Stiff (30 page)

11

Out of the Fire, into the Compost Bin

And other new ways to end up

When a cow dies on a visit to the hospital, it does not go to a morgue. It goes to a walk-in refrigerator, such as the one at Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital, in Fort Collins. Like most things in walk-in refrigerators, the bodies here are arranged to maximize space. Against one wall, sheep are stacked like sandbags against a flood.

Cows hang from ceiling hooks, effecting the familiar side-of-beef silhouette. A horse, bisected mid-torso, lies in halves on the floor, a vaudeville costume after the show.

The death of a farm animal is death reduced to the physical and the practical: a matter of waste disposal and little more. With no soul to be ushered onward, no mourners to attend to, death's overseers are free to pursue more practical approaches. Is there a more economical way to dispose of the body? A more environmentally friendly way? Could something useful be done with the remains? With our own deaths, the disposal of the body was for centuries incorporated into the ritual of memorial and farewell. Mourners are present at the lowering of the coffin and, until more recently, the measured, remote-control conveyance of the casket into the cremation furnace. With the majority of cremations now done out of view of the mourners, the memorial has begun to be separated from the process of disposal. Does this free us to explore new possibilities?

Kevin McCabe, owner of McCabe Funeral Homes in Farmington Hills, Michigan, is one man who thinks that the answer is yes. One day soon, he plans to do to dead people what Colorado State University is doing to dead sheep and horses. The process—called "tissue digestion" when you speak to the livestock people and "water reduction" when you speak to McCabe—was invented by a retired pathology professor named Gordon Kaye and a retired professor of biochemistry named Bruce Weber.

McCabe is the mortuary consultant for Kaye and Weber's company, WR2, Inc., based in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The mortuary end of corpse disposal had been a low priority over at WR2

until the spring of 2002, when Ray Brant Marsh of Noble, Georgia, dragged the good name of crematory operators everywhere about as far through the mud as a name could go. At last count, some 339

decomposing bodies were found on land surrounding his Tri-State Crematory—stacked in sheds, dumped in a pond, crammed in a concrete burial vault. Marsh initially claimed the incinerator wasn't working, but it was. Then rumors of decomposing body photos in his computer files made the rounds. It began to look as though Marsh wasn't simply cheap and unethical, but deeply strange. As the body count grew, Gordon Kaye began to get calls: half a dozen from funeral directors, and one from a New York State assemblyman, all wanting to know how soon the mortuary tissue digestor might be available, should the public begin to shun crematoriums. (At that time, Kaye estimated it would be another six months.)

In a few hours, Kaye and Weber's equipment can dissolve the tissues of a corpse and reduce it to 2 or 3 percent of its body weight. What remains is a pile of decollagenated bones that can be crumbled in one's fingers.

Everything else has been turned into what the WR2 brochure describes as a sterile "coffee-colored" liquid.

Tissue digestion relies on two key ingredients: water and an alkali better known as lye. When you put lye into water, you create a pH environment that frees the hydrogen ion of the water to break apart the proteins and fats that make up a living organism. That's why "water reduction,"

though clearly a euphemism, is an apt term. "You are using water to break the chemical bonds in the large molecules of the body," says Kaye.

But Kaye does not gloss over the lye. This is a man who has spent eleven years in the world of carcass disposal (or "disposition," if you are speaking with McCabe). "In effect, it's a pressure cooker with Drano,"

says Kaye of his invention. The lye does more or less what it would do if you swallowed it. You don't digest it, it digests you. What's nice about an alkali, as opposed to an acid, is that in doing the deed, the chemical renders itself inert and can be safely flushed down the drain.

There is no question that tissue digestion makes good sense for disposing of dead animals. It destroys pathogens, and, more important, it destroys prions—including the ones that cause mad cow disease—which rendering cannot reliably do. It does not pollute, as incinerators do. And because no natural gas is used, the process is approximately ten times cheaper than incineration.

What are the advantages for humans? If they're humans who own funeral homes, the advantage is economical. A mortuary digestor will be relatively inexpensive to buy (less than $100,000) and, as mentioned, a tenth as expensive to run. Digestors make especially good sense in rural areas whose populations are too small to keep a crematory furnace continuously active, which is the best way for it to be. (Firing it up and letting it cool all the way down and refiring it over and over damages the furnace lining; ideally, you want to keep the fire going nonstop, turning it down just low enough to remove the ashes and put the next body in, but this presumes a steady lineup of corpses.)

What are the advantages for humans who don't own funeral homes?

Assuming it's going to cost a family more or less the same as cremation would, why would someone choose to have this done? I asked McCabe, a chatty, affable Midwesterner, how he plans to market the process to bereaved families. "Simple," he said. "To families who come in and say, 'I want him to be cremated,' I'm gonna say, 'No problem. You can cremate him, or you can do our water reduction process.' And they're gonna say,

'What's that?' And I'm gonna go, 'Well, it's like cremation, but we do it with water under pressure instead of fire.' And they're gonna go, 'All right! Let's do it!' "

And the media is gonna go, "There's lye in there. You're boiling them in lye!" I mean, Kevin, I said, aren't you leaving out a pretty big part of it?

"Oh, yeah, they're gonna know all that," he said. "I've talked to people and they have no problem." I'm not sure I believe him on these two points, but I do believe what he said next: "Besides, watching somebody cremated is not pretty."

I decided I had to see the process for myself. I contacted the chairman of the state anatomical board in Gainesville, Florida, where for the past five years digestors have been taking care of anatomy lab leftovers—here under the name "reductive cremation," in order to hopscotch state regulations that willed bodies be cremated. When I got no reply, Kaye gave me a contact at Colorado State. And that is how I came to be standing in a walk-in refrigerator full of dead livestock in Fort Collins, Colorado.

The digestor sits on a loading dock, fifteen feet from the walk-in. It is a round stainless-steel vat similar in size and circumference to a California hot tub. Indeed, when full, the two hold approximately the same mass of heated liquid and passive bodies: about seventeen hundred pounds.

Manning the digestor this afternoon is a soft-voiced wildlife pathologist named Terry Spracher. Spracher wears rubber boots pulled over his pants, and latex gloves. Both are streaked with blood, for he has been doing sheep necropsies.[
1]
Despite what his job duties might suggest, this is a man who loves animals. When he heard I lived in San Francisco, he brightened and said that he enjoyed visiting the city, and the reason he enjoyed it was not the hills or the Wharf or the restaurants but the Marine Mammal Center, an obscure ecology center up the coast where oil-soaked otters and orphaned elephant seals are rehabbed and released. I guess this is how it is with animal careers. If you deal with animals for a living, you generally also deal with their deaths.

Above our heads, the unit's perforated liner basket hangs from a ceiling-mounted hydraulic hoist on a track. A taciturn, ginger-haired lab assistant named Wade Clemons pushes a button, and the basket travels across the loading dock to the door of the walk-in, where he is standing.

When he's done loading the basket, he and Spracher will guide it back to the airspace above the digestor and lower it in. "Just like french fries,"

says Spracher quietly.

Hanging from the hoist inside the walk-in is a large steel hook. Clemons bends down to couple this to a second hook, anchored on a thick band of muscle at the base of the horse's neck. Clemons presses a button. The half-horse rises. The sight is a disquieting blend of horse-as-we-know-it—

placid, dejected horse face; silken mane and neck where young girls'

hands went—and slasher-flick gore.

Clemons loads one half, then the other, lowering it down in beside its partner, the two halves fitting neatly together like new shoes in a box.

With the seasoned expertise of a grocery bagger, Clemons loads sheep, a calf, and the nameless slippery contents of two ninety-gallon "gut buckets" from the necropsy lab, until the basket is full.

Then he presses a button that sends the basket along the ceiling track on a short, slow trip across the loading dock to the digestor. I try to imagine a cluster of mourners standing by, as they have stood by gravesides as winches lower coffins, and in cremation parlors as coffins on conveyor belts are pulled slowly into crematory retorts. Of course, for mortuary digestions, some alterations will be made in the name of dignity. The mortuary model will use a cylindrical basket and will process only one body at a time. McCabe doesn't see this as something the family would stand around and watch, though "if they wanted to see the equipment, they'd be welcome."

With the basket in place, Spracher closes the digestor's steel hatch and presses a series of buttons on the computerized console. Washing-machine noises can be heard as water and chemicals pour into the tank.

I return for the raising of the basket, the following day. (The process normally takes six hours for a load this size, but Colorado State needs to upgrade its pipes.) Spracher unbolts the hatch and raises the lid. I don't smell anything, and am emboldened to lean my head over the vat and peer inside. Now I smell something. It is a large, assertive smell, unappetizing and unfamiliar. Gordon Kaye refers to the smell as

"soaplike," leading one to wonder where he buys his toiletries. The basket appears largely empty, which is pretty amazing when you think about what it looked like going in. Clemons turns on the hoist, and the basket rises from the machine. At the bottom is a foot and a half of bone hulls. I resolve to take Kaye's word for it that you can crumble them in your fingers.

Clemons opens a small door near the base of the basket and scrapes the bones out into a Dumpster. Though it's no more grisly than the emptying of a crematory retort, it's hard for me to imagine this catching on as part of the American funerary tradition. But here again, the funerary rendition wouldn't go quite like this. Had this been a mortuary digestion, the bone remnants would be dried and either pulverized for scattering or, as McCabe envisions, placed in a "bone box," a sort of mini-coffin that could be stored in a crypt or buried.

Everything other than bone has liquefied and disappeared down the drain. When I got back home I asked McCabe how he was going to handle the potentially disturbing realities of the dearly departed's molecules ending up in the municipal sewer system. "The public seems okay with it," he said. Contrasting it with cremation, he said, "You're either going to go in the sewer or you're going to go up in the atmosphere. People who are environmentally conscious know that we're better off putting something sterile and pH-neutral into the sewer than we are letting mercury [from fillings] go into the air."[
2]
McCabe is counting on environmental conscience to sell the process. Will it work?

We'll soon see. McCabe is poised to take delivery of the world's first mortuary tissue digestor sometime in 2003.

You have only to look at the story of cremation to appreciate that changing the way America disposes of its dead is a feat not easily accomplished. The best way to do this would be to buy a copy of Stephen Prothero's
Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America
. Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University, a masterful writer, and a respected historian; his book includes a bibliography of more than two hundred original and secondary sources. The second-best way to do it would be to read the passage that follows, which is basically small chunks of Prothero's book run through the tissue digestor of my brain.

Ironically, one of the cremationists' earliest and loudest arguments in America was that cremation was less polluting than burial. In the mid-1800s, it was widely (and wrongly) believed that buried, decomposing bodies gave off noxious gases which polluted the groundwater and made their way up through the dirt to form deadly, hovering graveyard

"miasmas" that tainted the air and sickened those who wandered past.

Cremation was presented as the pure and hygienic alternative and might well have caught on then, had the first U.S. cremation not proved to be a PR disaster.

America's first crematory was built in 1874, on the estate of Francis Julius LeMoyne, a retired physician, abolitionist, and champion of education.

Though his credentials as a social reformer were impressive, his beliefs about personal hygiene may have worked against him in his crusade for funereal cleanliness and purity. According to Prothero, he believed that

"the human body was never intended by its Creator to come in contact with water," and, as such, traveled about in his own personal miasma.

LeMoyne's first customer was one Baron Le Palm, who was to be incinerated in a public ceremony to which national and European press had been invited. Le Palm's reasons for requesting cremation remain murky, but somewhere in the mix was a deep-seated fear of live burial, for he claimed to have met a woman who had been buried alive (presumably not very deeply). As things turned out, Mr. Le Palm was finished some months before the crematory was, and had to be preserved. He fell victim to the spotty and improvisational embalming techniques of the day, and wasn't looking his best when rowdier elements of the crowd—uninvited townsfolk, mainly—pulled the sheet from his earthly remains. Crude jokes were made. Schoolchildren snickered. Reporters from newspapers across the country criticized the carnival air of the proceedings and the lack of religious ritual and due solemnity. Cremation was all but doomed to an early grave.