As our Sanctuary fills with more and more of the earth’s population there is a metaphysical certainty that we will run out of room for those who entered and then departed.
There are few cemeteries in the Sanctuary. The most populous is the cluster situated in the town of Colma.
Possibly a million bodies are laid out in shallow graves. Some were dug up and moved there from San Francisco proper and dumped into vast common graves with a single monument marking the spot. Whatever the event, reason or cause, odds are you will eventually be in Colma at the end.
When San Francisco’s graves were moved, the tombstones and the huge crypts were demolished and used as sidewalk material and even as land fill in San Francisco bay.
Like it or not, while your ego says you are special, in reality you will be tossed into a distant hole and forgotten. Don’t even think your relatives will come and visit. Unless you include that $1,000 a year mandatory graveside remembrance clause in your will, you will be quickly forgotten.
Millions of tons of steel are used each year to make caskets. By the way, a coffin is a body box with a taper from the head and shoulders to the feet, while a casket is a simple rectangular box like a Snicker’s bar.
The various and really interesting chemicals used to preserve you for a couple of months are toxic to every living thing (if they weren’t then they wouldn’t preserve you even for that long). If you ever wondered why all those fermenting bodies in communal above ground mausoleums don’t stink, they actually do. The little shelves are usually tilted backwards against a wall and there at the back is a drain and a chimney. As your body ferments fluids are often blown out the top of your casket and these fluids are then drained away thanks to that slight slope to the rear of the shelf. The fluids then drip into a back channel and bottom drain.
Some mausoleums are built incorrectly and you can tell because there’s that telltale smell or even telltale stain from fluids leaking down the front wall from behind the brass name plate. There are usually two plates covering the shelf where you have been placed. The first is a sealed with a rubber gasket and is a waterproof / smell proof barrier and the second and visible one is the brass one you paid for.
Cremation is certainly theatrical and reduces you to the size of a 32-ounce Pepsi bottle but the fuel required to do that is enormous. And then there’s the problem of America’s ever increasing obesity problem and that much “unplanned” extra fuel actually detonating and launching your body and that furnace up and over any nearby buildings and onto the street beyond. It happens.
Composting is the answer. Certainly there will be significant spare capacity at the Sanctuary’s “Self Choice” centers and so their backroom hardware can be assigned to helping you on your last journey as well.
Once processed by the “Self Choice” water jet, the processed liquid can be aged like fine wine and it then becomes a perfect additive for garden fertilizers of all kinds.
What finer way to become one with the Sanctuary than become part of nature itself?