OK. So I was sitting down by this one river today .....

............ with my kid. Just sitting there watching the water churning in the little dam. And I was looking across the river at the graveyard on the other side. And I got to thinking.

So I was telling her "Look at that. Nothing but death. Huge headstones, fancy coffins, toxic chemicals leaching into the ground and into the river and families still living that probably can't afford the debt of it all. It's all death. It's not natural. It shouldn't be that way."

I don't like it.

So I was bouncing ideas off to my kid.

What if instead of being pumped full of chemicals, imprisoned in a box and buried under an ugly carved stone...what if everyone was sent to an oven and cremated. And then instead of the void spaces of land with headstones looming over the toxic chemicals... what if there was a place of life. A garden.

It would be a place of life. It would be a place to walk and pick and eat and tend to life. It would be a place to remember the ones who are gone from us. It would be a place where the life that is gone is given back to the earth to nurture new life to be. A garden.

We could all still be buried there. Our families could pay a fee to mix our ashes with compost and plant a fruit tree or a small plot of flowers or a small plot of food. And there could still be very small stone markers or even monuments but they would have to belay beauty and life. Statues? Head busts of people smiling? Carvings? Something to remind us of how full of life they were when they still walked among us.

This garden of life would be born out of death. It would be a community garden. Anyone could come to walk the paths, pick the fruit, eat the food, smile with cherished memories. People with no one buried there could come to pick and tend to the garden if they wanted to and reflect upon the cycle of life and death.

All would be welcome. None would be turned away. A place of sharing, of community, of stopping to listen to the words of someone with tears and sitting with them to tend their plot of life in memory of a death until their tears fade away. A garden of nurturing both the dead and the living.

I wish to see a place like this. I hope that one can come into being. I really think my idea has possibilities. My kid thinks so too.

So since I came up with the idea I told her that's how I want it to be for me in thirty something years. Send me to the oven. Get my ashes in a shoebox. Don't let them talk you all into one of those ugly overpriced urns that no one wants to be stuck with. And stick me under a fruit tree...maybe with some plants around it. I'd like it that way ... well, not that I'd know any different but I like the idea of it.

It's weird the stuff a person thinks about when looking at a graveyard. I like my idea though.