Growing up, whenever I had a cold my father liked to joke (à la George Formby Sr.): It's not the cough that carries you off - it's the coffin they carry you off in [1].
I remembered this when reading the following passage from Heidegger in relation to the German regular verb stellen (which in English means to set in place, or to position):
"The carpenter produces a table, but also a coffin. What is produced, set here, is not tantamount to the merely finished. What is set here stands in the purview of what concernfully approaches us. It is set here in a nearness. The carpenter in the village does not complete a box for a corpse. The coffin is from the outset placed in a privileged spot of the farmhouse where the dead peasant still lingers. There, a coffin is still called a 'death-tree' [Totenbaum]. The death of the deceased flourishes in it. This flourishing determines the house and the farmstead, the ones who dwell there, their kin, and the neighbourhood.
Everything is otherwise in the motorized burial industry of the big city. Here no death-trees are produced." [2]
Personally, I would love to be buried like King Arthur in a coffin made from a tree trunk, preferably oak, that has been split longitudinally and hollowed out by a skilled local carpenter.
Having said that, I'd be just as satisfied with any number of alternative arrangements, providing they can legitimately be described as natural (eco-friendly) forms of burial; i.e., methods of interment which use biodegradable materials and do not artificially inhibit decomposition of the corpse.
Basically, as long as my body is free to rot, I'll be happy - although, at the moment, I'm particularly keen on the egg-shaped burial pods envisioned by designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, which will have trees planted directly above them, so that decomposing waste is sucked up by hungry young root systems in search of nutrients.
In this way, death flourishes, as Heidegger would say, and this flourishing determines (in part at least) the surrounding woodland and the life within it.
Notes
[1] George Formby Sr. (1875-1921) - known as 'The Wigan Nightingale' - is acknowledged as one of the greatest music hall performers of the early 20th century. His comedy played upon northern stereotypes and his own poor health; he even incorporated his bronchial cough into his act and came up with the saying that my father liked to repeat whenever the opportunity to do so arose. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis aged 45.
[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Positionality', from the 1949 Bremen Lecture series Insight Into That Which Is, see Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 25.
This post is for Heide Hatry: Königin des Todes und eine Ausnahmekünstlerin.
