After eons of burial and cremation being the only options, a new process is giving grieving families — and those contemplating their own death — a new path.
back room of his company Return Home, just south of Seattle, Micah Truman walks over to what looks like an off-white shipping crate, complete with a lock on the front. “Put your hand onto it,” instructs Truman, who, with his woodsy vest and tidy appearance, looks like a genial banker on a hiking tour.
Spade, a tall, slender and earnest 46-year-old in tan slacks and sweater, is recalling that moment in the office of her NOR company, Recompose. Based in a two-story home in downtown Seattle, its folksy front porch features cheery paintings of leaves, next to a garden with a small path winding through it. Spade cheerily admits that some of her company’s work is part of that garden. “A couple of weeks ago!” she says.
Our increasingly atheistic society also factors in, as does our mobility. “We live in a very transient society,” says Tom Harries, co-founder of Earth. “People do not live where they grew up, and therefore people don’t really want headstones that no one ever goes to visit.” Jewish law and certain religious organizations, like the Catholic Church, aren’t in favor of the process , but the way Americans are growing more secular and less religious plays into the appeal of NOR, too.
AFTER OPENING A PRELIMINARY office, Spade’s Recompose eventually settled into its current location in downtown Seattle. But the company wouldn’t have the market to itself for very long. In 2020, Truman launched Return Home, followed that same year by Earth, run by Harries, a Brit who helped innovate the cremation business by making the process available online. “That didn’t take long,” Spade says, with a bemused smirk. “On a movement level, it’s really good.
Born in the United States to an American U.N. diplomat, Truman moved to Kenya as a child and lived in China for much of his adult life, eventually working as an investment capitalist. Hearing about Spade and her work, and after a conversation with his mother and her friends about whether they were open to the process, Truman found his calling: “I worked in finance. It wasn’t like this. I’m 52 and I never did anything that mattered.
Matt Baskerville, an Indiana funeral director and member of the National Funeral Directors Association, confirms that his older customers are far less enchanted with the idea than younger ones. When the composting idea comes up with what he calls his “traditional” clients, he says, “I get a lot of unpleasant looks on faces. The parents may or may not be exactly too well received of the concept, but it certainly draws the attention of the younger crowd.
For others, like Paul Sheck, neither the environment nor any religious beliefs came into play when the time arrived to say goodbye to his son Jacob. Just as he was starting college, Jacob was diagnosed as schizoaffective, experiencing both mood disorders and manic periods. Turning to drugs, he was hospitalized and wound up in a program in California; last year, he died from an accidental overdose.
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