After-Orts #100

Though you may never have attended a funeral, two of the world's humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we're at fourteen.
     -- Caitlin  Doughty, in her appalling and fascinating book, Smoke Gets in your Eyes (& Other Lessons from the Crematory)


If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture-- that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
     -- Edward Abbey, quoted in Smoke Gets in your Eyes


And she died. At that moment,... [o]f her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.
    In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.
    Released from  their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days' time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants.... 
   Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of her atoms. A year later, babies contained some of her atoms....
   Several years after her death, millions of children contained some of her atoms.
     -- Alan Lightman, Mr g