In 1985 I was a naive thirty-nine-year-old woman on the verge of losing touch with reality. I found myself in a psych ward under the care of an unethical psychiatrist who, using drugs and “recovered memories,” convinced me I had sacrificed babies and committed other heinous acts during my years in a satanic cult. None of it was true, but for years I told myself that it was my fault.
Suffering alone is a hard place to be. I was comforted to read Erin Wood’s essay “Athens, Revised” [August 2024] and to know others have also played the self-blame game. I’m happy to say that most days I now know the difference between fact and fiction.
I enjoyed Derek Askey’s interview with Suzanne Kelly on green burial [“Returning,” August 2024], but I noticed that, even as they discussed other cultures, Kelly didn’t mention Jewish burial customs. Many Jewish burial traditions align with green burials and are based on the same premise: to return the body to the earth from which it came.
I appreciate Suzanne Kelly’s focus on ceremony and environmental concerns in burial practices. I especially noted the comparison of green burial with composting, but I did not see any mention of aquamation, also known as water cremation. Aquamation, like composting, does not require the use of land, and, unlike cremation, it does not produce air pollution. Instead water, temperature, and alkalinity are used to speed up decomposition.
It is nice to see a growing number of alternatives to caskets and fire cremations. Every little bit helps to pull us out of our carbon tailspin.
Jewish tradition has long called for burying the dead body in the same way the nascent green-burial movement does. I write about this in Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth, with two caveats: First, like most non-sectarian cemeteries in the US, many Jewish cemeteries require grave liners that create barriers between the body and the earth, even though Jewish law is explicit about a direct return to the soil. As a concession, grave liners are sometimes perforated so that the body has some contact with the earth. Grave liners are meant to prevent the sinking of the ground once the body and container have settled and, later, decomposed. Second, while green burial practices invoke the sense of returning at the heart of Jewish burial, the green-burial movement is also rooted in practical sustainability aims—namely, cutting carbon emissions, protecting natural resources, and conserving, preserving, and restoring land.
Aquamation goes by many names, including water cremation, biocremation, flameless cremation, resomation, green cremation, and alkaline hydrolysis, the scientific term I use in Greening Death. In alkaline hydrolysis a dead body is placed in a pressurized, heated chamber filled with an alkaline water solution that, in a matter of hours, reduces the body to liquid and bones. The bones are crushed and returned to the family in the same manner as flame cremation. The liquid is disposed of through the sewer system. This has been deemed safe in the states that allow it, but the process has not been around long enough for any long-term studies, and some folks are turned off by the idea that part of their loved one will go down the drain.
Alkaline hydrolysis is objectively greener than flame cremation, using significantly less energy and releasing no mercury or carbon into the air. And green burial is about embracing death-care practices that are less harmful to the earth. At its best, though, green burial also helps us remember that we, too, are a part of nature. I’m not sure to what extent alkaline hydrolysis can help recover such knowledge.
I recently decided to take the first steps toward ending a decade-long marriage. There was no abuse, no affair, but the isolating malaise became unavoidable as the years went on.
To help me through this time, I have been turning to Kate Osterloh’s essay “New Life” [July 2024]. What a relief to realize that I am not alone. The future is uncertain, and I worry about my young children, but I know the hunger inside me will allow me to, as Osterloh writes, “reach for what is.”
And Stacy Boe Miller’s essay “Sex in the In-Between” [May 2024] gives me hope that someday I’ll regain the courage to be vulnerable not only with myself but with other people.
Kate Osterloh’s courage in following her inner hunger is stunning. I especially related to her connection to Mary, mother of Jesus. I suffer from bipolar disorder, and in the middle of my most-recent depressive episode, I remembered Saint Dymphna, the patron saint of mental illness.
Dymphna was the daughter of an Irish noble family. She fled to Belgium to escape her father’s sexual intentions, but he found her and beheaded her. After she died, miracles started happening in the town, and victims of mental illness found healing.
During the darkest days of my depression, I set up an altar to Saint Dymphna and sat at it every morning. I believe she accompanied me though that dark time.
“New Life” is a one-step-at-a-time, risk-taking lark—and a perfect reminder that I can handle the next five minutes, and the next, and the next.
Maureen Beitler’s photo essay “To the Bone” [July 2024] is brilliant. Her images put me in mind of the masters whose photographs were published between 1940 and 1990, but Beitler’s work also has a contemporary style and approach that instantly transports me into the scene.
“A Seat at the Table” [interview with Aviaja Lyberth Hauptmann, by Wyatt Willians, July 2024] brought back memories of my own exposure to Arctic Native food preparation: During the 1970s I spent two weeks with an Inuk family at Pond Inlet on Baffin Island to learn about their way of life and culture. During the day I traveled with hunters and attended cultural-sensitivity training sessions. Then I would spend the night in my host’s home. One evening I returned to find several elder Inuk women chatting and enjoying a meal together. They sat on the kitchen floor around a seal, slicing pieces from the carcass with a traditional ulu knife and eating them raw.
The Sun has featured an amazing series of cover photos lately: a gentleman with his yard-sale-purchased neckties [Gloria Baker Feinstein, April 2024], a boy wearing his sister’s tap shoes [Lisa Whiteman, May 2024], an intimidating softball pitcher [Andy Hann, June 2024], and a Greenlandic soccer dribbler [Carsten Egevang, July 2024]. I keep these masterpieces on display until I’ve finished the magazine, pausing often to admire and imagine.
I loved Rhea Smith’s Readers Write piece on “Uniforms” [June 2024], in which she describes herself as a “big, loud redhead with wild glasses” and how her “magical” custodial uniform turns her into an impromptu hero. I’m probably the opposite of Smith in personality and appearance, yet I want her as a friend. Not only is she smart, strong, and capable, but she also has a wonderful sense of humor. Perhaps most important, she is gracious and forgiving.
I just had the privilege of spending a week with my granddaughter Eleanor. She is three years old and lives 1,500 miles away. Frederick Joseph’s poem “Making Luxury Out of Flat Soda” [News & Notes; June 19, 2024] left me hoping that something of my visit will stay with Eleanor as Joseph’s experience with his grandmother stayed with him.
You can read “Making Luxury Out of Flat Soda” in this issue.
