Sublime

in trade magazines like The Shroud, The Western Undertaker, and The Sunnyside.

We don’t need to stop at green or natural burial. “Burial” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word birgan, “to conceal.” Not everyone wants to be concealed under the earth. I don't want to be concealed.

we do not believe in embalming. It is not a ritual that brings us comfort; it is an additional $900 charge on our funeral bills.

In writing The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford wasn’t trying to improve our relationship with death, she was trying to improve our relationship with the price point. That is where she went wrong. It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the chance to fa

Death should be known. Known as a difficult mental, physical, and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.

We needed the cremation chambers stone cold in the morning to accommodate our larger men and women. Without a cold chamber, the flesh would burn up too quickly, going up the smokestack in thick, dark puffs, potentially summoning the fire department. People with additional body fat (such as the zaftig Mrs. Greyhound) were cremated first, while small

The idea that a nine-year-old girl can magically transform into a neat, tidy box of remains is ignorant and shameful for our culture. It is the equivalent of grown adults thinking that babies come from storks. But Joe, Westwind’s owner, thought Bayside Cremation was the future of low-cost death care. It wouldn’t be the first time California had wit

glasses, I went from thinking it was strange that we don’t see dead bodies anymore to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world. Corpses keep the living tethered to reality.