Halloween is just around the corner, so it’s probably as good a time as ever to think about how you want to go. You may want to end up in an urn, hopefully not a coffee urn like the one in “Due Date”, or under a tombstone in a memorial park like the one shown here.
There are others who offer you a chance to become moon dust by sending your ashes into outer space, or as part of a reef underwater. But wouldn’t you want to make the air cleaner for your loved ones by giving life to a tree?
Well, that is the concept that these Italian designers want to promote. Once a person goes, his or her body is placed in an egg-shaped container made of starch plastic. The body of the deceased is placed inside it in the fetal position, just as we all were when we were in our mother’s womb. This gives the dead the chance to be sort of reincarnated as a tree, because after the biodegradable casket is buried, a tree is planted on top. So eventually, instead of seeing tombs, catacombs and other grim images of a cemetery, you get a “sacred forest” full of trees.
Capsula Mundi is still a design concept, no thanks to current laws and regulations about cemeteries and burials.
Well in the meantime, there should be the studies as to what tree species would benefit from such an arrangement. In any case, it’ll just be a throwback to the days when our forebears were buried in the ground six feet under mounds of dirt, but this time with a green twist.
As for me, I’d rather be remembered as a sheltering parent or grandparent rather than a cold grey angel atop a tomb. Hopefully legislators won’t act like Jason or Freddie and slash the proposed laws that would allow us to do this.
