Note: This was originally a Tumblr post of mine that went viral. I really like what I wrote and decided to preserve it here as well.
I’m working on clearing out some old tabs, and ran across this piece from last fall. The short version is that your gut microbiome and other microbes that accompany you in a series of symbiotic relationships throughout your lifetime persist even after you die. While you might assume that these bacteria and other little beings would perish along with you once you’re no longer warm and living, it turns out that they shift gears upon your death, being part of the massive effort to return your remains en masse to the nutrient cycle.
There’s honestly something rather poetic about that. Here you’ve spent a lifetime being the center of a holobiont–a sort of miniature, migratory ecosystem. And these many millions of life forms that you have given safe harbor to for thousands upon thousands of their generations are among the funerary vanguard caring for your remains after you’re gone. They pour forth from their ancestral lands–the gut, the skin, and other discrete places–and spread out through even the most protected regions of your form.
And then, just as you constructed your body, molecule by molecule, from a lifetime of nutrients you consumed, so do these microbes go through the process of returning everything you borrowed back to the wider cycles of food and growth and life and death. The ancient halls where their ancestors lived in relative stability are now taken apart in the open air, and their descendants will disperse their inheritance into the soil and the water through the perpetual process of decomposition.
I’ve always wanted a green burial, and I find it comforting that when my remains are laid in the ground, they’ll be accompanied by the tiny ecosystems I spent a lifetime tending, and who will return the favor by sending my molecules off in a billion new directions.
