[“Reading their obituaries, I learned that they were as old as ninety-two and as young as forty-eight. One was an “accidental florist,” one a “voracious reader,” another a “skilled baker” and “serious cook.” There was a landscaper, a painter and woodworker, a beekeeper and dog trainer. One taught creative writing to homeless youth, one had a thirty-year career in law enforcement. One man, Ernie Brooks, helped to establish the field of underwater photography and was known as the Ansel Adams of the sea.
Each of their bodies was placed inside an eight-foot-long steel cylinder called a “vessel,” along with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. Over the next thirty days, the Recompose staff monitored the moisture, heat, and pH levels inside the vessels, occasionally rotating them, until the bodies transformed into soil. The soil was then transferred to curing bins, where it remained for two weeks before being tested for toxins and cleared for pickup.
Half of the NOR soil would wind up in a forest on Bells Mountain, in southwestern Washington, near the Oregon border. A composted body produces approximately one cubic yard of soil, which can fill a truck bed and weigh upwards of 1,500 pounds. For many surviving relatives—apartment dwellers, for example—taking home such a large quantity of soil is unrealistic, so Recompose offers them the option to donate it to the mountain, where it’s used to fertilize trees and repair land degraded by logging.
But Amigo Bob was a farmer, so Jenifer rented a U-Haul and brought the whole cubic yard of him home. She turned the trip into a kind of pilgrimage, stopping to visit loved ones and the headwaters of their favorite rivers. Over the next few months, their farmer friends came by and filled small containers with the soil to use on their own land. Jenifer used some to plant a cherry tree.
I asked her what it was like to have her husband home again, piled up in her driveway.
“Well, it’s compost,” she told me. “It’s still precious because it was his body. But it’s also compost.”]
The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost
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