Human composting: a ‘green’ funeral option

HAVE CONVERSATIONS ABOUT YOUR END-OF-LIFE WISHES While you may have decided human composting is the right choice for you, it’s imperative to make sure loved ones are aware of your final

wishes, says Camelia L. Clarke, spokesperson for the National Funeral Directors Association and a licensed funeral director based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “This will help them to have a

healthy grief journey,” Clarke says. “If you haven’t prepared them, they may have the burden of [not being able to honor] mom or dad’s wishes because of a regulatory issue.” Tim Andruss

agrees. The 64-year-old became an Earth Funeral customer after his wife, Alenka, passed away in October 2023. They’d been together 38 years. “It is a new-enough option that it could leave

some people flummoxed, and it’s not something that one would want to be explaining under the duress of the loss,” says Andruss, who lives in Olympia, Washington. “Personally, I've found

that the people who gain an understanding of organic reduction versus more traditional Western methods of caring for the passed have come to embrace the concept, and have often begun

similar planning themselves.” Alenka Andruss on her birthday with her new "gardening wagon." Courtesy Tim Andruss EMBRACE THE SENTIMENTALITY Andruss and his wife were avid

gardeners, so Andruss is using his wife’s soil to create a backyard perennial garden in her memory to be filled with purple flowers — her favorite color. He has given away some soil to his

wife’s daughter, spread some in overseas locales that were meaningful to the couple, and donated the rest to conservation projects. “Alenka’s soil is so alive,” says Andruss, who plans to be

composted when he dies. Comparing the process to cremation, he continues, “Ash just feels like ‘Here are some remains,’ and the soil feels like there’s life to it, because there is.” Return

Home customer Roberta Vollendorff, 73, buried all 240 pounds of soil from her son Sean’s terramation beneath the gigantic sitka spruce tree on her farm, where she raised her family. Sean, a

highly decorated Special Weapons and Tactics officer for the Takoma Police Department, died by suicide. The tree where Roberta Vollendorff spread composted soil from her son Sean’s

terramation. Courtesy Roberta Vollendorff It was “our laughing tree, our crying tree, our hiding tree, our everything tree,” says Vollendorff, a retired special education teacher from

Bellingham, Washington. “To me, the magic was having my son under the tree he grew up with…. I wasn’t losing him. I was having him be with me.” Even the transformation process can offer some

sense of connection. Truman recalls seeing a woman during Return Home’s public visiting hours with her back up against a vessel, her eyes closed. The woman later said she could feel the

heat of her mother against her back. “There are intensely beautiful things about this,” Truman says.