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Bury Me Naked : give me a shroud, or a box of pine, or not

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oh bury me on the lone prairie
where the dirt is soft and embraces me
to become the grass along the stream
to feed the deer in love in spring

give me a shroud, or a box of pine / c g, d g
or bury me naked, it’ll be so fine /d g

mother earth will embrace me then /g c
to decompose, then recompose again /d g
I’ll feed the earth, as she fed us all /g c
may others begin, when I do fall/ em am d

to become the eyes of meadowlark /g c
and vixen’s ears for her mate do hark /d g
and coyote’s throat that sings at night /g c
and (yellow) wings of dancing butterfly/ em am d

give me a shroud, or a box of pine / c g, d g
or bury me naked, it’ll be so fine /d g

need another “to become…” verse
with 4 more lifeforms here

so come along to my new home /g c
and be at ease, as you see me roam /d g
for the dirt has turned me you will see /g c
into bugs and leaves and critters free / em am d

give me a shroud, or a box of pine / c g, d g
or bury me naked, it’ll be so fine /d g

Bury Me Naked stele / laina corazon c12

Will and Testament for Me, Steven Eugene Ely “Stele”:

Hello Friends, When I die I hope you will celebrate my death because as another of my songs says, *We Will Love Again*. That is, if enough of us help delay the demise of our biosphere, We Will Love Again. For more fun, Stele

I don’t think I have any minor additions of this Will hanging around on my desk or in my house somewhere. In any case, know that this online Will supersedes and has power over any other paper versions found.

I also have copy or a similar prior version of this Will in my stele/aht/xoearth.org and greentopia/aht/yahoo.com emai1 drafts, and in the BuryMeNaked.htm file in the \1-XOEARTH-\a XOE folder on my computer.

There may be minor additions of this Will hanging around on my desk or in the house somewhere, but this online Will supersedes and over powers all other paper versions found.

If possible, I would prefer to be allowed to decompose on top of the soil, to be eaten by birds, coyotes, beetles, worms and bacteria. If this is too inconvenient or not possible for the executor, outside decomposition is not necessary.

If the above is a hassle, a simple cheap softwood coffin would be ok. Do not want to be buried in a costly metal, concrete or fancy wood coffin.

But if my executor decides to aquamate or cremate me, that’s ok too. Whichever it is, I prefer the way that releases less carbon emissions.

My mother would like some of my remains to be near her in a drawer where she has arranged to have her ashes and other family members put. Therefore, if possible, once I have decomposed in or on top of the ground, or aquamated, or cremated, it would be nice if someone would obtain some of my bone and/or hair from my decomposed self, and put them in the drawer next to her.

Do not donate my body or organs at death, and do not use my body for transplant, therapy, research or education.

Here is my executor list. Any of these may decide to be my executor in the following order of preference.

My preferred executor can be my son L[son] u k[son]e, sister R o [sis ster] b i n, brother D a[bro t ther] v i d, my son’s wife, P a[my fr iend] u l S i[that fr iend]e g l[fr iend] e r, D a n(fr iend)i e l a W i t h(fr iend)a a r, A n d[my fr iend] rea R o [that fr iend] s e, G(f r ie nd)a i l B(fr i end)r a(fr iend)d b r(fr iend)o o k [U K e x t r e b e l], or D r (ste p bro) e w . If someone does not want to be the executor the next person in this line may assume that role.

If for any reason a preferred person does not want to be the executor, it is totally fine with me that the next person down on the preferred list have the option to be the executor. I hope that the person who is willing to be the executor decides to do so because they think it will be enjoyable and even fun. I do not want any person on the list to feel obligated to be the executor.

The person I want to make health care decisions for me if I can’t because I am ill is the same as executor.

If more than one person from the preferred executor list wants a specific property item found in my house please draw from a hat to decide who gets that item.

I would like the executor to compensate themselves at $244 per hour for the time they spend liquidating my physical assets. If possible, it would be great if the executor gives at least 85% of the proceeds from selling or liquidating any of my personal property and real estate to my favorite climate crisis fighting organizations that include the SunriseMovement, SierraClub.org, 350.org, NRDC.org, EDF.org, Greenpeace.org, Extinction Rebellion rebellion.global, and Climate Reality. The executor may decide whether to give those proceeds to only one or to divide it between those organizations.

After proceeds are given to that environmental organization[s], the executor may decide to give any of the remainder to any one or several of the those in the above preferred executor list.

I have two bank accounts. The beneficiaries of those small balances have already been designated via my account options with those banks.

Please keep my XOEarth.org website going by paying the XOEarth.org, XOEarth.net and any other relevant domain fees [probably at GoDaddy.com] and webhosting services [probably at NetworkSolutions.com]. Please pay those fees paid in advance for at least 10 years. Please have someone maintain the WordPress website and software. I would like to give the management of XOEarth.org and XOEarth.net to the people in this order of authority : D a n(fr iend)i e l a W i t h(fr iend)a a r, my son L u[son] k e, A n d[my fr iend] rea R o [that fr iend] s e, L(fr iend)u k e C o(fr iend)m er, P a u (fr iend)l s e Si eg L e(fr iend)r , R o(fr iend) g e r H a(U K XR) l l a m, G(f r ie nd)a i B(fr i end)r a(fr iend)d b r(U K XR)o o k, or D r (ste p bro) e w .

If I am near the end of my life and there is less than a 33% chance for me to improve back to near normal, I do not want CPR.

I only want pain meds and no life support systems if I am very ill or near death.

When I am dying I would like to be in any of my family’s or friend’s homes if someone would like to take on this responsibility. Anyone may come to dance, sing, eat vegan food and play music.

All of my loved ones can know anything they want to know about my life that is found in my archives, writings and junk.

This Is My Legal Will, For More Love and Life, Steven Eugene Ely “Stele”

PS: This last update of my Will was done on about 8/6/2024.

Your Mama is so wet… she is covered by 75% water and she is going to drown your cute little butt if you don’t help her get people to burn less fossil fuels. Your Mama is so hot… she is losing her ocean species at such a high rate that you and I might not get to meet as manta rays when your and my atoms and molecules go flying around after we are both dead and gone as humans.

I wrote some names with spaces and clutter so they would not come up in a web search.
Resources::

A superb green burial song hook, Grave Matters, can be found in a book at Grave Matters by Environmental journalist Mark Harris.
Excerpt from Grave Matters: For all its verdant landscaping, the typical cemetery functions less like a bucolic resting ground for the dead than a landfill for the materials that infuse and encase them. Over time, the typical ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground, for example, contains enough coffin wood to construct more than 40 houses, nearly 1,000 tons of casket steel and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete. Add to that a volume of toxic formalin nearly sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer used to keep the cemetery grounds preternaturally green. More info at GraveMatters.us.

Green Burial Council www.greenburialcouncil.org
The Green Burial Council is a nonprofit organization working to encourage environmental sustainability in the death care industry and the use of burial. The Green Burial Council aims to encourage sustainability in the interment industry and to use burial as a means of ecological sustainability.

Natural burial – Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_burial

Aquamation : With “alkaline hydrolysis” to dissolve bodies, also called aquamation, the body of the deceased is immersed for three to four hours in a mixture of water and a strong alkali, such as potassium hydroxide, in a pressurised metal cylinder and heated to around 150C. It is the process behind Desmond Tutu’s ‘green cremation’.

Burials and Cemeteries Go Green : NPR www.npr.org > News > Science > Environment
Environmentally friendly funerals are catching on in some areas of the U.S. as an alternative to traditional burials.

Green burials are gaining traction in the Washington area www.washingtonpost.com. green-burials
People who drive hybrids, recycle and compost can also die in an eco-friendly way: a green burial.

A dying wish to be ‘home for fish’ CNN search for dying green at cnn.com Carole Dunham, 69, loved the ocean. Last July, she was diagnosed with cancer and had only a few months to live. Dunham knew her last …

Green Burials Offer Unique, Less Costly Funerals nationalgeographic.com
From artificial reefs to outer space, alternative burial options abound. More people in the U.S. are chosing environmentally friendly burials.

Worldwide, more than 50,000,000 people pass away each year. Traditional burial and cremation practices can have significant negative on our planet’s biosphere

www.upworthy.com/the-way-doctors-think-about-death-is-pretty-different-from-the-way-their-patients-do

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10 responses to “Bury Me Naked : give me a shroud, or a box of pine, or not”

  1. Stele Avatar
    Stele

    This kind of burial would be fine for me too. Stele
    The Living Cocoon from Loop, made from mushroom mycelium, offers a uniquely green final resting place.
    https://www.treehugger.com/living-coffin-reunites-faster-nature-5214276

  2. SteleEly Avatar
    SteleEly

    So many of us love those dreams when we can fly – and even be of be a bird. Why do we have them stick us in a sealed box or an sealed urn that the bird – and bees – can't get to. Bury me naked and let me fly.

  3. SteleEly Avatar
    SteleEly

    Via Grist: http://grist.org/living/a-different-way-to-die-th…
    Around half of Americans are buried after they die. In a conventional burial, the body is drained of blood and injected with formaldehyde, methanol, and other solvents that slow the decomposition process. Afterward, the body is placed in a casket made of wood or metal, which is then lowered into a plastic-lined concrete vault designed to prevent the soil around the casket from sinking.
    This takes a lot of resources. Each year, more than 30 million board feet of wood, 1.6 million tons of concrete, 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid, and 90,000 tons of steel are used for underground burials in the United States alone. That’s as much steel as is in the Golden Gate Bridge.

  4. SteleEly Avatar
    SteleEly

    via Grist: As the sole species responsible for filling the oceans with plastic, pumping the atmosphere full of pollution, clear cutting the world’s forests, and bringing about what could be the sixth great mass extinction, it’s perhaps fitting that when we die, we turn our own corpses into toxic flesh bags that ensure ecological damage for years and years to come. It’s as if someone dared us to come up with the most environmentally harmful burial practices imaginable, and we dutifully complied, stopping just short of strapping vials of radioactive waste to our chests on our way to the grave.

    As Mark Harris, the former Los Angeles Times journalist who literally wrote the book on modern burial practices, put it on his website:

    For all its verdant landscaping, the typical cemetery functions less like a bucolic resting ground for the dead than a landfill for the materials that infuse and encase them. Over time, the typical ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground, for example, contains enough coffin wood to construct more than 40 houses, nearly 1,000 tons of casket steel and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete. Add to that a volume of toxic formalin nearly sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer used to keep the cemetery grounds preternaturally green. http://grist.org/sponsored/7-ways-to-greenify-you…

  5. SteleEly Avatar
    SteleEly

    You can ensure that there's life after death for your loved ones, especially if you'd like to turn them into a tree.

    Two years ago, Margaret covered the launch of the Bios Urn, which is a biodegradable urn that allows people to grow a tree from the ashes of their loved one's remains, but the people behind this product, estudimoline, a design firm in Barcelona, have taken this one huge step further with the launch of their Incube.

    The Bios Incube is essentially an app-controlled tree incubator that is designed to fit the Urn, so that growing the legacy of a tree from the ashes of your loved ones is as simple as can be. The Bios Urn slides right inside the Incube, the device is filled with water, and then the Incube sensor is placed on top of the soil.

    The sensor monitors light levels, soil and air temperature and humidity, soil conductivity (for assessing fertilizer needs), and the status of the seed/tree, and then automatically waters the urn for optimal growth. The Incube holds about 3 gallons of water (which the company says is "enough to nourish your seed or tree for an average of twenty days"), and includes a pump for delivering the water from the reservoir to the soil. The data from the sensor is sent via WiFi to an app on your phone, where it can be used to track the growth of the tree no matter where in the world you are.

  6. SteleEly Avatar
    SteleEly

    Egg-shaped burial pods feed the trees and turn cemeteries into forests
    In another twist on green funerals and eco-friendly burials, two Italian designers envision a new way of paying it forward, even after death.
    In the attempt to make cemeteries, funerals, and burials greener, many different ideas have been put forth over the last couple of decades, including one which can turn your loved ones into compost, but this concept goes a step further and envisions planting "sacred forests" with the bodies of the deceased serving as fertilizer.
    The Capsula Mundi concept, from designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, uses an egg-shaped burial pod made from biodegradable starch plastic as the coffin, in which the body is placed in a fetal position and buried under the ground. A tree (or tree seed) is then planted over the top of the pod, which will use the nutrients from the decomposing body as fertilizer for its growth.

  7. SteleEly Avatar
    SteleEly

    Excerpt by Victor Forsythe: A green burial has many advantages over traditional Western burials, and not just because they’re more environmentally friendly. Green burials are typically less expensive (sometimes less than half the cost of traditional burials), and can be more meaningful and less depressing for family members. Regardless of what you believe about an eternal soul, there is a visceral comfort in knowing that your body will find its way back into the cycle of life on earth, and that your death will not be one more nail in the coffin (pun intended) for the Earth that your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will continue to inhabit.

  8. SteleEly Avatar
    SteleEly

    See the **A Will for the Woods** movie: http://www.awillforthewoods.com/
    Green burial is a simple and natural alternative to resource-intensive contemporary burial or cremation. The deceased is laid to rest in the earth​​ using​ only biodegradable materials​ ​and ​without a vault​ or toxic embalming, in a woodland or other natural setting, often with a fieldstone or indigenous plant marking the grave. ​This practice can be used as a conservation tool, enabling the acquisition, restoration, and stewardship of natural areas. Simple natural burials were prevalent for thousands of years (and still are in many​ parts of the world, including in traditional Muslim and Jewish burials) before the contemporary funeral industry propagated expensive and elaborate funerals as the standard.

  9. SteleEly Avatar
    SteleEly

    via Treehugger: Worldwide, more than 50,000,000 people pass away each year. Traditional burial and cremation practices can have significant negative environmental impact, but green funerals and eco-burials are one way to lessen the impact. While death can be a difficult subject, keeping ethical beliefs and environmental convictions in mind while tending to end-of-life arrangements can create a meaningful send-off–not to mention a lower-impact one. After all, if you gotta go, why not go green?

    … modern crematoriums have made significant reductions in emissions. Plus, as many cemeteries, particularly in the U.S., have rules and regulations stipulating the use of concrete vaults, coffins, and other such requirements that use significant resources and space, becoming one with nature isn't as straightforward and simple (or quick) as it may seem. Cremation, therefore, may make more sense from a green perspective, after all.

  10. SteleEly Avatar
    SteleEly

    Gerard Moline has combined the romantic notion of life after death with an eco solution to the dirty business of the actual, you know, transition. His Bios Urn is a biodegradable urn made from coconut shell, compacted peat and cellulose and inside it contains the seed of a tree. Once your remains have been placed into the urn, it can be planted and then the seed germinates and begins to grow. You even have the choice to pick the type of plant you would like to become, depending on what kind of planting space you prefer.

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