Travels of the Heart with Soil

Miles Walter Kintz has been to dozens of places in the last year, including Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, the Okefenokee Swamp, and his family’s favorite beach in Hawaii.

Some of these he never saw in his 22 years of life. After his death on December 10, 2022, and subsequent soil transformation at Earth Funeral, his family distributed the soil to over 100 people who loved Miles.

Since then, those loved ones have traveled the world with Miles, leaving some of his soil in their favorite places and new ones, places they’ll revisit and remember for a very special reason.

“Miles never belonged in just one spot,” says his mom, Laura.

On the day of Miles’ death, he hugged his mom goodbye before leaving for work. Hours later, Laura was making chicken noodle soup (Miles’ favorite mom dish) for dinner. It was the first week of rain after a long drought. The phone rang; Miles hadn’t shown up for his shift.

Laura, Miles’s dad, David, and his sister, Izzy, went looking for him on the winding country road he took to work. As the sun was about to set, they came upon someone from the fire department who told them Miles had been killed in a two-car collision. Laura is grateful they were all together as they absorbed the news; it was devastating. In a way, it was also beautiful. They held each other up while the sun slipped below the hills.

The months that followed were a blur. But one thought came clearly to Laura: she remembered Miles telling her that when he died, he wanted his body returned to nature. She later learned that he had spoken at length about this with his sister.

Laura remembered an article she’d read recently about human composting, and David got busy researching. It was perfect for their son.

Miles had been deeply connected to the natural world since he was a little kid. He was a nontraditional learner with dyslexia and dysgraphia, but he could find wonder in a handful of sand, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of oceans, forests, plants, and animals.

“He was the kind of kid who would walk up to you at a BBQ and talk to you about the local birds and dinosaurs and oysters,” says his mom. “He could sit with adults and kids and connect in truly magnificent ways.”

When Laura, David, and Izzy drove to Washington to pick up Miles’s soil, it was the first time they’d taken a road trip as a family of three. As they got close to the Earth facility, Laura says a reality started settling into her bones; this was the beginning of the rest of their lives.

Miles’s family took all of his soil, except one small container which they left to be donated to the Olympic Peninsula conservation project. Laura says that if they weren’t such an outdoorsy family who spent all their free time camping and gardening, taking the whole truckload of soil may have been intimidating. But when she laid eyes on it, she thought, we are going to grow so much with our boy. We are going to do right by him.

Miles’ soil is slowly being distributed to their community, and people have found many ways to memorialize him.

His Nonnie keeps some soil on her bedside table, in hopes that she’ll dream about him. They’ve planted trees together as a family, and Miles’s father has been gardening with the soil at home. When they hiked with dear friends in Joshua Tree National Park, they found a beautiful tree and left some there. Everyone who has taken Miles’s soil sends Laura the locations of where they’ve either claimed a tree, planted something new, or released the soil back to nature. She has built a website for the map, which is slowly filling up with travel-inspiring markers of where her beloved boy has been.

Human composting has made it possible for Miles's friends and family to grieve in many different ways, on whatever timeline feels right.

Laura says it’s also imperfect and unpredictable.Someone might try to plant something with Miles’s soil and maybe it won’t grow—that’s OK, too. Life is messy, and they can try again.

Miles’s parents and sister have taken several family trips with the soil this past year. But they haven’t visited his favorite places just yet. Going to Ecuador; Thoreau, New Mexico; and an organic farm in Mendocino, California—places that shaped him at different times in his life—would be too hard right now.

Laura says, "We'll get to each of them eventually and the many new places unknown. Processing our grief will never go away, so there is no rush. We will have this soil with us, in some form, forever, as new life continues to grow."