“So, what do you want to happen to your body when you die?”
I had shown up to my girlfriend’s closing night cast party for our university’s production of Twelfth Night in a black cropped turtleneck with a sexy little cutout under the boobs, fishnets under a deep green leather skirt with embroidered flowers whose pistils were made out of those silver half-sphere beads that sometimes decorate leather skirts, and black high-heeled boots. I was in the mood to be twenty-one, skinny, hot, tatted, and blonde—and to show it off. We barely had time to set down the cookies my girlfriend made for the event before we were pulled in among the piles of young people scattered around the house. Elle talked about how drunk she was. Ethan talked about an issue he was having with a professor. Jess talked about how everyone should try her cookies. Eventually, we all started talking about what we wanted to happen to our bodies after we die.
I’m not sure who was the first one of us to pose the question—it’s been asked so many times that I’m not quite sure it matters. I do know that when it was my turn, I didn’t have to pause and think about it; none of us did. We all had practiced answers, solid reasons behind those answers, and a prevailing air of nonchalance about the whole thing. And there I was: twenty-one, skinny, hot, tatted, and blonde—and showing it off—and thinking about how many times I’ve had this exact same conversation with all my other twentysomething-year-old friends who seemed to be hyperaware and hypercasual about their mortalities.
And honestly, why shouldn’t we be? We came into the world on the coattails of the biggest terrorist attack the United States had seen to date; we spent our developmental years jumping between active shooter drills and watching videos of decapitations and police brutality; for as long as any of us can remember, we’ve been consciously hurtling towards a politicized climate crisis with worldwide effects we can’t even comprehend despite our inability to escape the conversation for even a day. Throw COVID-19 into the mix, and what’s bound to result is an entire generation of kids who don’t know what life looks like without the threat of terrible violent death looming over our shoulders at all times. At the same time we were dreaming about what we wanted to be when we grew up, we fantasized about what would become of us if we didn’t make it that far.
So, I started asking my friends: What do you want to happen to your body when you die? Then I asked them what they believe in.
It’s the beliefs we carry in life that influence how we wish to have our bodies dealt with in death the most. At some point we have to ask ourselves what we value enough to incorporate into our final impressions on Earth. We have to ask ourselves how we want to leave.
The Tibetan sky burial combines many virtues which are highly valued in Buddhism, one of which is the concept of the body as a vessel for the soul. In this ritual, the body of the deceased is taken to a special monastery to be dismembered. The pieces are brought to a mountain and laid out around the area designated as their burial site to be fed to vultures flying by while the monastery’s spiritual masters (lamas) read sutras for the dead. Having their body used to feed the birds is the deceased’s final act of charity; it emphasizes the virtuous concepts of metta and karuna, or loving kindness and compassion.
Tyler pondered my question just long enough to pull his long blond hair up into a lazy ponytail before answering. At twenty-one years old, he viewed his body as materials, as resources that could be useful somewhere else—whether that be science, returning to and feeling nature, or becoming nutrients for soil. He wasn’t his body, but rather his spirit, and once that was gone, there was really no point in being picky about what happened to the vessel as long as was used for something. Therefore, upon his death, he wanted his body either donated to science or given as natural a burial as possible. His exact words were that, ideally, he would love to have someone “fly a plane over some mountains, drop [his] body, and just leave it at that.”
I got a similar sentiment from Jaimee, who sat on the floor and leaned against the couch behind her for support while sharing her twenty-year-old heart’s desire for her body after death: She wanted her body flung off the side of a cliff into the ocean by “two people [she] love[s]. Or strangers, honestly,” allowing the sea life to feast on her. I asked her if she had a dream cliff to be thrown from, and she quieted a bit while she told me to bring her to the cliffs in Northern Spain—the ones at the beach where she swam one time. I asked her if this was a public beach, and she said yes. At least she wouldn’t be around to deal with the consequences of a public body-dumping.
With “just dump it and let it be eaten” burials, the tie between life and death starts to sound a little bit like getting a present. The present isn’t the box; the box is just a way to hold all the good stuff inside, but once I’ve opened it up and claimed my prize, I couldn’t care less what happens to the package. Drop it in the mountains or fling it off a cliff for all I care; I’m not using it anymore.
And while that cavalier attitude feels admirable to me sometimes, I can’t help but think of the people left behind. I’ve seen what grief looks like from a distance: The desire to hide from everything that reminds you of what you no longer have coupled with the intense need to have something, anything, to channel your grief into.
Kennedy, a dear shining friend and the person who taught me the raw and horrible beauty of grief, had a very different belief system at twenty-one than she did at nineteen after watching and having to come to terms with her best friend, her mother, passing away due to breast cancer. She explained her holistic view of spirituality as one that credits nature as the start, one where all of us as people are a part of that nature: “We’re made of the stuff of stars and we’re made of the stuff of the world. It’s all connected and it’s all the same.” For her, death is less about “giving back” to the earth than it is returning to where we started.
In South Korea, whose funerals have deep Confucian roots, there is a large sense of duty to the dead. The family of a deceased person is charged with honoring their dead through a remembrance that will allow their spirits to safely pass into the afterlife. They have the responsibility of holding on in order to let go. When the land logistically ran out of space for burials (so much so that as of 2000, the law requires families to remove their loved ones’ bodies from their graves after sixty years), South Koreans found a new way to honor lives once lived. The ashes of their parents, siblings, children, and lovers are turned into beautiful beads for the family to keep. Sometimes these are called “death beads,” sometimes “cremation beads,” and sometimes “burial beads,” but what they’re called matters significantly less than what they represent. The body may not be useful in an ecological, cycle-of-life sense, but there is tremendous value in giving loved ones a way to know they did their duty to you and giving them permission to carry on, keeping you as close as they need to for as long as they want to.
Kylee was best known to me by the skateboard she rode to her classes and the mix of band shirts she tended to wear (sometimes Blink-182, sometimes MCR), so it made sense that at twenty-three years old, she planned to have her cremated remains pressed into a vinyl record. She’d pick out the soundtrack of her life at some point when she’s closer to her end and record a message saying whatever is left for her to say. Her family would be required to listen to it every year on both her birthday and her deathday.
My cookie-master girlfriend Jess, at twenty-one, wanted to be made into a ring, feminine and dainty just like her. She wanted to give the wearer the chance to feel close to her. She wanted to leave another piece of beauty in the world.
Sometimes it’s not enough to carry a memory with you. There’s a more intense desire to keep the spirit of a loved one alive and active past the time their body will let them. For the Yanomami tribe of the Amazon rainforest, this has been done through endocannibalism, or the ritual consumption of a deceased person from your tribe, family, or social group. The Yanomami people are known to have every member of their community ingest their departed via a soup made from their ashes and fermented bananas. The dead become, once again, a part of the living.
But the continuation of life doesn’t always have to happen from person to person. In the Cavite province of the Philippines, some accomplish their own life-giving-to-life ritual through trees. When a person can tell they’re close to death, they’ll go into the forest and pick a tree. Their family members build them a hut at the tree’s base for them to live out the rest of their days in; while the dying person settles into their final home, they can expect visits from family and friends who come by to hollow out the trunk. When the person passes, they are vertically entombed in the now-hollowed trunk. They have the opportunity to give their life and resources back to the trees that gave them oxygen, fruit, and firewood when it was their turn to roam the earth.
Parker seemed to think that talking about death and burial rites was just about the coolest conversation we could have. He squinted his eyes and tilted all nineteen years, five-feet-four inches of his body into the question while he told me he wanted to be buried with a tree and talked about how energy is shared between everything without the need for a ruling power; he told me a lot of things attributed to religion can really just be viewed as the connection and energy between people; he told me it would make him happiest to come back and experience living in a new way, so he chooses to believe in reincarnation. But even if it turns out that we don’t open a new set of human eyes as soon as our old ones are forever closed, we still become the tree. Whatever life is left over after we are gone changes only into other life.
Christoforos, perhaps a bit more harshly, scoffed at the idea of “giving back” to the earth, calling it ridiculous in his thick twenty-one-year-old Greek accent. “I can’t give anything back to nature,” he told me. “Nature owns me. It’s absurd to think I have any right to give something back that doesn’t belong to me in the first place.”
I personally found that I actually love the thought of having nothing to give. I love the idea that what we are is borrowed and everything we do while we’re here is only in favor of returning with a little more life under our belts than we could’ve had otherwise. To be able to humble ourselves into the understanding that nothing we have is inherently ours makes all of our experiences a gift. The question of how to leave isn’t nearly as important as the question of what to do with all the time we have before that.
And yet the question remains: How do we want to leave? Some of us honestly don’t give a fuck what happens to our bodies as long as they’re some sort of use to the larger world. Some of us want to give something to the people we’re leaving behind so they can remember us and honor what we were to them in the times they need comfort we can no longer give them. A lot of us fall somewhere in between the two. Most of the conversations I had were barely concerned with the logistics of death and burial—I mean, let’s face it, we are only twenty years old, our job at this stage of life is to dream big and expect that the world will bend to our every whim; it’s to hold tightly to that last little bit of childhood audacity telling us we deserve it all, and it’s to see all the ways we wish the world would change and take it upon ourselves to make that happen.
My name is Eleora, I am twenty-one years old, and when I die (after all the life left usable inside me has been taken out and given to the people that still need it) I want my ashes to be welded into some sort of kick-ass dagger, named after me, and hailed as what I hope to be the coolest heirloom my great great-grandkids’ friends have ever seen. I was raised to love and to fear a typically Anglo-Saxon Christian Jesus while my parents drove us to our weekly Shabbat group and told me I couldn’t trust what other people preached The Bible to say; it was better to find out for myself. So, I don’t believe in Anglo-Saxon Christian Jesus anymore, but I absolutely believe in love and in fear. I don’t go to Shabbat, though I do try my hand at making challah on occasion. I still haven’t made my way through the Bible, but as far as I can tell, most people are saying the same thing; the trick is to find the language that resonates with you. I heavily believe in connections between life and other life—or, in some cases, death. And I honestly believe that most of us are just trying to find a way to get back to where we came from, to help the universe find new ways of experiencing itself. To let the cycle go on.
Eleora Ryan is a writer, director, and translator who seeks to highlight the moments that make up art. She believes that art is more than the final product—it is every instance that led to the creation of the product. Her writing is aware of this and comments on its own production, bridging the gap between process and piece. Like most writers, Eleora’s work is an attempt to understand the world and her place in it. For her personally, this comes from inquiries into hidden patterns and the connections between seemingly unrelated happenings. Her deepest hope in her writing is to offer something emphatically human—something with the ability to feel deeply personal for anyone and everyone who engages with it, while adding something worthwhile to the conversations that matter.
