05-17-2011, 08:30 PM
i like this burial at sea idea! i'm actually going to check this out.
more at link, from Mother Jones:
http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/...ial-at-sea
If you're intent on going into a watery grave, you'll need to enlist someone like Brad White, a 52-year-old licensed ship captain who has been depositing bodies in the Atlantic since 2005. His company, New England Burials at Sea, based in Scituate Harbor, Massachusetts, does an average of six full-body burials a year and has 25 "pre-need" requests on the books. People who choose to be buried at sea, he says, "typically have a love for the ocean, do not want to be cremated, and prefer 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' They want to become part of the Earth again via our oceans."
To help them realize this, White offers burials that he says are not only historically authentic but environmentally sound. "About five or six years ago, someone kept asking me, 'Can you do a full body?', and I kept saying no, since I didn't want to put a casket in the ocean." He turned to nautical history for an alternative. Traditionally, 18th and 19th century American and British sailors who died at sea where wrapped in a sailcloth shroud with a few cannonballs or leg irons as ballast and then sent overboard. This inspired White to create the Atlantic Sea Burial Shroud, a canvas body bag that comes in seven colors, with your choice of piping or fringe. The shroud zips up, so there's no need for the traditional final stitch sewn through the nose—a superstitious precaution meant to rouse the comatose. For ballast, White sells custom-made 37.5-pound cannonballs. "Barbell weights work well, too," he says.
Besides honoring nautical tradition, White says, a shrouded body has less impact than a corpse inside a coffin—the standard for the Navy, which offers full-body burials for veterans, provided the bodies are embalmed and sealed inside a metal casket with a few holes drilled in it. White prefers not to handle embalmed bodies. "We're into clean waters and clean oceans," he says. His system is designed to be as biodegradable as possible. Grommets in the shroud "help the body sink because air comes out. And when a body decomposes, body gases come out. It also allows sea life to go in and do what sea life does. What's left after everything degrades are the cannonballs, and they make their own reef."
![[Image: medinal.jpg]](http://www.shoestringacres.com/medinal.jpg)
more at link, from Mother Jones:
http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/...ial-at-sea
If you're intent on going into a watery grave, you'll need to enlist someone like Brad White, a 52-year-old licensed ship captain who has been depositing bodies in the Atlantic since 2005. His company, New England Burials at Sea, based in Scituate Harbor, Massachusetts, does an average of six full-body burials a year and has 25 "pre-need" requests on the books. People who choose to be buried at sea, he says, "typically have a love for the ocean, do not want to be cremated, and prefer 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' They want to become part of the Earth again via our oceans."
To help them realize this, White offers burials that he says are not only historically authentic but environmentally sound. "About five or six years ago, someone kept asking me, 'Can you do a full body?', and I kept saying no, since I didn't want to put a casket in the ocean." He turned to nautical history for an alternative. Traditionally, 18th and 19th century American and British sailors who died at sea where wrapped in a sailcloth shroud with a few cannonballs or leg irons as ballast and then sent overboard. This inspired White to create the Atlantic Sea Burial Shroud, a canvas body bag that comes in seven colors, with your choice of piping or fringe. The shroud zips up, so there's no need for the traditional final stitch sewn through the nose—a superstitious precaution meant to rouse the comatose. For ballast, White sells custom-made 37.5-pound cannonballs. "Barbell weights work well, too," he says.
Besides honoring nautical tradition, White says, a shrouded body has less impact than a corpse inside a coffin—the standard for the Navy, which offers full-body burials for veterans, provided the bodies are embalmed and sealed inside a metal casket with a few holes drilled in it. White prefers not to handle embalmed bodies. "We're into clean waters and clean oceans," he says. His system is designed to be as biodegradable as possible. Grommets in the shroud "help the body sink because air comes out. And when a body decomposes, body gases come out. It also allows sea life to go in and do what sea life does. What's left after everything degrades are the cannonballs, and they make their own reef."