Our Last Best Act

"Planning for the End of Our Lives to Protect the People and Places We Love." An excerpt of Mallory McDuff's book. Plus: an open thread on our own end-of-life planning...

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May 10, 2024

Readers,

Today I’m sharing an adapted excerpt of Our Last Best Act, Mallory McDuff’s wonderful book about making end-of-life plans with our loved ones and the earth in mind. I thought it would be a good subject to both read about, and to have you weigh in about. So I’ve combined her essay with an Oldster Friday Open Thread, and I invite you to weigh in in the comments. Tell me:

How old are you? Do you have a will? Have you made concrete end-of-life plans and made your loved ones aware of them? How elaborate are they? For example, is there a playlist for your memorial? Are you plans conventional? Or do they include sustainable, earth-friendly options like green burial, body composting, or body farming?

From Our Last Best Act: Planning for the End of Our Lives to Protect the People and Places We Love.

By
Mallory McDuff

I hope to be around for a long time,” my father said, “but I’ve written my funeral plan so we’re all prepared.”

That morning, he’d cycled to the Bee Natural Farm in our hometown of Fairhope, Alabama, where he volunteered in exchange for organic vegetables. My dad was sixty-two but could pedal faster than his four middle-aged kids. He had gathered us at our childhood home to share his goal of having a burial that relied on family and friends, not a funeral home.

After almost four decades of marriage, he was learning to live alone. My father, a retired IBM salesman, wanted to make sure he—and we—were ready for his death when the time came. From my seat in my mother’s comfy reading chair, I could see two single-spaced pages of typed instructions in his hands.

“First, I’d like my body to rest in the bed under Mom’s quilt,” he said. “Then you can wrap me in linen tablecloths and place me inside the casket. I’ve talked to my friend Jeff, who’ll build my pine casket if I can’t do it myself.”

My father, a retired IBM salesman, wanted to make sure he—and we—were ready for his death when the time came. From my seat in my mother’s comfy reading chair, I could see two single-spaced pages of typed instructions in his hands.

With smile lines etched on his cheeks, Dad reminded us that embalming—what he called “filling a dead body with chemicals”—wasn’t required by any state. Nearly a decade ago, my parents had purchased two plots at the nearby cemetery, adjacent to the post office. After we were grown, they trained for their long-distance hikes by putting bricks in their backpacks and walking through suburban woods to the burial ground with its expansive oaks.

My dad had studied his cemetery contract. Like many small-town resting sites, this one didn’t require a vault, a 2,500-pound box of reinforced concrete that lines a grave to keep the ground level and maintain ease of landscaping. Many larger lawn cemeteries require a vault, which can cost thousands of dollars.

He wanted his body to stay at home until the time came for a twenty-four-hour vigil at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, followed the next day by the burial. Dad requested plenty of shovels nearby, so old and young could fill the grave with soil. And he’d written a playlist for his bluegrass gospel band, starting slowly with “Amazing Grace” and ending with the upbeat rhythms of “I’ll Fly Away.” He hoped his band wouldn’t be around when he died, as the bass player and vocalist were several years older than him.

“Use some of the money we’ve saved on the funeral to hire some good local musicians,” he said.

The level of detail felt suffocating.

At thirty-eight, I wasn’t ready to plan for his death, not when I needed him as a grandparent to my children, as a parent to me. A month before our conversation, Dad had lost his cycling partner and soul mate when my mom, who was only fifty-eight, was hit by a teenage driver. They’d cycled together to an early yoga class to practice sun salutations and savasanas and then biked to the farm, where my father planned to work for the rest of the morning.

My mom took a detour to retrieve the warm gloves she’d forgotten at yoga, but she never returned to the farm to pick up the fresh produce for her bridge club. At their house, the dining room table was already set with her white linens, sterling silver, and cloth napkins. My mother was killed, her neck broken by the harsh collision of her body with a vehicle driven by a young man. Sometimes I imagined the impact—hard metal on soft skin, a bike and the body of my mother, my emotional cadence, thrown to the ground.

A month before our conversation, Dad had lost his cycling partner and soul mate when my mom, who was only fifty-eight, was hit by a teenage driver. They’d cycled together to an early yoga class to practice sun salutations and savasanas and then biked to the farm, where my father planned to work for the rest of the morning…My mom took a detour to retrieve the warm gloves she’d forgotten at yoga, but she never returned to the farm to pick up the fresh produce for her bridge club.

I was still adjusting to my father’s daily phone calls and the crumbs on his kitchen counter, which my mom would have wiped clean in a heartbeat. After supper when I visited, my dad would invite me to play cards, a proxy in my parents’ nightly game of rummy to decide who had dish duty. He counted cards. She didn’t. And of course, my mother usually won.

My father anticipated a sustainable death as a part of a vibrant life. When I was in middle school, Dad built a prototype of his own casket, and my mom kept her jewelry in the pine box the size of her palm. He wore a suit and tie to sell computers to hospitals and universities but chopped wood on the weekends to heat our house. My parents hiked the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and most of the Continental Divide Trail, aiming to leave no trace in the wilderness, and he aspired to the same ideal in his death.

Planning to hike the 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail, they spent months preparing ready-to-cook, one-pot meals in Ziploc bags and packing more than 700 breakfast and candy bars for snacks along the way.

In a column for the local newspaper, he wrote about the mixed reactions to their upcoming hike: “Our children seem proud of us, and our preacher says that’s something he would like to do,” he said. “Our parents, on the other hand, wonder where they went wrong, and the bridge club wonders why anyone would want to do something like that.”

In Alabama, my parents raised four children in a 1970s suburban house at the end of a cul-de-sac. During the forty days of Lent, our family gave up trash—aiming for a waste-free household as a spiritual discipline. With an enthusiasm that could bleed into self-righteousness, my father was hell-bent on conservation of resources and money. My mother was an ally who modified his visions to make the plans more practical. She was our glue and our grounding.

Two years after my mother died, I picked up the phone when my sister called with news I couldn’t fathom. My father, unbelievably, had been hit by a teen driver while cycling to the farm. He’d been wearing a bright reflective vest and riding on the shoulder of a wide street, safety precautions he’d adopted after my mother’s death. But his neck was broken, and his life ended. After this hit-and-run incident, caused by a driver under the influence of drugs, my father’s body was taken to the coroner’s office and then to the funeral home. While he wasn’t at home in his bed as he’d wished, the funeral director agreed we could prepare his body for burial.

The time had come to put his plan in place.

Taking deep breaths in the foyer of the mortuary, my sister and I entered the refrigerated room, where he lay on a metal gurney, covered by a plastic sheet. I ran my fingers along the same pattern of wrinkles on his face that now mark my cheeks. He had only a few scratches on his body. We sang the gospel lullaby “All God’s Children Got Shoes” and began to wrap him in the linens ironed by Mom’s hands.

My father anticipated a sustainable death as a part of a vibrant life. When I was in middle school, Dad built a prototype of his own casket, and my mom kept her jewelry in the pine box the size of her palm. He wore a suit and tie to sell computers to hospitals and universities but chopped wood on the weekends to heat our house.

With the solid weight of his limbs against my chest, I lifted this compact, lithe man as my sister held his other side. We carried his whole life in our hands and placed his body into the wooden box, built the night before.

Our friend Jeff transported the casket in the back of his pickup truck to the church and then the grave. He’d used old sailing lines from the basement to fashion the straps for pallbearers to lower the pine box into the earth. At the cemetery, my oldest daughter stood by the gravesite with a shovel taller than her head while my dad’s band played “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

His plan had given us traction to move together through his death, a map of what to do next. But when I looked at my six-year-old daughter Maya, shoveling dirt into a hole in the ground, my face flushed with heat and tears in the summer sun. Four months pregnant with a baby who would be named after my mother, I sweated grief and fear. I didn’t know how to be present for my children in the absence of my parents. How could I prepare my daughters to hold both life and death at the same time?

Left, Mallory McDuff's parents, Larry and Ann; Right, McDuff's daughters Maya and Annie Sky at the gravesites of her parents.

In my forties, I’d made a will and directives, but my final wishes for flame cremation didn’t seem to fit in my fifties, especially given the dire climate emergency. I knew about the environmental impacts of conventional burial with embalming and a vault, but I was learning about more sustainable options ranging from conservation burial grounds to human composting, which could help protect the land around me for the future.

More than ten years after my parents’ deaths, I opened the file cabinet in my bedroom on the small college campus where I teach environmental education in North Carolina: I took out the folder containing my will, cremation directive, and advance care directive. It was like trying on a pair of jeans from high school. My sister was listed as the health care power of attorney, although she’d moved from nearby Atlanta to Seattle. I’d completely forgotten my instructions for a party after my funeral with beer and barbeque from Okie Dokie’s Smokehouse, where I used to take my kids for mac and cheese and ribs. (It claimed to offer “swine dining.”)

Since that time, my two daughters had grown from toddlers to teens, and my hair had turned a soft gray like my mother’s. Ten years earlier, I’d opted for flame cremation for its cost and convenience, but I’d since read about the fossil fuels needed to burn a body for several hours into the neat bag of ashes and pulverized bones. The ease of cremation still appealed to me, but I’d learned about more sustainable choices to leave the earth in the same way I’d tried, however imperfectly, to live on. As I held the documents, I saw the possibility of planning for death as my last best act for my children in a warming world threatened by more severe disasters, from blazing wildfires to destructive hurricanes.

After revisiting my wishes, I wanted to feel more prepared for the unknowns ahead. So I told my twenty-one-year-old daughter Maya about the option of keeping my body at the house until the funeral.

“Ew, Mom,” she responded, “No thanks.”

She explained, “If your body was in the house, I would feel like it was haunted. I couldn’t sleep.”

My fourteen-year-old Annie Sky had a more direct response: “I will sleep in a Motel 6 if that happens. I can pay for it myself.”

They couldn’t imagine spending a day in the presence of my dead body, and I didn’t blame them. Clearly, my journey to revise my own wishes as a single mother would need to involve my children, for now and evermore.

More than ten years after my parents’ deaths, I opened the file cabinet in my bedroom on the small college campus where I teach environmental education in North Carolina: I took out the folder containing my will, cremation directive, and advance care directive. It was like trying on a pair of jeans from high school.

My daughters have watched daffodils bloom in December due to warming trends in these Appalachian mountains. In one week, my brother’s house in Alabama was threatened by a hurricane while my sister’s family was trapped inside due to wildfires in Washington State. For the sake of my children and the hundreds of students I’ve taught over 25 years, I decided to take a one-year journey to explore options for my final wishes with climate, community, and cost in mind.

During that year, I visited funeral homes and crematories, volunteered at a conservation burial ground, explored neighborhood cemeteries, shopped for pine coffins and linen shrouds, researched human composting, learned about water cremation, and even visited a “body farm” that accepts human remains for the study of decomposition. My goal was to revise my final wishes in dialogue with my daughters, who would be charged with the logistics of my death.

A longtime friend, the Rt. Rev. Brian Cole, the Episcopal bishop of East Tennessee, helped me consider my journey in broader terms.

“How should we die in order to heal ourselves and the planet?” Brian asked. “We’re talking about resurrection in the time of climate crisis. We know the planet will probably survive, but we may not. The legacy we leave with our deaths will have impacts for generations to come.”

I thought of my father’s wishes. What would he say to me now? This journey became an expression of my parents’ love. It was also a prayer that our children’s lives could continue on this Earth when rising global temperatures threatened a safe existence. I’ve heard the climate crisis described as an intergenerational relay race. In matters of life, death, and earth, my search felt like one way I could carry the love of my parents to strengthen my children and my students along their way.

Adapted from OUR LAST BEST ACT: Planning for the End of Our Lives to Protect the People and Places We Love (Broadleaf Books, 2021) by Mallory McDuff. Elements of this essay first appeared in The New York Times.

Okay, your turn. Tell me: