ArtStorming the Art of Remembrance: Mallory McDuff

If you’ve ever wondered how to align legacy with love for the earth and art infusing every step, this conversation offers a clear starting point and a lot of heart. We sit down with environmental educator and author Mallory McDuff to explore how end-of-life choices—green burial, aquamation, and human composting—can reflect our values, save money, and restore land.

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Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

Transcript

Framing Creativity And Legacy

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Have you ever wondered what makes creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host, Lily Pierpont, and this is Artstorming, a podcast about how ideas become paintings or poems, performances, or collections. Each episode, I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and we'll explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. In our inaugural season, Artstorming the City Different, we dipped our toes into the vast ocean of creativity with a focus on some of our favorite creators of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That conversation was enjoyed by artists and non-artists alike because it showed us how we can all benefit from learning how to generate something from nothing, dream bigger, charter new territories, and solve problems in new ways. In season two, we're going to take that concept of generating our lives with intention to the next level. This season, we're talking about legacy, art as legacy, and how the most creative among us tackle this rich and deeply personal subject. Welcome to Artstorming: The Art of Remembrance. If life is a long-form performance, how do we curate the final act? Today we're getting down and dirty, literally. We're talking green burial and other sustainable and creative exit strategies. My next guest, Mallory McDuff, is an environmental educator and the author of Our Last Best Act, a book about planning for the end of our lives while protecting the people and places we love. Drawing from her deep personal experience, her book combines practical advice and inspiration for how people can align their end-of-life choices with their values, their wallet, and their personal style. In this conversation, Mallory also shares how her students have used art to process death as well as design final projects that honor the planet. We explore how planning for the end is actually a radical act for living. Hello, Mallory.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Are you in Asheville? I am in Swannanoa, which is about 10 minutes outside of Asheville.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

We recently learned about you because one of my board members, Julie Welsh, bumped into you at a conference and she had known of you already and had been talking about you. And she was very excited to finally meet you and then propose you for an episode. And I confess that it was not until I think yesterday that I got to look through the book that you sent in advance of this conversation. I wasn't able to read it all, but I'm so glad I perused through it a little bit because I learned that you and I have both lost parents at in relatively quick succession. So today we're gonna explore all the things that have come out of that experience of yours, one of which is a book called Our Last Best Acts. Welcome to Artstorming. Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. Well, you really are one of the first people that I've met, certainly since I started this project, that has gone depth after depth, to use a pun, into the topic that I care really deeply about. So obviously you got on this jag a little bit because of the loss of your was it your father or your mother first that where you started thinking about all this?

SPEAKER_00 3:33

As a child, I grew up in the small town of Fairhope, Alabama. It's on the coast of Mobile Bay. And as a child, my particularly my father talked a lot about how he wanted his funeral to be. And this was, you know, as a teenager, the things your parents say, you know, there you listen, but sometimes it's not until later in life that you can make meaning of, you know, the people who your parents were. And in this case, my father grew, I grew up hearing him say, you know, I want a funeral that relies on family and friends, not just a funeral home. And he even carved a prototype of the casket that he wanted to build for himself out of pine. And my mother kept her jewelry in that little little box. It was super smooth and it sat on her dresser for all the years growing up. So I always knew that he wanted something different. Of course, what was different then was actually building on a legacy of how we handled bodies after death years ago, when people would just be buried in a cemetery, a local cemetery, sometimes in their backyards. Um, but I did, as you said, both my parents' sudden deaths around my age. My mom was 58 when she died, and she was hit by a team driver as she was cycling. And after her death, my father sat us down, his my siblings and I, and he had a two-page single space typed directives for his death. And at the time, we thought, oh, he's just grieving our mom. And then two years later, he was hit by another teenage driver. He had the full reflective vest, he was biking on the side of the road. But because he had been so explicit about his directives, it gave us grounding and momentum at a time that we were completely unmoored just by the mirror image aspects of both of their deaths coming to the room.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

Yeah, I mean like what are the chances? Those are the kind of little weird mysteries that stay with you, even after you figured out everything else, and even if you have deep faith or wherever you come from on the spectrum, to have those weird coincidences, you spend the rest of your life trying to figure that out, I would imagine.

From Cremation Defaults To Greener Paths

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Yeah, and it's and it was, you know, they were both fairly amazing people. I mean, they threw hiked the Appalachian Trail, they threw hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, they biked everywhere they went, and they weren't like these hippies. To use a to use a phrase, not you know, they were my dad had retired from IBM. My mom was a preschool teacher, they were super active in their Episcopal Church, but they were living a lifestyle that really was kind of on the forefront of sustainability before those were like common words that we threw around a lot. I teach at a school outside of Asheville that is known for sustainability, environmental studies is the most popular major. But so what's interesting to me about their lives is that they were just trying to live out in honesty, their their faith and their values around saving money, saving resources, and those things were very congruent. I grew up thinking that those weren't contrasting values. So, just as a quick example, my dad did commute 30 miles to the town of Mobile from the small town where we lived to sell computers for IBM. And one year he gave up for Lent riding in a car. So he biked 30 miles twice a day, I think, with his suit and the paners of his bike. And my mom was like, Okay, we can do that, you can do this, but you have to ride with me to church because I don't approve of going to church with sweaty, you know, be all sweaty. So he made that one concession to her. But you know, she was also baking her own, being wheat for gray for flour, like doing things that like that now my students do, but they weren't like trying to be revolutionaries, they were just trying to live a simple good life, you know. But it was their the I think the as you as you said, the the uncanny similarities. I mean, I do say mirror image accidents, I use that phrase a lot. It I I think for some reason, too, it maybe propelled me to think more deeply about how they how we handled their bodies after they died, and given their directives as a way to not there, there's no silver linings to sudden death of people who are good people, you know, there just isn't. But I do think there's a way of creating meaning. And for me, it was really starting to investigate wait, what are the resources out there for sustainable end-of-life planning that that I don't even know about? You know, in my final wishes, I had said I wanted to flame cremation. Um, it was the cheapest alternative. I'm a single mom with two kids, I'm always thinking about finances. So I had just like everybody I knew, like flame cremation was the choice they were they made for all the all the reasons that are very good reasons. Um, but there as I started to do more research into alternatives to conventional burial and flame cremation, this whole other world just revealed itself of people who are working in this field to help people align their values in life with their end-of-life plans. And it just became kind of like when people discover, I don't know, mushrooms or feet. It's like, oh my God, there's the roots of trees. I for me, it was like there's this whole world and all these amazing people. And so the story, my story, really became an entry point for me to write about all these amazing people and these alternatives and the choices that we have that I didn't know about before this research.

Family Dialogue And Evolving Wishes

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Well, what's so cool to me about what you just said is that given that your father was so proactive and so organized around this, it it almost took a that mirror crisis or that mirror accident to take you to that next layer deeper, because he'd figured everything out for you. And you could have just ridden on that awareness, but it would cracked open a kind of curiosity. So if there is a silver lining, it's that you've made available to so many people now all of these other possibilities. It's something we don't want to think about or talk about. And one of the things that's people said in your book is that you make this whole topic a very enjoyable thing to explore. And I think the fact that you come at it from uh an environmental standpoint and a stewardship standpoint, again, it's just any entry point that we can to engage in this conversation. So you've done a deep dive into all of the different options so thoughtfully presented. So thank you for the work that you've done around all this. And how do your girls feel about it?

Implementing A Homegrown Green Burial

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Well, in the book, it's funny I do a lot of public speaking around final wishes, and I often I'll talk about it as matters of life, death, and earth. It's not just matters of life and death. But a lot of times people will tell me, your younger daughter really was kind of the comic relief in the book. Because at the time, I mean, she's 20 now. I have two daughters, 26 and 20. But my younger daughter was the one that was at home when I was doing this research, and she was several years younger, and she would really be like a reality check for me. You know, we'd be in the car and I'd like, oh my gosh, you know, I just visited this place called a body farm, and where people donate their bodies and people study, researchers study decomposition, and it's totally free. And oh my gosh, this is so amazing! And you know, she would just be like, Wait, are you telling me that your body would be just out in an enclosed field for other people to see to research? Like, I don't think I like that, and you know, so but and I would I was so taken by this one particular chapter about body farms and human composting, which is also called natural organic reduction. But what I was so taken with, you know, because I interviewed students who are working in a lab at Western Carolina University where they have a facility where you can donate your body for the study of decomposition. I was so taken with that. And my daughter was like, uh-uh, no, that's not for me. And so I think her reality checks also reinforce the fact that while we write our final wishes with it's wished, it's the operative word for ourselves. The people who are in our circles, in my case, my two daughters, will be the ones who have to implement those wishes. And if it's something that they're really not down with, that's a dialogue, that's a discussion. And the other thing that my daughters reminded me of in their conversations was that, you know, our final directives are are not ever final. It like I thought, oh, I said flame cremation and I don't think about that again for 50 years or whatever. And in reality, because the available options are evolving in every state, final wishes are like jeans. So you need to put them on and make sure they still fit. And if they don't, you might find another style or like right now, wide leg jeans are back. So maybe you want to do a few upgrades. So it's something you want to not just have one conversation, it's like puberty. We don't have one conversation with our kids, hopefully, but rather it's an evolving conversation where we're adding information. And so my daughters, to wrap up my response to your very good question, like no kid wants to talk about their parent dying. But when it's not just one conversation, but kind of a dialogue and you're going back and forth and listening to each other, then it becomes a part of life and not just this one thing we have to do because somebody's like uh really ill and you've got to face that quickly.

Green Burial Basics And Cost Realities

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Yeah, it's a strange analogy maybe to think about. But when I think of all of the tools that are available to us now, as you said, with all these emerging technologies and ways to exit, they're they're like tools in an artist's toolkit. And at the end of your days have to decide what art form are you gonna make in what medium and have none of the skill sets and none of the supplies and not suddenly have to be making that decision. Nobody would ever ask you to do that. But yet that's basically what we're faced with when we end our lives, is there are you know 42 ways to uh dispose of the body, or just say hypothetically, and you've got to pick one at a time when you're absolutely incapacitated if it's happened suddenly, as it was in my case. My both my parents died unexpectedly. My father maybe slightly more expectedly, but certainly he was sick, but it wasn't a foregone conclusion that he was gonna die. In fact, I was told he was coming back from where he was in Oklahoma in the hospital and coming back to New York, and I was getting his apartment ready for his return. What they didn't tell me, because they thought they were shielding me, was that he wanted to die in New York. He had AIDS and he knew he was gonna die, but he didn't want to die in Oklahoma, he wanted to be back in the city, and he didn't make it back. So that was fine. And then so that there was all of that end of life, and he was only 50, and I was only in my early 20s, and it was on me to figure everything out. Cut to nine years later, and my mom was killed in a skydiving accident. Well, certainly nobody expects that to happen. And so, again, it was just all of this, and nobody had planned for anything. I mean, there'd been some financial plans, and my in the case of my father, he died in test state. So there were no financial plans, no nothing. I mean, just zero. In my mother's case, there was at least sort of a family partnership, but uh to address some of the finances. But again, that paled in comparison to what's necessary to completely metabolize, if you will, the a loss of that magnitude. So my curiosity is that you had the benefit of your father kind of proactively talking about this for it was sort of in the background, as you said, in your childhood. And because of the research that you were doing, you introduced it to the concept to your daughter. So it's sort of been in the ethers for them too. But based on your research, what would you say is a good time to introduce a family conversation about this, given that already we we don't already have it as a part of our culture? It's something that we're sort of in introducing potentially for for new generations as a tradition.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Sure. And well, first I just want to say thanks for sharing the the details of your parents' deaths. Those are two very radically different, and yet both pull the rug underneath your feet kind of death.

SPEAKER_02 17:47

Yeah.

Laws, Cemeteries, And Local Advocacy

SPEAKER_00 17:47

And yeah, and so that's yeah, really, really hard. And that and I think the stories about your parents just illustrate too the I don't know, the diversity of ways we live our lives, and there's some diversity of ways that we end our lives. And oftentimes, at least for me, in in talking to groups about this topic, this is like the one thing we don't control usually is how we die. And as you said, the preparation, it makes it easier for the people who are still alive to feel grounded in one of the most unmored times of their lives. And so the question of when is too early to, or when is the right time to talk about death, you know, I I don't think there's an age that's not age appropriate for children. Pets die, you know, that's a really opportune time to to talk about life and death with children. And to, I mean, the irony of it all is that we we have more humane ways of ending the lives of our pets, as most people know, than of our human friends and family members. And so I think that's like a uh opportune time to model having family involved and to be able to open that conversation. And again, I don't think it has to be this like big, heavy conversation, too. It can just be you know talking about relatives and how they died. And I think also taking children to funerals if you have the opportunity. I think so many children, I think in the US at least, or even adults. I think it's like I've had some friends who've like had children and they've said, Oh my gosh, I've only held a baby a couple of times. But like when people die, most people haven't seen a dead body. Majority of of folks in in our country haven't. And and so just normalizing talking about death, I think to me that's been just a real gift of this project and and this the continuing conversations that I've that I have with people is is also that the conversations that at least we're talking about heavy things, but somehow there can be a lightness and some joy and humor. Um, I mean, it's just funny. Like people, somebody I gave a talk at a church not too long ago, and somebody was like, I didn't expect there to be so many jokes. But there's it's like when we're dealing with messy human situations that are really hard, it's we're not all sitting around just distraught. There's the distraught that we're holding those feelings of despair, and you know, the connection we feel to all the people who love this person.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Yeah. Well, I think one of the great opportunities when we're talking about death is you know, obviously it brings into stark relief how we're living our lives in the present. You mentioned that your parents were very clear what their values were, and those values were really presented and shared by into the whole family. So values weren't just abstract, they were lived day to day. And I think that if we shift the focus to just having conversations about values, and one of the things that we fold into this conversation is legacy, not legacy like the name on a building because you've accumulated a lot of money, but there's this quote that I love that I just found from Pete Buttigieg who says, legacy is not what you accumulate, it's what you loosen your grip upon and who finds footing because you did. And so what I love about that is if we shift our focus to how we're living our lives with intention, then it would serve as part of the an extension of that is that we plan for our death with intention. And it's that intentionality that I think makes it accessible, makes it humorous because it's a reflection then of who we are. And if we're funny people, then we have a funny approach to it. And I think we just need to kind of weave it into the whole tapestry of life in general, right?

Rethinking The Funeral Industry

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Well, and to do, yeah, no, that makes c complete sense to me. And I I think the other thing you can write whatever your final wishes are, your directives. And then, like for us in the case of my dad's death, like we didn't even know where his body was. It was a hit and run. And I mean, and I was getting on a plane to go home with my kid, and I was like pregnant too with my second child, and and And realizing, okay, we want to honor his wishes, but he wanted to have his body at home, and then for us to bury him in the neighborhood cemetery. And we at that point did not even know where his body was. So we're like, oh, his final wishes are probably a wash, you know, like what can we even do? And then as we were proceeded, once you know, I arrived and my siblings were there, we said, if we can just do one thing on his list that will have honored him. And that one thing that seemed the simplest was he had arranged with a good friend who was going to build his casket if he couldn't. He wanted to build it himself, but that was if he had, you know, lived a long life and was able to predict prepare for his death, which he wasn't. And so we started with that one thing and called the friend. And the friend was like, Yeah, I'm on it. I've got a piece of wood right here. And he pulled an overnighter and built this gorgeous pine casket. And then one thing just led to the other. You know, we realized my father's body was at the coroner's office and it was transferred to a local funeral home. And we went and met with the funeral home in person, and they knew my dad from my mom's death and knew that he wanted minimal intervention. And so we said, we don't need you to do anything, not a thing, except keep the body cool for two days. And so we were able, this is like small town Alabama. This isn't Berkeley, California or Ashefield, North Carolina. I mean, this is a small town funeral home. And they said, okay, sure, we'll just keep his body in the refrigerated room. And my sister and I were able to go into the funeral home, prepare his body for burial, wrap his body in, he wanted to be wrapped in my mom's linen that she had pressed, you know, for for dinners. And so he was wrapped in those linens. And then we picked him up and put him in the pine casket, and his friend transported the casket in the back of a pickup truck. These are all details that he had documented. He wanted to be in the back of a pickup truck. Um, and so I think what's interesting is that what seemed like insurmountable um was actually one he really wanted to save money. It saved a ton of money because he had pre picked up a uh burial plot in the local cemetery. He had found out in advance of my mom's death that the cemetery did not require vaults. And if you think about what is green burial and what is conventional burial, green burial, you don't have a vault, which is typically a concrete box that is only purpose is to keep the ground level. It doesn't have any other purpose. So no vault, no embalming, and biodegradable containers or shrouds. Those are the three variables for what we now call green burial. We didn't have that term back when they they died, but that's how burials have been um done for years and years. Um, so I think it's just interesting how it we were able to do almost everything on his list in a very short amount of time, like really 24 hours. And in a way that was so I mean, empowering seems like a overused word, but to be able to wash his body, put his body in a shroud, put it in a pine casket that his friend had built, this is these aren't things that people do pretty much, but they're accessible to all of us on some level. And not just, and my book is not just about green burial, which was my experience with my father, but really about so many other options that that we do have. But yeah, just a little bit of detail about that.

Artful Containers, Shrouds, And Urns

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Well, no, that's so cool because we think about this whole process of life, and we now know death doulas for birth are now popular, and now there's a whole category of of death doulas, which are preparation for that stage of life into death. And what I love about what I learned in in what brief interaction I had with your book is that I didn't re I didn't understand or didn't hadn't thought about it. And I come from a green weenie background as much as anybody, but um that that the embalming process and how polluting that is for the ground, and that it's not required by law that that a body be stuffed with formaldehyde before you inter it, if you go that route. And uh just the just learning all those different things. Again, we don't want to confront these things because it doesn't seem like a very fun subject, but it actually gets to be pretty interesting. And most of us have interest in, I mean, we're recycling our cans for heaven's sakes. We might as well take an interest in in one of the biggest polluters in our culture right now between cremation and and burials and and just the the impact that's having on our ground. Anybody who is considers themselves a steward of the environment should be paying attention to this. I mean, we take all this time to make these choices, and then at the end we just sort of let it all go to the hands of the funeral service industry because we don't want to look at it.

Teaching Death, Dying, And Climate Justice

Willow Caskets And Craft As Care

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Well, and also it saved a lot of money. Yeah, you know, embalming as a practice started during the in this country in the Civil War, where there was the need or the desire to ship bodies from the south back up to the north to you know reunite with families. And and so for most people in the U.S., their first embalmed body that they saw in that time period was Lincoln, because he did, you know, a train voyage across the country and and his body uh was embalmed. So a lot of people have a misconception that embalming is required in different states. It's not required but legally in any state. Now there it's the the rules get a little more complicated if you're uh crossing state lines, et cetera. But it's it's very place dependent. So I think one thing I'm always trying to remind people is, and I'll share, you'll be glad to share resources with y'all, but it's you know, it's very easy to research the available options where you live. There's an organization called the Green Burial Council, and you can look up, you know, there's a map, interactive map, you can look up green burial sites near you. But I also like to remind folks that there are also, in terms of just burial, there are also like neighborhood cemeteries that may not be on like the list for the Green Burial Council because they certify burial grounds if they meet certain criteria. But for example, one storyline in the book is my exploration of the cemetery that's on campus. I live on the campus of Warren Wilson College in a 900 square foot little duplex where I am now. My kitchen looked a lot built bigger when I'm on the Zoom than it does in real life. But there's a cemetery that is owned by the Presbyterian Church affiliated with the historically affiliated with the college. And because so many people are cremated, flang cremation, that's the biggest growing method of disposition in this country right now, they really had not done very many full-body burials. And the pastor connected to the cemetery at the time did not realize that the contract for the cemetery required bulf. And this is like, I mean, this like when people hear Warring Wilson College in this region, um, you know, they they think about sustainability. So this was a really interesting discovery on my part at least. And part of the narrative in the book was me leveraging the elders who were on the board of the cemetery to try to get an exemption so that I could buy a plot and just do green burial, which ended up happening. And I narrate that journey in the book. But I think the interesting thing is that there may be more options for green burial than you even know about. And you can find that out by really just looking at the cemeteries near you and asking to see their contract. And even though this contract said they required vaults, they ended up changing it. And I asked for an exemption based on my religious values to care for creation. And it was actually the pastor, Steve Runholt, who had that idea because there had been a Muslim student who had been buried in the Muslim faith, in the Jewish faith. There's no embalming and no vaults, so there's a precedent of legacy, you know, from these faith traditions. And so, so I had known that student who had been buried, who had died suddenly at a tragically at an early age. And and so, you know, these elders and the the cemetery elders had that conversation and ended up um deciding to change the language of the contract, you know, and this is just like one little cemetery in one valley, you know, in one state in the country. But what to me it really revealed is the relational aspect of this. We also have in this region a conservation burial ground, and those exist throughout the country, and those are burial grounds where the land is protected in perpetuity through conservation easements. So you can be buried at a cemetery where the land is protected from development in perpetuity, and that's also cheaper than going conventional burial. Yeah, I'm friends who have started conservation burial grounds. I have students who have gone to work for the conservation burial ground because it aligns with their environmental values and they're getting to be outside, they're getting to work with people. Yeah, just things that I just had had no idea actually existed. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

Well, and considering it's an it's an entire industry, and so there are these legacies, there are these conventions that exist just within a spiritual community like uh that you described. And then there's the legislation that's you know, like what's legal at crossing state lines, so that comes into it. But and then there's the funeral service industry itself, which is, I would imagine, had some weigh-in on the conversation in terms of you know, what's happening in the cremation industry, what's happening in the burial industry, and and you know, if we don't put the vaults in the ground, then the concrete industry has less guaranteed income. So it becomes it's an industry, let's face it. Yeah, the lots of moving parts. Were you able to uh learn a little bit about some of the bureaucratic stops interfere with people being able to do this as as thoroughly and elegantly as they would like?

Human Composting And Urban Space

SPEAKER_00 34:12

Yes. And I have a whole chapter on my interactions with funeral homes, and it's uh toward the beginning of the book. And to be honest, I had to really check my assumptions at the door. Well, I had them checked for me by some very innovative funeral home directors, and specifically one who was a real leader in this region. And I kind of came in, quite frankly, influenced by my my father, I think, who was very much like like if he had fake green grass at his burial plot, I think he would have like risen from the dead. He was dead like, and yeah, where he got those, he I mean, I think that those values align with his values in his life. But I had certainly picked up on that and had read a lot of books about the funeral industry. And one of the leaders that I interviewed who really called me out, not publicly, but just and and she said, you know, you've got to have a little more nuanced view about this industry. She's like, there are a lot of us who are working to provide living wage salaries for our staff. We provide a lot of support and relational building, relationship building and communities. And a lot of us are partnering with some of these institutions like conservation burial grounds to provide um you know services that help people use those options. So so that was nobody likes to be well, let's just say, I would rather be like, oh, I'm so sensitive, and I've taken all the perspectives into account. And this was one, you know, I could physically like feel my face getting redder as I was like, oh my God, she's totally right. And kind of like with my students, often some of my job, I feel like, is to help students see that issues aren't two-sided, you know, that they are nuanced. So what I would offer to your listeners too is that there's not one funeral industry. You know, there are, but the the take, the common line that you'll hear is like if you go to one place, like one funeral home, and you want to get a different price, just go a mile down the street. So it is um an industry where some of the bigger companies, corporate companies, have eaten up the smaller ones. And like in in this region, I teach a class called Death, Dying, and Climate Justice. And I and it's just been a transformative experience for me and for many of my students. And I take them to a funeral home that is a locally run family-owned funeral home that's been around for decades. And the owners are working closely with the conservation burial ground to provide reduced costs because they're basically just keeping the body cool and then taking it to the conservation burial ground. Um, and so, so these kind of situations I think are becoming more common, and that's important for people to know. It's also important to know that, like if you're working with a funeral home, you don't have to buy a casket from that funeral home. You can buy a cardboard box from Costco and bring it to a funeral home. You don't have to take a body to a funeral home. You can leave a body at home, you know, and there's support for for how do you deal with the paperwork. So I think just that the the bottom line to me is that all that research is so much easier to do when you're not like yeah, and like okay, a hundred family members are coming into town, where are they gonna stiff their feet? What are they gonna eat? So that is it's just it's something that you can start to research in the here and now. And and so uh I have so many questions.

Closing Reflections And A Letter Of Love

SPEAKER_01 38:07

In addition to that, just to follow that thread, is that's just the beginning because once those logistics, there's so many other really creative things. Like you you described that your father wanted to be shrouded in in linens from your mother. Well, of course, as an artist, I go to oh my god, the opportunities for, I mean, like I could be uh Queen Nefertiti, you know, I probably my portrait. I mean, uh even just funeral masks and this whole idea of so many different cultural and global traditions that have played into what you could do that would be an expression of how you do your life. I mean, I have been an interior designer, I curated my art collection. To go out in a box just would be uncharacteristic of me. And just to circle back, the great story there is that so my dad was an interior designer, and I I mentioned that he died in New York, and actually he didn't make it to New York, he died in Joliet, Illinois. And we went to the funeral service place there, and he had died of AIDS, so cremation was uh just a given because they were so freaked out and everything. And we went and the with the red flocked paper, and we walk up the steps, and my sister and I just like started giggling because the place was so tacky that, and uh hopefully nobody's listening that was involved in that, but um, it was just ridiculously tacky. I mean, a joke almost like a Saturday Night Live spoof. And we got there and we were looking through the book, you know, of the cremation urns, and just like one was worse than the next. And Daddy was such an aesthetic. And so, you know, our our shoulders are just going up and down because we're giggling and laughing, and the poor Undertaker comes in, thinks that we're crying hysterically. Oh, he is so solemn, and the whole thing was just such a parody of itself. It was hilarious. Oh, and you know, me saying, Oh, daddy wouldn't be caught dead in this kind of thing. And that's no, so we left, and I don't think I think my aunt took care of the arrangements ultimately. But then five years later, we go back to Oklahoma, and um my sister and I are there for Christmas, and my uncle comes downstairs and says, Well, I have something to ad I have something I have to tell you. Uh, we never did get around to taking your father to the cemetery, and so he comes down with this hermetically sealed brown box, which was like the antithesis of something to be suitable for Daddy. But again, the shoulders started going, Missy and I, my sister, we just started laughing hysterically. But um, yeah. The point is that once you get through the logistics of all the options, then you can start really playing with it and having fun with it. And I've been talking to artists um as part of this program about the various different creative expressions of funeral urns and other objects. You probably heard of parting stones, which they get compressed into these smooth river rocks, or uh it can be compressed into a diamond, the cremains can be and green burials can become an arboretum. I mean, they're just like the options are so limitless. And why not take advantage of that? As I said, we we are so organized around making decisions that reflect us while we're alive.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

Why not carry that all the way to the end?

Outro And Support For Artbridge NM

SPEAKER_00 41:10

Yeah, no, and I I love that story for all its nuances. One chapter in the book, the chapter is called the container store, and it's about where do we put our bodies, whether it's aquamation, which is a form of cremation, but using water and lye, that's just as a sidebar. That's there's now two types of cremation. Uh, and one you know burns less fossil fuels, the aquamation. But let's say whether you're doing flame cremation or aquamation, I've had students as a final project in the class, they have to create an artistic expression depicting the semester. And when, you know, a student has whose sculptor or ceramicist, you know, has built an urn. I interviewed in the book uh an artist who basically wanted to had bought a plot at the conservation burial ground called Carolina Memorial Sanctuary. And she, I spent an afternoon at her house, and she had her shroud, she was a printmaker, and she had taken x-rays of her body and had them like batiked on this fabric. And it was like, oh my gosh, for being wrapped in images of your body. And she'd had all her friends had contributed to different art forms that were going to be included with her. And so, you know, there's a lot of examples of, for example, people who want to use a cardboard box, which is just you can be buried in a cardboard box as well as being buried in a casket or a wooden casket, you know, having people decorate the casket, even with markers or collage. And yeah, there really are, as you said, a lot of ways to infuse the creative spirit into these final wishes for sure.

SPEAKER_01 43:01

Yeah. In fact, we're having as an accompaniment to this podcast series later this year, we're launching something called Remains to Be Seen, which is a virtual 3D exhibition showing different expressions like what you just described, your students. So memorial objects of all kinds from all traditions.

SPEAKER_00 43:20

And so cool.

SPEAKER_01 43:21

I will definitely tap you for if one of your students would like to participate. The cool thing about doing it as a virtual gallery is that we don't actually need to have the item. We just need images of the item. And uh we're gonna be giving people uh uh a technology that allows them to take photographs from every direction so somebody can literally physically walk around the object in the virtual gallery. And so um hopefully that will be we're looking at targeting a second quarter, so about March, April.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, I had a student two years ago, I've only taught this class twice. And I've you know, I've been teaching for environmental education for 25 years, which is a lot longer than most of my students have been alive, which is kind of crazy. But I don't think at that juncture in my career, I thought, oh, I'm gonna teach this class and it's gonna be more exciting and transformative and humbling than anything I've ever taught. And that's always a good experience, right? Because you're like, oh, and it really was it's the content of that became the character in the course. I mean, it was transformative, not because of anything I don't think I did, but rather because the students were so eager to to jump into this and to, and they all it they all said, like you know, we haven't had a chance to talk about these kind of issues and to meet people who've really made death their Life. An example of this is a woman named Sarah Laswell who owns a farm called Moss and Thistle Farm. And she grows willow. So the plant, and then harvest it and crafts, you know, handcrafted caskets that the family can participate in the weaving of these caskets. They're absolutely exquisite. And to see, I mean, it's like an hour bus ride in a 15-passenger van up a mountain. It's like not the easiest field trip, but you know, we go there, it takes an hour to get there. We're there for an hour, and then we have to come back because it's a three-hour course. But the look of awe on my students' faces when they see it this farm or these willow, and then they see these willow caskets and get to listen to Sarah talk about her work is and talk about art. Like she is an artisan who is really one of the few willow casket weavers in the country. But my students are like, oh my gosh, like I've had students go and apprentice with her after meeting her and live in a bus and harvest the willow. And it's just the connections are so life-affirming, and that's kind of a paradox.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

Yeah, well, that is the beauty of this whole experience for me is that the paradox that I constantly bump up again, it is so life-affirming. And I can tell you that back in my 20s, when I lost my parents, nobody wanted to talk about this. This I this project, this idea has been the remains to be seen exhibition has been in my mind for 30 years. But my contemporaries did not want to talk about. I mean, they were ill-equipped to talk about it. Now, in my 60s, everybody knows somebody we've lived all through it enough to be able to talk about it. But I'd love to get uh I'll get her name from you because she might be an interesting person. She'd be talking to.

SPEAKER_00 46:58

She'd be wonderful. Yeah. And she's been in, I mean, the New York Times did a feature that included her, like she had her caskets like in Central Park. So it's L A S W E L L Sarah Laswell. And we presented at conferences together at farms with the type of conference enjoyed. We're outside. But anyway, yes, she's amazing. And and I think the other thing too, I with this course, I was really uncertain how I mean most of my students are in their 20s and young 20s often. And I didn't know. Like the stereotype is like, oh, nobody wants to talk about deaths. And what I have actually found in this course and in all the groups that I've spoken with is that we all have we all know somebody who has died. And you know, I've had students in my classes who have lost dear friends. You know, we all know teenagers who have died, and it's usually something tragic. People, you know, teenagers don't just die of natural causes unless it's a terminal illness, and that's tragic. I've had students who've lost their parents or their parents have died, as well as some students who've, you know, lost pets or and or their pets have died. And and my experience has been that people, when given the opportunity to talk about these matters, they jump in. It's just we don't have like my students said there hasn't been a space to talk about this. Yeah. Um, and so that's what I kind of thought, oh, nobody's gonna want to talk about death. This is gonna be really hard. And I had people like coming, like in my workplace, I had a colleague like talk to me after a meeting, like, I know you're doing this work on death. Like, did you know that my grandfather carved headstones in western Kentucky? You know, that's a part of his legacy. And so it that that has been really interesting to me is is that that when offered the space, it's a communion of sorts.

SPEAKER_01 49:02

Absolutely. And so at these conferences that you go to when you're speaking with all these people that are in your industry, is that offered up as a possibility to create college-level coursework that addresses this topic so that we can part of what we're trying to do here is create a new version of the legacy, a new way to engage with this. And so part of it is like a public relations conversation. How do we introduce this? How do we make it popular? How do we make it palatable? And um it's very exciting to me that what you're saying. I mean, obviously, I think of students who are interested in in um death maybe as being goth or something, but obviously you don't have to be goth to be interested in the subject. So, do your conference people talk about the way to get a curriculum in schools?

SPEAKER_00 49:51

Um, well, I've spoken to a lot of different groups, and it's not necessarily I've spoken in in conferences for environmental education, for example. Um, but a lot of the public speaking that I do, I do a lot for faith communities because that is a point of connection for a lot of people in terms of when somebody dies, if they're a part of a faith community, that's a direct connection. And you know, I've also spoken at um like an annual conference for the Funeral Consumers Alliance, which is a consumer advocacy group and there's affiliates in every state. So I don't know that I've been a part of let's get this into the curriculum, but I do know that there are at our small college, you know, I teach this death, dying, and climate justice class, which is really an environmental studies class. Um, and and I have a colleague who teaches the anthropology of death and dying. And so that's more of a cross-cultural anthropological lens. And those two together, I have a lot of students who take both. Um, and and they they provide a nice complement. I I do think that, you know, I've talked to other colleagues at other colleges where where there are courses like this, they're usually they're often an elective. At Warren Wilson, it's um a choice that amongst some required courses surrounding ethics and environmental studies. For me, I think about it as important at the college level, but also important for like in any faith tradition for schools of theology or you know, seminaries for training faith leaders. I think that's a really important point of entry. Um, but yeah, to me, I've just I was just like totally surprised and and humbled by the students' curiosities. And they none of my students were goth. Right.

SPEAKER_01 51:42

Well and I have what would be even a cool component to the to the two classes would be the trifecta, the golden trifecta would be to add an art class in there. I mean, even though you incorporated an element of that, but to bring that element into it, I know that um one of the people I'll be talking to is Greenwood Cemetery. And I don't know if you know about their uh um cemetery as muse program, but they have a whole residency program. And and Hollywood Forever, I believe, also has a different take on the creative element of cemeteries and how we use those more as their original intention, where it it's more of a public park for people to kind of commune together in the arts with nature, with everything. And I have a concept that I'm gonna talk to you about offline, but the a concept that we're creating for within the Remains to be seen exhibition, which is my concept for a new memorial arts park. Well, anyway, I just think it it's so interesting to see that sometimes it's just the time has come for a conversation to kind of come into the public domain, but I really feel like it's out there and that people are curious and hungry to discuss it, regardless of how you approach it.

SPEAKER_00 52:50

And I also think with the at least I'll just speak as a teacher who's like grown older with young people, both in my little house and in my work. There is such a sense for anybody who has any leanings of like, oh, I actually want this earth to be protected for those who come after me, for those who are living now. There is a sense of real overwhelm, particularly in the political moment we're in right now in this country. What can I do? And I feel like my job as an educator is to like mine the depths of my soul so that I show up, you know, vulnerable, but also committed to the fact that collective action can make a difference and we have to wake up and be present. Not every single day, but that's like our job. If we're feeling a little down about the state of the world, let's lean on a friend, get through that day, and then we might be the ones to stand up the next day. And what I've found with this topic is that the one of the reasons I think it's so empowering for students is that it's one thing we can do. Like nobody else is gonna plan the end of our lives for us. Nobody. And except if we die without a plan, it becomes a royal pain in the net. So there is the sense of okay, this is not gonna solve the climate crisis, but it is a collective cultural shift that allows people agency and it allows people to make a real difference. And I equate it also with the shifts in birth. When my mom had me, she was under general anesthesia in 1966. I mean, out for the birth. Then that just is shocking to like my daughters. Whereas one generation later, I was able to have two births without any anesthesia and or anything, but natural birth. And that's one generation that shift happened. And that I think is a similar shift that's happening, that's happening right now. And I will say, just I know y'all are based in New Mexico, there's a company called Earth Funeral that uh provides for what's called human composting. They call it on their website soil transformation, but essentially it is human composting, and that is legal now in 13 states, and there's 10 additional states who've introduced legislation as well as aquamation, which I mentioned earlier, and that's available in half the states. So just mentioning some of these other choices, and with all of those choices, I think getting back to the legacy of artistic expression, there's the opportunity to integrate creative expression into any of these choices and the rituals around death and dying.

SPEAKER_01 55:52

Yeah, for sure. So uh have you heard in any of your research a concern that we're running out of burial space? I guess the whole beauty of doing a green burial, these conservation burials, is that obviously that is something where you don't have to worry about taking up space that can't be reused again. It's one of the arguments that I had heard, or maybe it was just unique to Greenwood Cemeteries. They kind of have a finite amount of space. When you're surrounded by Brooklyn and New York, there's only so much land that you have and you can only accommodate so many people. So obviously cremations are helping that. And maybe a green burial section of the cemetery would help that. But is that a concern that you've heard worldwide is space allocation for burials?

SPEAKER_00 56:37

Well, that's um that can that legitimate concern is really is what prompted the research around human composting. So the company that really started this is called Recompose, and they have a wonderful website, and they're based in Washington state. But the founder of that company, her initial research was um precipitated by this thinking about urban spaces and the lack of green spaces. So the scientific, it's not really scientific, but natural organic reduction is the phrase that people use. But the lay term is human composting. And so that whole process was developed with the idea of what we can do with bodies to return the bodies to the earth, but and but to account for urban spaces. And so, I mean, it's really interesting in approximately a month's time, you bring the body to the facility, and you can look at pictures on their website of machine essentially the where that you add organic material and over a period, yes, it gets turned. And then at the end of approximately a month, you have compost, and you can decide to either take the compost or some of the compost yourself, or you can donate it to conservation projects, regional conservation projects. And I just think that is like a fabulous option. And there are other companies now that are offering that across the country from Colorado to New Mexico to Washington State.

SPEAKER_01 58:15

And what I love about that too is that makes then the marker, if you will, instead of bringing a gray headstone somewhere in a state that you never get to go to, then the art object that becomes the living expression of who you are has infinite possibilities. And I'm mindful of the fact that we're running out of time here, but I just I don't even know where to end it because I could talk to you for another five hours, I'm sure. But um, what would be Jesse, what would be like a wrap-up point that you would like to use in terms of just everything that you've learned up to this point and where you're going with it? Sure.

SPEAKER_00 58:50

Well, I would I'd love, I have like a four-sentence conclusion to my book that kind of wraps things up for me. Could I just read that? Absolutely, that'd be fantastic. Okay. So I I end the book with a two-page letter to my daughters and congruent with what my dad gave to me. So I'll just read the last few sentences because it's it encapsulates it for me. So the last paragraph of the book reads Honoring my parents after their deaths and living into their love for the earth has been one of the defining unexpected paths of my life. I experience my parents' love in my body nearly every day. And that feels like God to me, even when I'm scared about what will happen next. You too, I'm writing my daughters, will carry my love everywhere you go. And if you can't follow this plan, remember what Annie Skye, my youngest daughter, once said. If mom's dead, she might never know. Always know I love you. Yours forever, mommy.

SPEAKER_01 59:52

That's so beautiful. Mallory, thank you so much for being on the show. And I really do want to continue our conversation.

SPEAKER_00 59:58

I really appreciate you reaching out because it's one of those things, like I'm I love talking about it, obviously. And yeah, there's uh there's just a lot of different angles, obviously, to come at talking about death and dying. And this the integration of the arts is so important. Yeah, I was blown away when I in the book that when I spent an entire day with this artist who had used so many different media to prepare for her own death from the the x-rays to to involving her friends. Oh my gosh, you are so intentional. She had even her little directions written on pieces of paper that were in a box. So people, yeah, it was just like the intention to detail was Do you happen to remember her name? She might be someone. Yeah, she yeah, no, she's I mean, she's profiled in the in my book. Okay, I'll I'll find it. I knew she was an artist, but I had no idea how thorough she had been. Oh my god, yeah. I was like, oh my gosh. I thought my dad was intentional. Her story is in chapter seven, which is called the container store. Okay, great. Um I giggled when I saw that name. Yeah, that was one title that came easily. It's Mariah. It's spelled Maria, M-A-R-I-A, and her last name is E-P-E-S. Perfect. Thank you for that. And I have not been in touch with her in uh several years, but she would be a really great spokesperson of integrating the arts into the plant. On this was just a delight. Thank you so much for reaching out.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:28

I'm grateful. Thanks for jumping on it, and we will be in touch for sure. Okay, that sounds good. Thanks a lot. Bye. So thanks for joining us today. Artstorming is brought to you and supported by Artbridge NM and listeners like you. Look for us on your favorite podcast platforms or wherever you listen. Your subscriptions, likes, comments, and shares help us to reach more listeners and attract the support we need to thrive in these challenging times. If you love what you hear, please consider making a contribution. We rely on your help to keep these conversations going. Every dollar you contribute goes directly into programs that support our mission. And we've been offered a matching grant that will match every dollar that you contribute. That means more compelling stories, more in depth articles, and an even greater impact on our community. Please visit our website at www.artbridgenm.org and thank you so much for being an essential part of our work.