Pushing Up Daisies

Our traditional ways of dealing with death are changing, with Earth-friendly concerns sparking a surge in eco burials.

- Sally Blundell

He was an avid sailor, a talented dancer, a devoted father and an entrepreneurial fireworks professional whose gunpowder-fuelled chemical concoctions lit up New Zealand skies in dazzling displays of sound and colour.

When Anthony Lealand died last June at age 71, following surgery-related complications, he went more gently than many into Dylan Thomas’ good night. His body was washed and dressed by his two children, placed unembalmed in a macrocarpa coffin made by son Nicholas in the shape of a boat, then lowered into a shallow grave on a gently sloping lawn overlooking Lyttelton Harbour.

Eight months later, few signs remain at the new eco-burial site in the Diamond Harbour Memorial Gardens Cemetery. No headstones, no permanent markers. Just some native grasses, a cluster of young coprosma, the smell of pine, the sound of birdsong, the glint of the sea on which Lealand loved to sail.

“I’d much rather think of my father at the beach,” says Nicholas. “He wasn’t very spiritual or sentimental about his body. We know he is in the ground just there, but he isn’t in his physical body – he is in his life’s work, his children. The soul is this elaborate metaphor to mean all the things that are outside your physical body, and that part of him continues on. His business is still running, his friends still tell his jokes – all that is still there, but his body is just compost.”

NO SURPRISES

So, what’s needed for a good death? As palliativecare doctor Janine Winters writes in