece of petrified wood and a bundle of dried sage tied with a lavender ribbon.

When he died in a traffic accident last year, Mr. Odom, 41, became the first of 40 people at Fernwood cemetery to move on to greener pastures - literally. He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus.

Here, where redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which "each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank," said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall.

For me, I think there is a middle way here. Loose the elaborate mummification process and the vault-like caskets, but maybe a bit less of the dried sage and "replanting" rhetoric.

Or you can go with Homer Simpson's plan, which he discussed as he faced bypass surgey:

Homer: Now Marge, if the unthinkable should happen, you're going to be lonely.

Marge: Oh Homer, I could never remarry.

Homer: Darn right. And to make sure, I want to be stuffed and put on the couch as a constant reminder of our marital oath.

I suggested that to my wife, and she made it clear that the couch and I would both be at the end of the driveway the next day, for anyone to take away as a curiousity. When I asked who would lug the couch outside, she was strangely silent.

Maybe less blogging and more attention at home, eh?