The World Without Us

Bacteria left in the intestinal tract are soon aided by natural enzymes that become active as a dead body’s pH changes. “One of them is the same as Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. They break down our proteins so they’re easier to digest. Once we stop, they kick in, embalming fluid or not.”

Embalming was uncommon until the Civil War, when it was used to send fallen soldiers home. Blood, which decomposes rapidly, was replaced with anything handy that didn’t. Often, it was whiskey. “A bottle of scotch works fine,” allows Mathews. “It’s embalmed me several times.”

Arsenic turned out to work even better, and was cheaper. Until it was banned in the 1890s, it was used widely, and heavy arsenic levels are sometimes a problem for archaeologists examining some old U.S. graveyards. What they generally find is that the bodies decomposed anyway, but the arsenic stayed.

After that came today’s formaldehyde, from the same phenols that produced Bakelite, the first man-made plastic. In recent years, a green burial movement has protested formaldehyde, which oxidizes to formic acid, the toxin in fire ants and bee stingers, as yet one more poison to leach into water tables: careless people, polluting even from the tomb. The eco-burialists also challenge why, after we intone sacred words about dust returning to dust, we ambivalently place bodies in the ground, yet go to extraordinary lengths to seal them away from it.

That sealing begins—but only begins—with the casket. Pine boxes have yielded to modern sarcophagi of bronze, pure copper, stainless steel, or coffins crafted from an estimated 60 million board feet of temperate and tropical hardwoods, felled annually just to be buried underground. Yet not really under the ground, because the box into which we’re tucked for good goes inside another box, a liner usually made of plain gray concrete. Its purpose is to support the weight of the earth so that, as in older cemeteries, graves don’t sink and headstones don’t tumble when caskets below rot and collapse. Because their lids aren’t waterproof, holes in liner bottoms allow whatever trickles in to drain away.

The green burial folks prefer no liners, and coffins of materials that quickly biodegrade, like cardboard or wicker—or none at all: unembalmed, shrouded bodies are placed right in the dirt to start returning their leftover nutrients to the earth. Although most people throughout history were probably interred this way, in the Western world only a handful of cemeteries permit it—and even less, the green headstone substitute: planting a tree to immediately harvest the formerly human nourishment.

The funeral industry, emphasizing the value of preservation, counsels something rather more substantial. Even concrete liners are considered crude compared to bronze vaults so tight that in a flood, they pop up and float, despite weighing as much as an automobile.

According to Michael Pazar, vice president at Wilbert Funeral Services of Chicago, the biggest manufacturer of such burial bunkers, the challenge is that “tombs, unlike basements, don’t have sump pumps.” His company’s triple-layered solution is pressure-tested to withstand a six-foot head of water—meaning a cemetery transformed by a rising water table into a pond. It has a concrete core, clad in rust-proof bronze, lined inside and sheathed outside with ABS: an alloy of acrylonitrile, styrene, and butadiene rubber, which may be the most indestructible, impact-and-heat-resistant plastic there is.

Its lid is affixed with a proprietary butyl sealer that bonds to the seamless plastic liner. The sealer, Pazar says, may be strongest of all. He mentions a major private testing lab in Ohio, whose reports are also proprietary. “They heated it, hit it with ultraviolet, soaked it in acid. The test report said it will last millions of years. I’d be uncomfortable with that, but these guys are Ph.D.s. Imagine some time in the future when archaeologists only find these rectangular butyl rings.”

What they won’t find, however, is much sign of the former human to whom we devoted all the expense, chemistry, radiation-resistant polymers, endangered hardwoods, and heavy metals—which, like the mahogany and walnut, were wrenched from the Earth only to be stuck back in it. With no incoming food to process, the body’s enzymes will have liquefied whatever tissues bacteria didn’t eat, mixing the results for a few decades with the acidic stew of embalming juices. That will be yet another test for the seals and ABS plastic liner, but they should easily pass, outlasting even our bones. Should those archaeologists arrive before the bronze and concrete and everything else but the butyl seal have dissolved away, all that remains of us will be a few inches of human soup.