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.”[41] 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.
Prothero posits that LeMoyne had erred in presenting a more or less secular ceremony. His unsentimental memorial speech, devoid of references to the Hereafter and the Almighty, and the bare, utilitarian design of his crematory (reporters likened it to “a bake oven” and “a large cigar box”) offended the sensibilities of Americans used to Victorian-style funerals with their formal masses and their profusely flowered, ornately appointed caskets. America was not ready for pagan funerals. It would not be until 1963—when the Catholic Church, in the wake of the reforms of Vatican II, relaxed the ban on cremation—that disposal by incineration would start to take hold in a serious way. (1963 was a banner year for cremation. It was that summer that The American Way of Death, the late Jessica Mitford’s exposé of deceit and greed in the burying business, came out.)
What has inspired funeral reformers throughout history, Prothero maintains, has been a distaste for pomp and religious pageantry. They may hand out pamphlets detailing the horrors and health risks of the grave, but what really bothered them was the waste and fakery of the traditional Christian funeraclass="underline" the rococo coffins, the hired mourners, the expense, the wasted land. Freethinkers like LeMoyne envisioned a purer, simpler, back-to-basics approach. Unfortunately, as Prothero points out, these men have tended to take mortuary utilitarianism too far, outraging the churches and alienating the public. Take the American doctor who put forth a plan to boost the dead’s utility by skinning them prior to cremation and making leather. Take the Italian professor who advocated burning cadaveric fat in streetlamps, speculating that the 250 people who died each day in New York would yield 30,600 pounds of fuel daily. Take the cremationist Sir Henry Thompson, who sat down and calculated the value in pounds sterling of the 80,000-odd people who died each year in London, should their cremated remains be used as fertilizer. It worked out to about £50,000, though the customers, should any have emerged, would have been dealt a raw deal, as cremains make lousy fertilizer. If you wanted to fertilize your garden with dead people, you were better off doing it the Hay way. Dr. George Hay was a Pittsburgh chemist who advocated pulverizing dead bodies so that they would—to quote an 1888 newspaper article on the topic—“return to the elements as soon as possible, if for no other purpose than to furnish a fertilizer.” Here is Hay, quoted at length in the article, which is pasted into a scrapbook belonging to the Historical Collection of the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The machines might be so contrived as to break the bones first in pieces the size of a hen egg, next into fragments of the size of a marble, and the mangled and lacerated mass could next be reduced by means of chopping machines and steam power to mincemeat. At this stage we have a homogeneous mixture of the entire body structures in the form of a pulpous mass of raw meat and raw bones. This mass should now be dried thoroughly by means of steam heat at a temperature of 250 Fahr. …because firstly we wish to reduce the material to a condition convenient for handling and secondly we wish to disinfect it…. Once in this condition, it would command a good price for the purpose of manure.
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In the grand scheme of industrial air pollution, crematoria rank low on the fret list. They emit about half as much particulate matter as a residential fireplace and about as much nitrous oxide as the typical restaurant grill. (This is not surprising, as the human body is mostly water.) Of greatest concern is mercury from dental fillings, which vaporizes and drifts into the atmosphere at a rate of .23 grams per hour of operation (about a half gram per cremation), according to research done jointly by the EPA and the Cremation Association of North America. An independent study done in England in 1990 and published in the journal