Credit: Yin Shun

Seattle should build one of these on Elliott Bay:

1275263980-rendering2_lede.jpg
  • Tin Shun

Instead of tossing ashes into the great blue yonder, you can stow them on a floating columbarium moored to the main land. Think of it as a cruise ship, of sorts, but for permanent vacationers.

From the harbor, visitors pull up to the columbarium by boat, then set the ashes in a designated niche or sprinkle them overboard into the murky depths. Seascape at every turn provides a picturesque environment in which to pay respects and a fitting cosmic tribute to those who’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. The harborside location doesn’t get in the way of urban development plans.

The dead would very much love to be on a floating columbarium with a view of the lights (and life) of downtown Seattle.

Seattle should also consider this recent development in Tokyo:

Last year, as Bloomberg reported, city officials dropped by a colombarium outside Tokyo where families swipe a smart card to access ashes from an underground vault, turning the somber act of remembrance into something like an ATM withdrawal. Visitors can bring flowers and tchotchkes if they want, but they have to remove them as soon as they leave. And if they’re too lazy to make the trip, they can always pray in front of an image of the urn online.

The Japanese are the masters of the post-human condition.

And what about this new but very cold Swedish approach?

In eco-conscious Sweden, it’s now legal to freeze bodies in liquid nitrogen, then shatter them. (This is supposedly gentler on the environment than burning bodies, if somewhat disturbing to family members.)

Something in the culture of the Swedes has prepared them well for life after God, life in an indifferent universe.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

20 replies on “The Future of Death in Seattle”

  2. I don’t want any resources wasted on me/my body after I die. I won’t be around to give a damn. Throw my dead body in a landfill for all I care.

  4. Hi Charles. Please, please don’t write “the” Puget Sound. It grates on the ears of us old-timers like saying “The Manhattan” would (unless of course you speak of the cocktail). You are allowed to write “The Puget Sound area” however.

  7. I have a better idea. Instead of wasting resources building this monstrosity, just chuck everyone’s ashes directly into the sound.

  8. Man! That is AWESOME, I always wanted to be shattered to death or liquefied by my favorite song, Now I can be shattered if I die of cancer or some bullshit.

    I hope nobody ever builds that platform thingy, SO TACKY. If you want to reinvent funerals, try a less mini-mall approach.

  9. Building & maintaining a boat to merely keep ashes sounds like a colossal waste of time & money. Surely the shatter method is the way to go for PNW people. Or leave my freshly dead body on the Olympic Peninsula to feed the bears. The new polar-grizzly hybrids. (Ok, ok, in the North Cascades or Upper Canada.)

  10. The dead don’t give a rat’s patootie about being “on a floating columbarium with a view of the lights (and life) of downtown Seattle” – they’re dead.

    Now, the living who put their deceased’s ashes on a floating columbarium might enjoy it, but my guess is the weekend sailors on Elliott Bay wouldn’t much like getting smacked in the face with some dead person’s carbonized remains every time they turned tack.

  14. The Swedish option was mentioned in Mary Roach’s book, “Stiff” (which is a really fun read). One of the reasons why it is so environmentally friendly is because it uses a small percentage of the energy to destroy the body that a crematorium uses. Plus the process does not destroy DNA so you can bury the remains and incorporate your loved one’s DNA in a garden so that it becomes part of a tree, etc.

    Thank gawd religion and their rules are becoming obsolete where a lot of the ideas about funerals come from. Open casket funerals are creepy IMO. I have never understood them, but it was part of a Catholic rule not to destroy the body. Huh? Bury me au natural please! Hell, let the coyotes eat me…I don’t give a rip.

  16. The freezing and shattering idea would make for some very interesting pinata-themed funerals. The family could stuff the body full of frozen treats.

  19. Well, I suppose the one advantage of it is that we wouldn’t be wasting as much land with our rotting corpses but it seems like a huge waste of resources.

    For the freeze and smash method I wonder what they do with the gooey paste that’s left over after the smashed bits defrost.

  20. Wouldn’t the shattered body thaw into a puddle of slop really quickly? A BIG puddle of slop? What happens to the slop?

Comments are closed.