CBS Sunday Morning Human Composting: The rising interest in natural burial

As more people search online for information regarding human composting techniques, we will discuss them here. Due to Marie Eaton’s internet fame, everyone is looking for her. Due to their decision to choose a new location for the burial, we have included information on her, Marie Eaton, and her brother Wayne Dodge for the benefit of our readers. To learn more, keep reading the article.

CBS Sunday Morning Human Composting

Marie Eaton always manages to locate whatever she misplaced in her garden at her residence in Bellingham, Washington. He’s in the garden when I go outside, she claimed. And each time I’m beneath a maple tree, I find myself saying, “Oh yeah, Wayne, you’re here.” Wayne Dodge, her brother, was an enthusiastic gardener who had a soft spot for Japanese maple trees. However, he had a fall in 2021 that left him quadriplegic. The 71-year-old doctor contracted pneumonia a few months later. “As a doctor, he knew what that meant; they call pneumonia the old man’s friend,” Eaton remarked. And that is how he decided to depart. Although we were heartbroken to lose him, we respected that decision.

Wayne had opted for a relatively new alternative to burial or cremation: natural organic reduction, more commonly known as human composting. The process that turns the body into soil happens naturally. In Marie Eaton’s garden, some of it is spread out beneath the Japanese maples. It’s gorgeous, like gorgeous, gorgeous mulch, she added. What do you tell folks who hear this and think, “That just sounds a little creepy or a little strange,” Tracy enquired. Eaton responded, “I might ask them to consider a little bit what traditional burial entails, which is embalming a body, placing it inside a lead-lined coffin, and placing it inside a concrete vault in the ground, as though we’re pretending the person isn’t dead.

That, in my opinion, is considerably creepier than this process of returning to the earth naturally. At Recompose in Seattle, the nation’s first human composting facility, Eaton’s brother underwent that procedure. The company’s creator and CEO, Katrina Spade, showed Tracy the location where families can attend a memorial service while their deceased loved one is wrapped in organic plant material like straw and woodchips. The deceased person’s body is often laid out here, and at the conclusion of the ceremony, it is passed through the threshold vessel. On the opposite side is a collection of 8-foot-long stainless steel containers that have been filled with more natural material to speed up decomposition.