The Garden of Me

Every year Sweet Husband's grandmother gets him a subscription to Popular Science for Christmas. He is to Popular Science as I am to Martha Stewart. When he comes home and sees it lying on the counter waiting for him, it does no good to ask him to do anything else before he's read the whole magazine from cover to cover. The perk for me is that I get a nice synopsis of all interesting things Popular Science-y, without having to muggle through the stuff I couldn't care less about.

This evening he read to me an article about different things you can have done to your body after you die. Being the semi-responsible couple that we are, we have disscussed this, just in case. Sweet Husband wants to be made into a diamond (Yes, they really can do this) and up until this evening I wanted to be creamated and have my ashes spread, oh, a little here and a little there. But the article proposed what might be a better solution.

"Promesion," a body-disposal method developed by Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh-Masak lets you return your body to the Earth in a way that gives plants more nutrients than cremation. Apparently, the body is put into a container and then dipped into a vat of extremely cold liquid nitrogen. When the body is pulled out, it is so dehydrated that a jolt of vibration will shatter it, turning it into a nitrogen and phosphorus rich powder. The powder is then put into a potato starch box, which will disintegrate in less than a year. The cost is estimated to be about $1000, much cheaper than a traditional burial.

This is SO cool. Even if I didn't think that cemetaries are a huge waste of space (which I do), and even if I didn't think coffins are creepy (which I also do)--I'm going to be a garden someday! What could possibly be a better way to go?