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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, S t e v e n E u g e n e E l y “S t e l e”:

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, S t e l e

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

If above ground decomposition is not possible, being buried in a simple cheap softwood coffin would be ok. I do not want to be buried in a fancy or costly metal, concrete or wood coffin. I do not want to embalmed.

However, if my executor decides to aquamate or cremate me, that’s ok too. Whatever method of decomposition is chosen, I prefer the way that creates the least burial waste, releases the least carbon emissions and creates the least pollution.

If I am very ill or near death and the treatments are creating a lot of medical trash then I only want pain meds and no life support system.

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 or resource intensive medical care.

The executor can make the above health care decisions, or the executor can choose to put it to a vote among the peeps on the potential executor list. Flip a coin if it is a tie.

If I am dying it would be cool if I am in any one of my family member’s or friend’s homes, but only if someone would like to take on this chore. Anyone of my family or friends may come by to celebrate my lucky life with me to talk story, play music, dance, sing, and eat vegan.

If possible, it would be nice if the executor gives at least 80% of the proceeds from selling or liquidating any of my personal property, mobile home, any other property, and/or any real estate [although I don’t think I own any real estate] to one or more of my favorite climate crisis fighting organizations.

Some of my favorite climate crisis fighting organizations include the SunriseMovement.org, 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 more of those organizations.

After proceeds are given to that environmental organization[s], the executor gets to decide how much to give of the remainder of my assets to any one or more of the people in the potential executor list.

The beneficiaries of any bank account[s] that I have have already been designated to environmental organizations and individuals via the account options with those banks.

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

I may have paper versions of this Will hanging around on my desk or in my house. However, this online Will supersedes and has power over any paper version found.

I have a similar or 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.

My mother said she would like some of me to be near her where she has arranged to have drawers for her ashes and drawers for the ashes of other family members. If possible, and only if it is a joyful chore for any person to take on, once I have decomposed after being on top of or being in the ground, or being aquamated, or being cremated, it would be neat for someone to get some of the soil from my grave, and/or my bone, hair or decomposed self, and put them in a drawer next to her if any such drawer is available and already paid for by Mom. Alternatively, if collecting some of my remains is not possible and/or not considered fun for any person wanting to take on this chore, I have put some of my hair in the little urn with the hummingbird and MM written on it that is in my house. The little plastic bag that is also inside the urn are some of Mom’s ashes.

Do not donate my body or organs at death, nor use my body for transplant, therapy, research or education.

If more than one person from the preferred executor list wants a specific property item found in my house, please draw from a hat or use an online random number generator to decide who gets that item.

Hopefully there will be a remaining balance from the sale of my personal assets and after body disposal expenses. If so, I would like the executor to be paid up to $10,444 to thank them for the time they spend to liquidate my assets and other legal stuff.

Below is my preferred executor list. Any of these may decide to be my executor in the following order of authority.

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 the preferred list to become the executor. I hope that the person who decides to be the executor does so because they see it as a fun project to take on. I do not want any person on the list to feel obligated to be the executor.

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, A n d[my fr iend] rea R o [that fr iend] s e, D a n(fr iend)i e l a W i t h(fr iend)a a r, 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, they can offer the executor role to the next person down the list.

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 hosting services [probably at NetworkSolutions.com]. Please use some of my assets to pay those fees in advance for at least 10 years. The management of XOEarth.org and XOEarth.net can go to one of the following peeps and in this order of preference: 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, my son L u[son] k 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 , M i (f r ie nd)c a P a r(fr i end)k i n, or D r (ste p bro) e w . If someone does not want to be the XOEarth manager they can offer that role to the next person down the list.

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

This update of my Will was done on about 10/31/2024.

This Is My Legal Will, For More Love and Life, S t e v [me] e n E u g e n e E [my name] l y “S t [me] e l e”

PS: 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, I might not get to see and play with you again someday as a manta ray, penguin, moose, pelican, fox, wild horse, arctic tern, redwood, rose or a human. That’s because her lifeforms are drying out, burning up, drowning, dying off or going extinct. So your and my atoms and molecules might fly around and become a part of those lifeforms after we are dead and gone as humans, please fight hard to save our sweet biosphere.

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 pressurized 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. Search washingtonpost.com for green burials.

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

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

Fans:: Share and sponsor a musician to record a Bury Me Naked or a future life song.
Musicians:: Record and share this Bury Me Naked or a future life song.
Artists:: Do a video, art, dance or multimedia for this song and share it.

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Comments

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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