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Make Your Death as Meaningful as Your Life (Part 1 of 2 with Seth Viddal)

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Summary

Navigating the complex topics of end-of-life planning is inherently challenging, but at LightAtTheEnd.com, we aim to provide clarity and options for those exploring meaningful and eco-conscious memorialization. Recently, Kevin Berk sat down with Seth Viddal, co-owner and COO of The Natural Funeral, to discuss innovative alternatives to traditional burials and cremations. This exploration delves into Seth’s personal journey, the evolution of burial practices, and the emerging trends in funeral services that cater to environmentally savvy consumers.

The Impact of Personal Loss and Reflection

Seth Viddal’s journey into the funeral industry was profoundly influenced by his personal experiences with repeated family losses. His parents’ and brother’s deaths served as a catalyst, forcing him to reassess his career and life goals. Despite the tragedy, Seth found a calling to serve in end-of-life care, seeking to offer funerals that truly reflect the individuality and values of the deceased.

Traditional Practices and Their Evolution

Kevin Berk points out that most people in Western cultures have long known only burial and cremation as options for body disposition, never stopping to consider the historical roots of these practices. Seth Viddal provides a brief history of these traditional methods, noting that they have been the status quo for generations. However, modern consumers are seeking options that align with their environmental values and personalized needs.

Innovative Alternatives: Water Cremation and Terramation

A significant part of the podcast focuses on the innovative methods of water cremation and terramation (body composting). Water cremation, technically known as alkaline hydrolysis, is a process that uses water and alkaline compounds to decompose the body, resulting in a nutrient-rich liquid similar to traditional cremation’s ‘ashes’. This method offers an eco-friendly alternative that eliminates pollutants associated with flame-based cremation.

Terramation, or natural organic reduction, is poised to revolutionize the industry by composting human bodies. Through a carefully controlled process involving wood chips and biologically active compounds, the body is transformed into fertile soil. Seth passionately asserts that terramation could become the predominant body disposition method in the next 30 years, reflecting a massive shift in both public consciousness and industry practices.

The Role of Family and Personalization

Seth emphasizes the importance of family involvement in the funeral process. The Natural Funeral encourages families to participate in caring for their loved ones, which can include activities like preparing the body or personalizing the memorial service. This hands-on participation brings healing and helps demystify death for younger family members.

Future Outlook and Memorial Innovations

In addition to these modern methods, innovations like memorial stones are gaining popularity. Companies like Parting Stone transform cremated remains into solid stones, offering a tactile and personal way for families to keep their loved ones close.

Conclusion

As the conversation applauds these innovations, it becomes evident that there is much more to explore and discuss. The conversation with Seth Viddal is a glimpse into a future where funerals can be as unique as the lives they commemorate, a canvas for creativity, and a sustainable practice that respects the planet.

Stay tuned for more from LightAtTheEnd.com’s podcast series, where we continue to delve into these transformative topics, exploring how we can create goodbyes that truly honor life in all its forms.

FULL TRANSCRIPTION:

Welcome back to the LightAtTheEnd.com Podcast. LightAtTheEnd.com is a resource for those who want to learn more about end of life topics, but don’t know where to start. I’m Kevin Berk, and I’m joined today by Seth Viddal, co-owner and COO of The Natural Funeral (thenaturalfuneral.com). This is part one of a two part discussion we’re having on planning deeply meaningful, connected, creative, and eco-conscious goodbyes and memorializations for ourselves and our loved ones.

Kevin Berk: Seth, thank you so, so much for joining me today. I’m thrilled that we got introduced by our mutual colleague, Alexis Rebane of Guardian Fox Arts (guardianfoxarts.com), and it’s wonderful to be finally meeting you.

Seth: Thanks, Kevin. I’m really glad to be here and I’m grateful for the work that you’re doing at LightAtTheEnd.com.

Kevin Berk: Nice. Thank you.

So, I’ve had a couple of conversations with people, including Alexis and Emily Miller, talking about green burial and eco friendly alternatives, and because I don’t want this discussion to be totally duplicative of those, I’ll probably dig deeper on some of the topics that we previously discovered. But that said, I know that you will have a different perspective and I would love to hear it. So if there’s anything that I ask where you feel like backing up the bus and starting a little bit earlier [is in order], I welcome you to do it.

Seth: Sounds great, Kevin.

Kevin Berk: Okay, good.

Personal Journey and Family Losses

How did thenaturalfuneral.com come to be and how did you become involved in it?

Seth: Yeah, well, that’s a kind of a long story that, that really led up to how I got curious about working with folks around the end of life transition. And, Kevin, that, story really began with the passing of my parents. But maybe even before that, when I was 10 years old, I found myself being, raised – myself and a younger brother – by our single mother.

And, at 10 years old, my mom fell in love with a new man and he eventually became my stepfather. And, his name is Ramon Olachia and he was Mescalero Apache and was very connected with his cultural roots and his identity and practiced the crafts and the lore and kept alive really the spirit of his lineage.

And he taught that to his kids. And I was fortunate at 10 years old. I felt really like I’d won the lottery, from this mentality of, sort of, scarcity and lacking a father figure to having someone that I really Looked up to in the way that he related to nature and to other human beings.

And he really set me off on a path of scouting and camping and being outdoors and appreciating. our connectedness with other living beings, and, that was at 10 years old. And so I got to grow up in his care and our family got bigger and my parents had a child together and they adopted several children and they fostered several children.

And we had a great, big, beautiful family. And,I would eventually grow up and, move away. And, there was a point where my, my father was growing older. And, I got a call one day from my mother that my dad just hadn’t woken up that day. And we were sad, but he’d had a decline over several years, physically, and…maybe another story for another time, two weeks prior to his passing, he and I got to take a big road trip and we went to some sacred spiritual places around the country. We found ourselves at the Battle of Little Bighorn, and we found ourselves at the Custer monument in the black Hills of South Dakota, and we had this really blessed time together, not knowing that it would be our last time spent together, and that preceded my mom’s phone call saying dad had died by about two weeks. And so, two and a half weeks, then, after this trip with my dad, I found myself with my mom at a funeral home in Texas, in the little Gulf coast town where I grew up with my stepdad and mom and big family, and we were making funeral arrangements and the arranger, I remember him reaching back in a file cabinet over his shoulder and pulling out the file folder that we had most recently used in my family, which was the death of my grandfather. And so what we basically did was we approved this cookie cutter funeral, the same casket and the same two hour visitation and the same tea and crumpets, that we had purchased several years earlier when my grandfather had died.

And at the moment, I. I didn’t really connect that this action we had just taken for my father really didn’t match who he was, but as you do, when you’re getting through life, we tend to just tap the brakes for just long enough to get through a funeral event, at least that’s how we had historically in my family and everybody does the best they can.

And you come together and you console and you share memories and you eat some casserole and we tell some stories and then everybody is back to back to the business of living.

The Impact of Repeated Losses

And Kevin, it was about one year later that my mom called me again, and this time with much more sadness than her voice. She was calling to let me know that my little brother, Sam, had died by suicide. And so, Mom and I found ourselves, about a year later, back in the same funeral home, and I remember reaching over the shoulder and pulling out the file cabinet and saying, well, this is the last funeral that we had for your family.

And we basically repeated the same funeral, but this time it was for my little brother and Sam had, been adopted by my parents and was a gay man in coastal Texas that grew up in a struggle around his own identity and self worth and a joy that he found in the world.

And in, in that moment of sadness, my mom and I made the decision to replicate the same funeral that we had before, I mean, same casket, same kind of visitation and all.

Kevin Berk: Did that just make it easier to get past it? Was that kind of the thought process at that point?

Seth: It was taking the option that we knew worked last time. it really wasn’t a part of the conversation, what might we do differently? Who was Sam and how was his life different than Ramon’s, and how would we come together as a family differently in this moment?

It really, Kevin was about, this is a simple option. It’s the low hanging fruit. We already know this works. Let’s get the same model of casket, do the same routine and same tea and crumpets, same ceremony, we just sort of got through it. That was in March of 2015, that Sam died and in March of 2016, my brother called me because my mother had died while she was packing her bag to come to Colorado and visit me and my family the following day. And so, that was another unexpected loss. And my family found ourselves back, y’know, there’s some coffee stores where they’ll give you a punch card after you have so many lattes, you get, you know, your eighth one free… and that’s what it felt like. We felt like we were on a conveyor belt, through this funeral home and we bought the same funeral for mom. And then after we got through mom’s funeral, something gave in me and in my family.

Around that same time period, Kevin, in March of 2016, I experienced a ruptured intestine and I found myself hospitalized, for, about a 10 day period where I underwent a life threatening experience where, I’d gone into a toxic sort of septic shock from this intestinal rupture. And then after I left the hospital, severely compromised, and attended my mother’s funeral that way and made the plans for her funeral that way. So even again, in that moment, it was about taking the easy option and following the path that we had done before, sort of without the thought of what we might bring new in that moment.

Reflecting on Mortality and Career Shift

And so Kevin, that was a long, story personally, after death became an uninvited guest, those three times with my mother, brother, and father, and then nearly with myself having experienced a life threatening event, I stopped and, or I shouldn’t say I stopped… the universe stopped me and forced me to examine the question, what is mortality trying to teach me right now? And what is my place in the world?

The Birth of The Natural Funeral

At the time, I owned and operated a business that my wife and I decided to sell and I went back to school in my forties to explore how I was going to serve in end of life care and in recognizing these transitions that are available to us when one of us dies.

Kevin Berk: Seth, that’s such a rich story. Thank you so much for sharing it with me. It seems to give some great context for what you do in the rest of the conversation we’re going to be having. I have to ask: was there never a point with your father where he had discussed what he wanted after he passed or, after he did, with your mom about what she wanted after she passed?

Was that conversation never had? It’s interesting that you ended up with your, your brother, your father, your mother all having the exact same burial experience, and it didn’t sound like that had ever been talked about.

Seth: No, Kevin, it wasn’t. Our family was very similar to most sort of American, cultural households where, death is not talked about very frequently. In fact, I remember when my grandparents died, based on the ages of the children was who got invited to the funeral.

And it was like with a lot of families, how can the children process this? How much do we describe to them clearly? How much do we separate them from what we perceive will be a tragedy or a sorrow that they won’t know how to process, or that’ll be difficult for us to process if we bring it up together? We were just as bad at having that conversation in my family as, I think most households, or many households.

Maybe it took me seeing it in threes for me to wake up to the possibility that I’d like to really peel back what’s possible at that moment, because it was through those funeral experiences that I realized we’re leaving a lot on the table about what’s possible.

Kevin Berk: And I imagine having that, extreme health scare of your own had you really thinking about it as well.

Seth: It did. It did. Not so much my own funeral, but, it really got me to, to thinking about what do I want to do with the rest of my life. I sort of had been a a serial entrepreneur for years and had started multiple companies from real estate development And finally, a general contracting firm that was doing a lot of commercial and industrial work so I’d build or rehabilitate strip malls or churches or schools or restaurants. And it really took, the sobering impact of those losses to make me wake up to the possibility that I have something to give in this space and it maybe it’s through the acute awareness that the universe provided to me in a short period of time that I’d like to focus on this, that I realized that’s how I want to spend the rest of my life.

Conventional Burial Practices and Their Evolution

Kevin Berk: Most of us westerners of our relative age grew up with two options, burial and cremation.

But can we talk about how those became the predominant methods of final disposition? I’d never really stopped to think about it until I heard you on the frankly-excellent Body of Wonder Podcast, talking a little bit about it. And I went, you know, I’d never thought about that, but it makes a lot of sense.

Seth: Yeah. Kevin,I’ll be a little bit crass here because you could boil those those options down to what, what they used to ask a long time ago when you’d,arrive at a restaurant or a social engagement, they’d ask, “would you like smoking or non smoking?” And many funeral homes ask which like cremation or burial and that’s the bottom line that we’re getting to.

And then around that, we’re going to package some other services or maybe catering or a fancy casket or a viewing or a dove release or music. But you’re right, those have been the, at the crux of the offering for many, many years. I could give you a history of burial and a history of embalming that dates back to the Civil War or the history of cremation in this country that dates back to Philadelphia in the 1880s, but those have been the main two options for a long, long time. And Kevin, I think it’s the way that like that funerals came into my consciousness and my needing to act on as an adult where I became a decision maker in the funeral process and I found myself ill-equipped to challenge the status quo or to really be creative or innovative and what might be a thoughtful funeral consideration for my folks that were experiencing those losses.

And I defaulted to what is the easiest path forward.

Innovative Alternatives: Water Cremation and Terramation

And some ideas, Kevin, that have come forth in the past several years in the mainstream funeral consciousness are concepts like water cremation, which is also called alkaline hydrolysis. There’s another process called terramation, which is scientifically referred to as natural organic reduction or body composting.

There are some other really radical concepts even that are being explored that aren’t at the proof phase that are being explored, internationally. that may be outside the scope of our conversation today, but to just bring into, maybe to broaden the lanes of what people are thinking about.

It’s not just, cremation or burial or smoking or non smoking. Now we have folks who’ve come to us who’ve said, I’d like to be cremated because I don’t believe in taking up ground forever. In fact, I don’t,I’m not going to die in the town I was born and my children don’t live in the town where I’m going to die and the idea of a permanent memorialization in a geography that doesn’t have a long generational lineage with my family doesn’t make any sense.

And furthermore, I composted my table scraps. I have solar panels on my house. I drive a hybrid car. I zeroscape my yard. I don’t want to be put in the ground and have the grass be watered and mowed for perpetuity, for nobody to come and visit.

And so I’d like a cremation, but I have a fear of fire, or I have a religious or cultural perspective that doesn’t agree with fire or cremation and my human body or my spiritual body. And so these other concepts are meeting the needs of people who have environmental or sacred or personal reasons that they’d like a different disposition method.

Kevin Berk: I’ll give a little historical perspective on these other two options that I’m going to share and what I’m, what I want to pause for just a second, Kevin, maybe it makes sense to offer your listeners this jump, because I said, I went back to school in the late 20-teens and As a part of that journey in searching for how I was going to manifest an offering in the second half of life, I was really blessed to meet a couple of entrepreneurs who were beginning, they had a fledgling concept for The Natural Funeral, but we didn’t yet have our doors open or have a brick and mortar facility. And In my sort of culminating capstone project, final semester, back at university in my adulthood, I met Dan Ziskin and Karen van Vuuren who had this idea for something called The Natural Funeral. And it was going to be in Boulder County, but again, we didn’t have the spot yet. And we opened in March of 2019 and I opened with them as an intern and we since developed our friendship into a business partnership, and now I get to operate The Natural Funeral every day. We began in Boulder County,and we’ve since opened an additional funeral home about 40 miles to the north in another county and a care center down in the Denver metro area.

Seth: But that all is important to know as we tie into water cremation and terramation, because it was sitting down with hundreds of families with radical curiosity, knowing that they had just had their moment like I had when my mom called and said dad had died, or when my mom called and said that Sam had died, or when my brother called and told me that mom had died.

 It wasn’t my time to think and be creative then. My time to be creative about what can happen in the funeralindustry and what shifts are available to us happened like… one cup of tea after the next, as I would sit down with families in our parlor at The Natural Funeral in Lafayette, Colorado. We pour tea here in the china that was my grandmother’s wedding set that when she died, became my mother’s that’s now become mine. and as I slide the cup of tea to this family and I ask them, “What would it mean for us to create something that really honored the values of your person, your husband, your child, your parent?”

I listened to that question with really a built in curiosity that wants to understand: how can I advocate for this family in a way they may not even know is possible? How can I listen between their descriptions of their person to offer them the simplest access to a funeral that will meet their needs? But maybe do that in a way that’s going to plant a seed of creativity in them to honor their person in a way they didn’t know possible.

So time after time, people would come and they would describe to me a life of environmental activism or they count their footprint with each step that they take in their impact to the planet. And then they’d say in light of that, I know I don’t want to take up ground forever, or I don’t want toxins pumped into my body that may affect a water supply. I don’t want fancy hardwood on my casket. I don’t want a marble headstone imported from somewhere. And in fact, when I think about being cremated, I don’t want to go out a smokestack and be pollution in the neighborhood, what else have you got for me? Have you got anything that matches who I am?

Introduction to Water Cremation

And so one day a person approached us and said, “have you guys heard of water cremation?” I hadn’t. And she said, I just moved from Florida a few months ago, and when my dog passed away, my veterinarian said, “do I want to have my pet cremated?” And of course I did because I love my pet. and so then the veterinarian said, “would you prefer flame cremation or a water cremation?” I’d never heard of that before. So after the vet told me about this, I said, “Oh, I want that. It sounds gentler and better for the earth. And I still get back my urn with some remains to scatter.” And so this person said it was so meaningful, why can’t we offer that to people? And so we got to doing some research, and this was back in 2019, and we found out that a method of disposition called alkaline hydrolysis had been legalized in certain states. And in fact, Colorado had passed a law allowing for alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation, and that law had passed back in 2011, but nobody was offering it. And so we got to work with a supplier of the technology, the instrument that performs alkaline hydrolysis.

And we began offering that to the consumer in response to a request that came over a cup of tea across a lit candle in a moment of a family’s curiosity about how we could match a funeral to their values. We couldn’t obviously perform the service immediately, but within, I would say it was, maybe three months, we had already made the investment to begin retrofitting our facility with this technology.

And Kevin, that was back in 2019. and now we have served hundreds of families from all over the United States, a few international families who have heard that we’re offering this thing and it resonates with them. And so they move heaven and earth to put arrangements in place so that’s what happens with their body when their time comes.

Personalized and Environmentally Friendly Funerals

Kevin Berk: The fact that it took someone else bringing that to you and, and you weren’t aware of it, even being in the industry It shows kind of a remarkable shift that occurred not only in you and, and your business, but just the, public consciousness, I suppose, around water cremation being a real, valuable, and available, and legal option.

Seth: Yeah. There there really has been an enormous shift in the consumer Kevin. I’m lucky because I got to funeral service wanting to put myself out there to advocate for the consumer’s needs, wants, shifts in an industry, but I had no idea what those needs and shifts would be. Andto some extent, it began with what can we do in the ritual space?

What can we do inside of a chapel? How can we allow a family to experience caring for their loved one alongside us? Rather than the outsourcing that occurs. a lot of times there’s a death call that comes to a funeral home. It might come from a nursing facility or from a hospital or a coroner’s office or a family’s home.

And often the question is, “how quick can you get here?” and we found that sometimes families don’t just want the body picked up and taken away, and then they don’t see it again until burial day or, they don’t see their loved one again until everybody else does, and there’s a visitation and there might be 300 other people. But the parent or the sibling didn’t get that intimate time alone with their person. So our early offerings were really how can we bring the family in to participate in the care of their person with us rather than us asking for a picture of mom, so we know what side to comb and part her hair on. What if we bring the family together and we say, Here’s warm water with essential oils in it and combs and brushes, let’s comb mom’s hair together. Should we put a braid in her hair a final time and we’ll have families telling stories about, Oh, mom loved it. I’d braid her hair and my sister would rub her shoulders at the same time. And we’d tell stories and we’re right back in that moment with a family inviting them into some style of participation in the death care that they didn’t know was possible.

So you’re right, Kevin, a lot of our early sort of creativity leaned toward how do we bring the family in, into this care participatory with us? And, and it took those candle side moments for a family to say, what else have you got?

And thank goodness! There’s a big quadrant of what I don’t know. I don’t know. And it, there’s a big section of my intelligence, right? The, I don’t know what I don’t know yet. And there’s so much that lives out in that realm that. People bring it to us as gifts and they bring it to us in their time of need and they say, what would really resonate with me right now is I don’t want to participate necessarily.

Maybe I’m too timid for that. Or I’m just not ready for that. But what I do want is my wife was a rose gardener and what I really want is a way to respect the earth and to have her body rejoin the cycle of life. Can you do that? And the person may not know that what they’re asking for is actually a technology where.

Yeah,

 If her specialty and passion was investing her time and nutrients and care into a rose garden. The truth is her whole body can become that gesture of love. And a family doesn’t know necessarily how to ask for that.They might come in and they might say, “how can I come back as a tree? How could I come back as a flower?” Or just “How can I do good?” And we connect those dots.

Kevin Berk: You were approaching it from a place of hands on customization and it was the desires of the people who you were engaging in these conversations with that then sort of exposed, well, how can we give you what you’re looking for?

Seth: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It’s a lot of, it’s a lot of curiosity. It’s a lot of active listening and it’s really,As our team comes together and we talk about our commitments toward the family with no attachment to what it is that they’re going to ask for, because they’re not necessarily the same religion or cultural background or age or they may have radically different perspectives and views and we appreciate and celebrate that. And so our team tries to advocate from a perspective of we want what you’re about to ask us for. We want to empower you to receive what you’re about to ask us for. How do we lay groundwork for you to feel safe and comfortable asking us for what you need?

The Importance of Involving Families and Children

 So we’ve tried to create some lanes for that and tried to create some space for that. And it starts with the way we welcome people over tea and we light a candle with a match. We ask them if we can bring the warmth and the closeness of their loved one into this conversation with us and then we allow their presence of their loved one and their values to inspire the funeral service that we’re getting ready to co-create with this family.

Kevin Berk: From all that I’ve been reading recently, it sounds like that process of being more involved and engaged with the person after they’ve passed it’s actually much healthier for the family members, the loved ones to be involved at that level and to often introduce children at a younger age to that. It has less of a specter of of being ominous and scary if they’re kind of there for the whole thing. that your understanding as well, or your experience?

Seth: Yeah, Kevin, that definitely matches with my experience and when people call and they’ll often ask, you know, “there’s a, a 12 year old grandson, can we bring him” or maybe the death occurred, to a person in their, young twenties or late teens, and the family wants to ask about bringing younger siblings, you know, “we’ve got a seven year old little brother, would it be okay for him to come?”

And it’s deeply personal to each family and we respect each family’s opinion. And we always encourage the full inclusion of the whole family body because the whole family is going to process this loss together. And the family is a unit that’s forever changed by the transformation of this one person going from being an active, living participant in the family body to now a living memory in the family body.

And so we encourage that engagement and participation.

 I’ll share with you a really sweet story that’s always stuck with me and it was early on, it was actually back in 2019 when I was Very new with The Natural Funeral. We didn’t yet offer water cremation or terramation. It was the very early days in 2019. We’d just opened our facility when a young woman died and that young woman was in her early twenties and had a younger sibling who was in his teens. And I’ll remember the mother asking, would it be okay if he came to see his sister this final time, and I remember Him touching his sister and recoiling at the temperature that he felt when his warm hand came in contact with her cool skin. And I remember him saying, Recoiling and saying, “that’s not my sister. That’s her body. My sister’s not here anymore.” And it was the temperature. It was touching her skin and feeling the difference in his warm skin and her cool skin that like a lightning bolt put that recognition into this young person, and into me too, and I backed away and I had a private emotional experience realizing this young person had just taught me a, an enormous lesson in reality And in processing the life of his loved one.

So it’s, it’s beautiful. And it happens a lot of different ways, Kevin.

Kevin Berk: this is just the shell, their spirits someplace else… [That’s] probably a whole other discussion, but for now, let’s get back to where we left off talking about water cremation or alkaline hydrolysis. Now, that has also been available for about 100 years.

 If that’s accurate, that it’s been around for so long, how has it been ignored for so long?

History and Technology of Alkaline Hydrolysis

Seth: Alkaline hydrolysis was patented by process on December 25th of 1888 by a man named Amos Herbert Hobson. And so alkaline hydrolysis, the technology has existed since the late 1880s. It was patented around the the hydrolization of livestock carcasses. Amos Hobson patented it as a disposition technique for cattle.

 It really remained relatively obscure and certainly not commercialized in any way for a long, long time. It wasn’t patented in terms of a human funerary application. It wasn’t until the, I believe 1990s, maybe 1980s-1990s, that research universities begin using alkaline hydrolysis for disposition of body donors for the donor programs and the first, academic implementation that I’m aware of – and I don’t consider myself a subject matter expert on alkaline hydrolysis, but I’m doing the best I can to relate to you the historical timeline as I, as I know it – in the 1980s or 90s, the Mayo Clinic began using alkaline hydrolysis systems for disposition of cadavers through their body donation program.

And, there, there was implementation around that before several companies patented products for use in commercial human funerary applications.

And there today exist only a handful of companies who make, instruments for alkaline hydrolysis. There are 28 states that have passed legislation allowing for alkaline hydrolysis, but I would share that just like in Colorado, where it was legalized in 2011, and in 2019 we began as the first operator in Colorado, there are lots of states where alkaline hydrolysis is legal, yet not offered.

Can I tell you a little bit about the technology or do you feel pretty…

Kevin Berk: Oh, of course!

Seth: …do you think your listeners are pretty tuned into that?

Kevin Berk: No, no, no, I would love to hear it. And, and I suspect they would too.

The Process of Alkaline Hydrolysis

Seth: OK, so let me give you a description of alkaline hydrolysis which is by definition a process of chemistry. It is where the body is placed in an instrument and surrounded by water and alkaline compounds in order that the soft tissue of the body is removed and converted into liquid form or hydrolyzed.

The process in our system takes about three and a half hours for each decedent. The decedent is placed into a stainless steel vessel that’s about the dimensions and shape of a bathtub. It’s about 2 feet wide by about 2 feet deep by about 7 feet long. And with the loved one, we place 12 gallons of warm water.

And then alkaline compounds are metered into the water, producing a base or high pH alkaline compound that surrounds the body. Our vessel then gently rocks, and then once the chemicals in the water are placed into the vessel with the body, on about a 15 second timer, we rock three degrees down one way, and then about 15 seconds later, we rock three degrees down the other way.

And this process of creating a wave across the body takes place on about a 15 second timer for about the next three and a half hours. This is a closed system, so there’s no emission, there’s no smoke or pollutant going out a chimney, all of the essence of the body is captured and maintained in this vessel – and what we’re left with at the end of the process, three and a half hours in, are three distinct things inside the alkaline hydrolysis vessel.

One of those things is anything inorganic from the body, a pacemaker, or a joint, or a hip, or a knee, anything that was implanted surgically in the body would survive this process and we would send that for medical recycling. Titanium, silicone, precious metals from teeth, amalgams from cavity repairs, anything that can be medically extracted and recycled is, Sent back into,a circular, recycling system.

And the other two things are the bone, the skeletal remain of the body, which is the same thing that’s in a cremation chamber following a flame cremation. People often think that they receive back the ashes following a flame cremation, when in fact, they’re receiving back skeletal remains, there aren’t really ashes following a flame cremation. It takes place at such a high temperature that the ash is actually re-incinerated until it’s just smoke. And so the cremated remains or what we’re familiar with receiving in an urn are skeletal remains. And so too, in a water cremation, we take these skeletal remains and we reduce them to a powder form in order to put them in an urn and we give them back to the family.

slide. And the third and final thing in the chamber there is the essence of the body itself,the water, the liquid remains from the process. So rather than converting, like I said, to a smoke, our body which began as 68 percent water or liquid in our body, is now, that elementally in the chamber.

And what I mean by elementally is there’s nothing scientifically measurable, which could be a pathogen or DNA or a pharmaceutical or anything that is not an element. What’s able to be scientifically measured are things like nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and calcium and magnesium.

What cannot be found are things like acetaminophen, or Seth, or a pathogen of any kind, right? So we’re elementally returned to nature in that way. So the medical equipment is recycled. The skeletal remains are returned to the family in an urn for scattering or burial or memorialization. And the essence of the body is returned to the cycle of life as a nutrient rich bio stimulant.

Kevin Berk: Seth, I’m so glad you explained that to me. I was a little unsure about the separation between the skeletal remains and the liquid essentially that was, that was created, the bio stimulant, as you say.

Introduction to Terramation

Can we talk now about the terramation, or the body composting alternative?

Seth: We can. In fact, Kevin, in this modern moment of early 2025, that is in fact, my favorite and most passionate topic, because I see the needle moving in a big, big way in the funeral industry around terramation, and there’s something about the way people connect with this process, that water cremation hasn’t quite found. I would say even flame cremation hasn’t quite found, terramation has come to the funeral consumer in such a radically well received way that I have great cause for enthusiasm that it actually is going to be the catalyst that affects the biggest change the funeral industry’s seen in the last hundred years.

So I’m ecstatic to talk about it.

Kevin Berk: So you think that, I don’t know how, how many decades from now, that’ll be the 70%?

Seth: I think it could be as soon as 30 years from now. And again, Kevin, we’re talking about the shift of a 25 billion dollar a year industry that affects 22,000 funeral homes across the country, serving 3.3 million deaths a year in the United States. And yeah, I’m calling our mark that 30 years from now, terramation can be the largest market segment in the funeral industry, because the consumers that we have walk through the door, whether they are planning ahead for something that is going to occur, hopefully a long time in the future, and they’re healthy today, they walk through the door skipping about their enthusiasm for having found this thing that they finally relate to.

We’ve had people, I’ll tell you stories of people in their thirties who’ve come in healthy as can be, no prognosis, no reason to be at a funeral home other than, “I heard about this thing in the news, and if y’all offer this, I want to sign up today so that in the unlikely event, I’m, in some accident and I need funeral services soon, make no mistake about it, this is exactly what I want for my body.” And I’ve had people in their thirties come and, stop what they’re doing, take a day off work, come tour the terramation facility, write a check. to prepay for their you know, eventual service, and skip out and go tell their friends about this happy thing they’ve just done. It is allowing people to connect with the reality that we are mortals and we are finite and that the cycle of life that existed before we who have this name got here will exist after we are, gone, at least in this iteration.

And there’s a useful thing that we can do with our remains when we don’t need them anymore. and that’s what the process of terramation symbolizes to so many people. Terramation is both much, much older than water cremation and much, much newer than water cremation.

The Future of Terramation

And I’ll explain what I mean by both of those things. Terramation is the act of composting. It is the act of returning a living, being plant, vegetable, animal that has lived, grown a body and died and in so coming back into contact with the biome that represents earth’s skin or earth’s soil layer, that body becomes digested back into the top soil of earth in a nutshell, that’s been happening here forif the planet’s 4.6 billion years, then, 800 million years later, when single cell organisms and plants began to live and die. They began to compost. Terramation is the idea of an architecture grad student from about 10 or 12 years ago, who is named Katrina Spade. And she started in the Washington area with something called the Urban Death Project. And it was a concept for composting human remains in an urban center where we might be land constrained for cemeteries, or we might somehow in a concrete jungle, in an urban empire, recognize that we didn’t come from this concrete and that our body can become earth again or become living again when we’re done with it. this concept of research began 10 or 12 years ago about how do we take this most natural thing that occurs for all living things in the world and make it reverent and sacred and contained and dignified in a way that we can bring that… call it “biotechnology” into the funeral consumer experience and relationship with death.

Natural Organic Reduction and Its Impact

And so the Urban Death Project evolved into Katrina’s company called Recompose (recompose.life), which is now one of four operators in the United States who offer a service called natural organic reduction. And natural organic reduction was first legalized so that composting, the science of composting, could legally intersect with the industry of human being dispositions.

So that began in Washington State about 2019, and now 12 states have laws that allow for natural organic reduction. Three of the operators that exist today began in Washington State and still operate there. And the other U. S. operator is us, The Natural Funeral that, that operates out of Colorado.

We began terramation in our purpose-built Chrysalis vessels back in September of 2021 and natural organic reduction, whether we’re doing it or another operator is doing it is basically the placement of one human body in a sealed and controlled vessel where the body is surrounded with organic materials. Some people use sawdust, some people use, wood chips, some people use different things. We use mainly wood chips, straw, alfalfa, and we use a biodynamic tea that has blends of certain bacteria and fungi that are accelerants in the safe, effective, and rapid decomposition of, of a human body.

And so the wood chip, straw, alfalfa, the tea and the body in our vessels, our chrysalis vessels are oxygenated. So that we promote the aerobic living, breathing bacteria, we control the temperature of the vessel because there are certain ranges where we need to heat the vessel enough that it destroys pathogens that could be with the body to make this process safe and hygienic, and we control that temperature range because different bacteria thrive and decompose at their best rates in certain temperature windows.

And we inoculate this with this proprietary tea along the way, so that we keep our biologic counts exactly where we want them to be at different points in the process. And we rotate the vessel periodically. And that rotation allows the bacteria and fungi that don’t otherwise have mobility, we aid them in their mobility.

And we also oxygenate and control temperature through rotation. It’s a very precise instrument for performing nature’s very oldest task of reuniting living beings with her body. At the end of our process, we create around 400 pounds Of what we call regenerative living soil, which is to say the organic return of your stardust to the cycle of life.

We give it to families in containers that they can carry, or we make donations to land stewards on behalf of families who wish for us to donate it.

Kevin Berk: Now is that the same, whether you’re talking about the nutrient-rich liquid from, alkaline hydrolysis and the, organic material that comes from body composting, Are both of those able to be

 used to then enrich soil?

Seth: Yes, to answer your question, Kevin, both the end product from terramation and the end result from water cremation are sterile, nutrient rich outputs that we can return to the cycle of life.

At water cremation, at the conclusion of that, the output is a sterile nutrient rich liquid. Which if you’ve got any gardeners in your listening audience, they would know that the macro nutrients are what we typically would advertise when we’re talking about fertilization, and the output from a water cremation is typically a 1-3-9 NPK, and there are other trace elements that are micronutrients that are very valuable.

But we contribute to the growth of things with the nutrients that we built our bodies out of, and the output from terramation looks like soil. And I will happily share some photos, Kevin, for you to be able to demonstrate this and share with your audience.

Kevin Berk: Excellent, thank you.

Parting Stones and Memorial Alternatives

One of the things that I noticed on your website and I’ve seen it on, on other sites, and this I think goes back more to flame cremation as an alternative, is memorial stones or parting stones, and I’d like to understand that more, cause I don’t completely, it, it seems to me to be a very attractive alternative, but I just don’t know. So maybe you can inform me.

Seth: Yeah, oh yeah, Kevin. People have really connected well with solidified remains and there’s a company that we work closely with called Parting Stone, which is expert at that. And what they do is it’s an age old dilemma about what am I going to do with these ashes or what do I do with the urn?

In fact, 26 percent of U.S. Households have urns in them. A lot of ’em are like up on the top shelf in the closet, way at the back in a cardboard box with blankets stacked on them, or in an attic, that somebody’s gonna inherit someday. The cremated remains of, you know, Aunt Somebody and…

Kevin Berk: The rest are on the mantle.

Seth: Yeah, Yeah. but it’s kind of a dilemma or even, okay.

If we’re going to go scatter these, where do we do that? And where’s it, where are we allowed to, and, you know, stand, upwind, not downwind and, there’s handling concerns, if you will. And parting stones has really gone a long way to demystify that. And in fact, make handling of cremated remains quite enjoyable, quite tactile, and even soothing.

 Parting stones or solidified remains takes the ashes or the cremated remains and uses a ceramic adhesive to create a stone from them. And then there’s like a firing process, like you would creating a glass or clay or pottery, and I’m not at all an expert at any of that, but the makeup of a parting stone is actually 98 percent cremated remains and 2 percent ceramic adhesive.

And so environmentally speaking, there’s not anything grossly, negatively environmentally impactful that I can think of about this. the process is pretty contained. It’s pretty small scale, amount that we’re talking about firing here. So the process takes the cremated remains from a flame cremation, a water cremation, Or even a terramation and takes the skeletal remains and creates those into stones. With terramation. I want to share with you that we were working in partnership with a family who has allowed us to work with parting stones at the midway point in a terramation process, there is a reduction of the bones that occurs.

I shared with you that the body is placed in the vessel, surrounded with the wood chips, the straw and the alfalfa and the tea and then our process is about a 60 day process for that, full uh, composting or terramation to occur. And at the midway of that, about 30 days in, we sift through the material.

And we collect the bones but we reduce the bone to a powder form to put it back in the soil so that it is biologically available to the microbes. And at that stage, we’re currently conducting a trial that we’re doing in concert with this family who requested it and parting stone To solidify terramated skeletal remains.

And so it is a very important process. it’s very significant to families. I’ve heard of, children carrying a stone of a parent. It generally makes 60 to 80 stones and they’ll pick up a stone every day and put it in a stone in their pocket of a parent and go to school and then come home at the end of the day and put the stone back in a loving spot.

So they do help people process. It’s just another new alternative.  

Kevin Berk: Seth, we’ve gotten through about half  of what I’d hoped to but it’s been unbelievably fascinating and I want to be sensitive to the fact that I know you’ve got a hard stop. Might we reconnect for a part II to get through the rest of it?

Seth: I think that’d be a blast, Kevin. That’d be so much fun. Yeah.

Kevin Berk: All right. Good. 

End of Part I