A Perennial Peace

“It makes me feel immortal,” says Kimberly, 65. After learning about human composting, Kimberly signed up for a prepaid plan. She loves the idea of becoming soil and wants to protect her family from the financial burden of arranging a funeral some day.

After becoming soil, Kimberly will join the rhododendrons, camellias, lemon trees, and Japanese maples that grow in her yard. As nutrient rich soil, she will continue to nurture land she has loved for 18 years and counting.

Kimberly is healthy and active. She plans on living for many more years. After retiring from a career in law, Kimberly started driving a tour bus through wine country, from San Francisco to Napa and Sonoma. She’s full of knowledge about the region, and she loves to share her passion with visitors. In her spare time she plays pickleball and gardens.

Her backyard is dense with leafy plants. Kimberly’s husband is a committed composter. All of their food waste gets buried in holes he digs around little stone paths. As such, their coastal soil is rich with worms and everything grows quickly. Kimberly and her husband love spending time out there, enjoying the beauty of the garden and the ocean breeze.

Since discovering human composting, Kimberly tells everyone about it. She knows a lot of people want to be cremated and have their ashes spread in a special place. But she thinks it’s so cool that people can become soil now, instead. She wants more people to know about this option.

“Ash is so filthy—and it puts a lot of bad smoke in the air. I don’t like the idea of all that ash out there,” she says. But she says becoming soil, “makes me feel one with the Earth.”

Kimberly has a very lighthearted way of discussing her end-of-life plans. But that wasn’t always the case.

When Kimberly was seven, she remembers a week of being completely consumed and terrified by the idea of death. Every night, she’d wake up crying. After consecutive nights of these meltdowns, her mother told her a story about a soldier who was mortally wounded and met a genie. The genie could grant him one wish, so the dying soldier asked for immortality.

This seemed like such a gift at first. He survived his injury and went on living and never aging. But then everyone the soldier knew and loved got older and died. He lived for hundreds of years and grew very tired. The story made Kimberly feel better.

Even at her young age, it helped her understand that aging and death aren’t so scary when you’ve had a chance to live a long, fulfilling life.

When Kimberly says human composting makes her feel immortal, she doesn’t mean immortal like the soldier.

“Children are like blooming flowers,” she says. At the end of her life, she hopes to nurture some of the beauty that goes on living without her.