Welcome to the 100th episode of Pushing Up Lilies, I want to thank you for listening in each week! On this special episode, I am sharing with you the many diverse and fascinating ways we handle the remains of the deceased. From traditional burials and cremations to more unconventional methods like sea burials and donating bodies to the FBI Body Farm, I will guide you through the options and the reasoning behind each choice. Join me as I explore the science, rituals, and personal decisions that dictate how we honor our loved ones after they pass. Discover the meticulous processes involved in these methods and gain a deeper understanding of the final journey our bodies can take. Whether it's becoming a memorial reef in the ocean or contributing to forensic science, each path offers a unique perspective on death and remembrance. Tune in for an enlightening discussion on the many ways we lay our loved ones to rest. * Listener discretion is advised.
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly True crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:30 Hey, guys, this week, we are celebrating my 100th episode!
0:36 It's pretty amazing and I could not have done it without my great friend Jody who helps me tremendously.
0:46 I appreciate her so much.
0:48 I knew nothing about podcasting, and she has taken me from knowing nothing to knowing a little bit more but not near as much as her super excited.
1:00 The Patreon account should be up and going soon and the subscription box will soon be starting.
1:07 And I would love if you would like to be a part of that initial group of people who get that subscription.
1:15 I would love to hear from you if you could shoot me a private message on my Facebook page, pushing up lilies, or you can email me at Julie at pushinguplilies.com and I'll be glad to give you the information.
1:27 There are probably 25 of my special listeners to have the opportunity to get that first box and give me their opinion on the packaging and what I can do to make it better before I roll out the real deal.
1:43 So this will be like a prototype type thing around 25 people is what I'm looking for.
1:49 I can let you know the pricing and all that once you reach out to me if you're interested.
1:54 But again, 100 episodes, so thankful that I have gained listeners and that there are people out there who actually want to hear my country hick Texas voice.
2:07 I appreciate y'all so much.
2:09 And I'm excited for what this next year has in store.
2:14 Wanted to share kind of a funny story with y'all.
2:19 You know, we make jokes in our career field just to kind of keep our spirits up somewhat.
2:25 We don't ever mean it disrespectfully, but this I read and is really hilarious.
2:32 You know how some people are jokesters, and they just love to see people laugh.
2:38 I love people like that.
2:39 They're infectious to be around.
2:42 This man was one of those people.
2:47 It sounds like Shay Bradley was a military veteran and he passed away in October of 2019 bagpipes were playing in Dublin as he was being buried.
3:02 And suddenly there were loud thumps heard along with pleas that said…
3:11 Hello, hello, hello, let me out… It's dark in here.
3:15 Everyone at the burial as you can imagine was horrified, come to find out it was a final prank that Mister Bradley wanted to play on his friends.
3:28 And again, he was well known to be a prankster and I'm sure everyone loved him for that.
3:35 But his daughter Andrea helped him record the messages before his death and he even sang a bit of Neil Diamond's.
3:44 Hello again, his daughter said that he would have loved the attention it got and videos of it that were taken went viral.
3:53 I have not viewed those yet, but I can imagine that it is hilarious, and he probably just wanted to break up the sadness of, you know what everyone was feeling in the funeral.
4:05 You always hear those jokes about people saying, you know, at my funeral, I'm going to throw or have someone throw a bunch of flowers and whoever catches it is next, you know, kind of like at a wedding reception.
4:18 Anyway, I thought that was funny and super cute.
4:20 I'm sure that it made his friends laugh because it sounds like he had a great personality.
4:27 Wanted to touch on the weather in Texas here too.
4:29 Y'all, it is ridiculous.
4:31 And I guess to celebrate my 100th episode, it was 100 degrees yesterday.
4:37 So hot, so humid.
4:40 We were literally melting, and we talked to some family members in North Dakota, and it was 77 degrees and I was so jealous.
4:48 We will be there in July and I'm so looking forward to a little bit cooler weather.
4:55 I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to that.
4:58 It was 95.
5:00 Today, we are having a lot of scenes outdoors.
5:04 A lot of people found in their vehicles that aren't running with no air conditioning.
5:10 A lot of people who are living in RV’s with no air conditioning, people who are dying outside.
5:18 A lot of heat related deaths, I'm sure already this year a lot of them haven't been ruled on.
5:24 But today the body's surface temperature on my deceit who was outside was 117.4.
5:31 So you can only imagine in the sun, I feel so bad for all these workers that are doing the roads and the bridges and all the construction cause there's always construction in Texas on the roadways.
5:45 These guys are out there in the sun with the sun beating down on them all day.
5:51 I just feel bad for them.
5:53 I mean, I know they're making decent money but they're not making anywhere near what they should be having to put up with the Texas conditions.
6:01 Hats off to those guys, construction workers, even firefighters and police officers, y'all are outside all day.
6:08 I don't know how you do it, especially in all your heavy equipment.
6:12 I literally was sweating like crazy today.
6:15 And I mean, I had on short sleeves and a fairly light set of scrubs, and I was still super, super hot, you know, we were talking at the office the other day about how many different ways there are to preserve your body or, you know, cremation versus burial, all those types of things.
6:36 And so I decided that it'd be kind of fun.
6:40 I don't know what our idea of fun is.
6:42 It would be fun to kind of go through some of the different things that people do after death.
6:50 Cremation has surpassed burial as the most frequently chosen option that's been since 2016.
6:58 One reason I'm sure is because of the cost, it's about $1500 versus probably 6 to 10,000 for a burial.
7:09 And you can have a viewing at the funeral home before you're cremated.
7:15 There is a chance that people could see you before the cremation takes place.
7:21 Of course, that's always, you know, I guess depending on the condition of someone's body, whether or not the family wants to view them or have family or friends view them.
7:31 But burial has been our culture for a long time.
7:36 And I can remember years ago, my grandmother passed away and my parents for some reason, I think it was because they didn't want to have her embalmed back then.
7:46 I guess you didn't have to be embalmed if you were buried within 24 hours.
7:50 And so we quickly had her graveside service after her death and that was apparently so she wouldn't have to be embalmed, but that has been our culture over a long period of time.
8:04 But the body goes through changes long before anyone is placed in the coffin.
8:11 When the heart stops beating and the blood stops circulating the cells become acidic and the chemical reactions that initiate that cell breakdown start.
8:25 But decomposition can last decades.
8:27 And it's a series of chemical reactions that change our body composition.
8:33 I know that we have disinterred or dug several bodies up before because we've gotten some new information on the case, and we needed to do toxicology or take hair samples.
8:45 And it's always fascinating to me to see the changes that the body goes through after having been buried for 10 years or 15 years or even 2 to 5 years.
8:56 Just to see.
8:57 Number one, I mean, are the coffins actually leak proof?
9:01 You know, are you getting what you pay for?
9:03 I mean, who knows?
9:05 I mean, we're not going to habitually dig everybody up just to make sure that there's no water inside.
9:12 That being said, there are several different levels of coffins or caskets that you can purchase.
9:19 Some are said to be waterproof.
9:21 And you know, I'm sure there's all kinds of selling tactics just like there are with vehicles.
9:28 But after being buried, just four months, cell molecular integrity is gone, and the tissues continue to rot.
9:38 Now, the process of tissue liquefaction and disintegration can take up to 50 years.
9:47 I mean, think about that.
9:48 That's a long time for decomposition to take place.
9:52 By the time the body's been buried, 100 years, very little is left.
9:57 The bones might not even be intact.
10:00 By year 80 collagen breaks down and bones become extremely fragile and there may be only fibers from clothing or even teeth left.
10:13 And that's what we're talking about after 100 years.
10:17 During cremation, when they burn the body, it produces carbon dioxide and takes a lot of energy.
10:25 Over the years, people have been trying to think of other ways to preserve the body or other things that they can do with the body to keep from using all that energy and producing that carbon dioxide corpse.
10:40 Composting isn't a completely new idea.
10:44 But in 2019, Washington was the first state to legalize this natural organic reduction, which is composting.
10:53 This involves turning the person basically into soil.
10:58 The body is put in a container with wood chips, straw and alfalfa and then microbes then decay the flesh.
11:08 Seven weeks later, the remains are converted into a cubic yard of compost, which can be returned to the family.
11:18 That's kind of a different idea.
11:20 It's a little bit different than cremation, but they turn into soil because they decay with the wood chips.
11:29 And the alfalfa cryonics was born a long time ago, that was back in 1967 when a professor of psychology who died of liver cancer was the first body to be cryo-preserved.
11:45 Cryonics has advanced.
11:47 Since then, blood is replaced with mixtures of an antifreeze compound and preservatives and the body is preserved in liquid nitrogen.
11:58 The goal is keeping your memories intact for some reason, they are hoping that the brain remains intact enough after being preserved this way that they would be able to download a person's personality into robots in the future.
12:18 There might be a robot that looked like you, and that talked like you, and that acted like you, which is kind of weird to think about.
12:25 I mean, I'm sure there's a movie somewhere out there like that.
12:29 They say that's going to be possible in 50 to 100 years.
12:32 Who knows?
12:33 That sounds kind of creepy to me.
12:34 I don't know if I would want to be around when that happens.
12:38 But as of 2017 cryonics were used to preserve 250 bodies.
12:45 They're basically placed in a deep freeze.
12:48 Now, a biologist spent 20 years perfecting a greener way to dispose of bodies where the corpse is put in a prom, which is a machine, and it is cryogenically frozen in liquid nitrogen.
13:05 Once the corpse is frozen, the prom shakes the body until it breaks down into tiny pieces about one millimeter in length.
13:16 Piles of remains are then freeze dried and then leftover liquid is removed, metal bits are removed, and the remains are placed in a biodegradable container.
13:28 Then it's buried in a shallow grave.
13:30 The topsoil will break down the urn and get the nutrients.
13:35 This is not yet legal, but this is a greener way to dispose of bodies where basically they are shaken down until they break into tiny pieces.
13:47 Many of you may have heard of water cremation, which is also called aquamation and that is when you put the body in a high-pressure chamber.
13:58 Now, the chamber is filled with water and lye, which we all know what that does and it's heated to 200 to 300 degrees.
14:06 12 hours later, everything but bones are a brown liquid, and the bones are ground up and the remains are given to the family.
14:16 This process was patented back in 1988 and it's a cheap and quick way to dispose of animal carcasses.
14:26 In 2003, Minnesota became the first state to legalize this.
14:31 But as of 2015, it's only an option in 15 states, but the Mayo clinic uses it regularly.
14:41 That's water cremation kind of interesting as far as ways to take care of the body once you're gone.
14:49 One of the most interesting things to me is plastination and that's one way to actually become art by donating your body to science.
14:59 I don't know if y'all ever heard of body worlds, but it's an exhibit that does this.
15:04 I have seen it whenever I lived in Houston, I went to the body World's exhibit in Houston.
15:09 And it is truly amazing if you ever have the opportunity to go.
15:13 It is definitely a sight to see and interesting that all these people have actually donated their body to that cause so that they could be placed on exhibit for us to look at.
15:24 The inventor, Gunther Von Hagen spent years experimenting with this technique.
15:30 It was patented back in 1978 and 13 years later, he for the first time plastined an entire body.
15:39 This is where water and fat in the body tissues are replaced with a reactive polymer like silicone rubber or epoxy or resin.
15:50 The interesting thing is it takes about 1500 hours, which is about a year to complete the process from start to finish.
16:00 Quite a bit of work goes into it.
16:02 As of 2018 plastined body parts or bodies were used in 400 medical institutions.
16:11 This was originally developed as a teaching tool.
16:14 The first Body Worlds exhibit went on display in Japan.
16:18 In 1995.
16:21 The bodies are like art and are even sometimes apparently sold.
16:24 Now, I don't know about that, but that may be just in Japan.
16:28 I don't think you can do that in the US, but I'm not sure if you donate your body for this cause though you have no control over what happens.
16:37 I know that many of the displays are like before and after lungs of a smoker versus a nonsmoker.
16:44 I guess you don't really know what part of your body may be put on display.
16:49 But of course, no one would know that it was you.
16:52 17,000 people have signed up to be plastined and the inventor is one of those 17,000.
17:00 He plans to have that done to his body after he passes away.
17:05 I know y'all all heard of the body farm and the FBI started the body farm in 1981.
17:13 The first person donated their body that year and that created the body farm.
17:18 All you need is one.
17:20 You can still donate in Knoxville, Tennessee and there are six other locations to contribute to research but your remains when you do this are not treated nicely.
17:33 I don't believe your family gets money for this.
17:35 Actually, you are left to decompose in various stages.
17:39 Sometimes they remove your clothing, sometimes you're partially clothed.
17:44 Sometimes you're wrapped in plastic, placed in a car, placed in the trunk of a car, placed in a garbage bin.
17:51 Some bodies are even submerged in water.
17:55 And the purpose of this is to take notes to help with real life crime scene scenarios.
18:01 But people are constantly asking to donate.
18:04 And again, you don't know what's going to happen to your body.
18:07 You don't know what they're going to do, but you are basically left to rot in different scenarios so that they can kind of see how long it takes a body to break down and what kind of bugs we expect to see at what stages.
18:20 And so that's how we know a lot about what we know regarding decomposition.
18:26 In 2019, a body donation company in Arizona turned out to be a lab of freaky people had donated bodies and the owner was making money selling dead bodies for all sorts of things.
18:39 He would sell it to the military for them to put in blast sites to see what certain ammunition would do to the body.
18:48 The FBI also found a cooler filled with male genitalia and a small woman's head sewn to a large male torso hanging on a wall in this guy's house in Arizona.
19:02 Who knows?
19:03 I mean, people probably thought they were donating for like the medical school to learn.
19:09 And then in actuality, he was selling parts and doing just freaky things.
19:14 And this all of course is separate from organ donation, you know, in organ donation.
19:21 And I think what a lot of people don't understand is to donate an organ.
19:24 You have to be left on life support.
19:27 The organ has to continue to work until it can be transplanted if someone dies at home.
19:34 And two hours later, the medical examiner comes, it is too late to donate organs.
19:39 Now you can donate heart valves and tissue corn is there's a time limit, but there's also other rules that you have to go by as far as you know, no communicable diseases, you can't have hepatitis, you can't have HIV.
19:54 Another way is burial at sea.
19:57 It's a tradition for many fishermen and sailors, Neil Armstrong and Osama Bin Laden were famous sea burials.
20:07 Legally, anybody can do this.
20:09 But there are a lot of rules and regulations.
20:13 The Environmental Protection Agency has to be told your plans a month in advance and you have to be placed three miles offshore and it must be in deep water.
20:25 There are only three acceptable burial locations, and you have to have a license to do it and you have to get a doctor's note saying that you weren't diseased or you didn't have any kind of communicable disease that could spread to other people because you're being placed in the water and other people are being exposed to body fluids or whatnot.
20:49 It's not common, but it's getting more popular.
20:55 The Navy offers full body sea burials for veterans, but the corpse has to be sealed in a metal casket.
21:02 I think I read that one new England company puts the body in a canvas bag and attaches a cannonball to, to it.
21:10 So it will sink to the bottom.
21:12 Another really interesting way is sky burials, and this is done by Tibetan Buddhists.
21:20 They perform sky burials, which is where a monk acts as a body breaker and takes a butcher knife to the corpse.
21:27 This sounds horrifying, but they're ok with it there.
21:31 That's just kind of what they do after this body breaker cuts you up into pieces.
21:37 Vultures swarm and tear at the flesh within 15 minutes.
21:42 Nothing is left but bones.
21:45 It's considered a bad omen.
21:47 If anything is left behind and then they smash up the bones and mix them with butter and flour and feed them to the vultures as well.
21:56 The birds are considered angels, and they say that they are taking the souls to heaven.
22:02 And so that's, I guess why they believe that that's a good thing.
22:07 Even though it sounds horrifying to cut up your family members and have them eaten by vultures.
22:11 It's actually a draw for tourists.
22:13 And so China tried to pass a law to stop people from watching, but they came anyway.
22:19 If you can only imagine, I know we've spoken before about cannibalism, and we all know the story about Jeffrey Dahmer.
22:27 But cannibalism has been practiced around the world and endo cannibalism means when you are eating deceased people from your own tribe, like necessarily like in your family or your family members.
22:42 This is a known expression of respect.
22:46 The corpse could start decaying though by the time the funeral took place and the people that eat the corpse are selected, the people that are selected might not actually enjoy that.
23:00 I mean, could you imagine just eating a person in general would be enough for me to puke.
23:04 But if I had to eat like a decaying corpse, especially somebody that was related to me.
23:10 No, not going to happen.
23:13 The four people of new guinea ate the body and brain of their dead, but a deadly molecule in the brain of the corpse was consumed.
23:24 And then that molecule spread and infected a lot of people.
23:28 This was outlawed back in the fifties and sixties.
23:32 But as food becomes scarce, it's scary to think that consuming our dead might be a source of protein.
23:41 You know, we talked earlier about cremation by 2035 80% of the people will be cremated and the ashes can be placed in a biodegradable pod which feeds a tree.
23:54 Eventually, this could be done with whole bodies where they can be buried and then when they decay and break down, it feeds all those proteins into the soil.
24:04 Now, humans are carbon and so are diamonds.
24:07 Ashes can be compressed and turned into a diamond.
24:10 There are several places that do that as well and they can be mixed with paint and artwork can be created.
24:18 They can be used to paint.
24:21 You can shoot your ashes into space; you can spread your ashes on a coral reef.
24:28 You can mix them with paint and have them in a 3d painting and your ashes can even be made into bullets.
24:36 There are a lot of interesting things you can do after you die if traditional burial and cremation is not for you.
24:44 One thing to remember though is if you donate your body, you could end up as a test subject.
24:50 If you go to the medical school, they might practice putting implants in you, they might practice a leg amputation.
24:58 I mean, they're going to do different things.
25:00 You have to be ok with the possibility of first year medical students cutting you up.
25:06 When you do this, you have to decide in advance to make it easier for your family because it's not an easy decision for them to make.
25:14 And because they don't charge anything to cremate once your body is used for educational purposes, a lot of families turn to this.
25:24 They don't accept just anybody though, 70% of the people who apply for body donation are rejected.
25:32 And again, you can't have hepatitis, you can't have HIV, you can't even be overweight.
25:38 They do have to be somewhat picky about who they accept.
25:43 And sometimes even the manner of death might exclude you.
25:47 20,000 doctors graduate medical school every year.
25:51 The demand for willing dead people to allow them to be used for these purposes is high many times before the students will do whatever it is they're going to do to the body.
26:04 They will offer a moment of silence to honor the person.
26:09 You can also donate specifically to become a human skeleton.
26:13 And I thought this was kind of interesting, I know, in high school, back in science lab, we had a skeleton hanging and we always thought it was so cool, but you can remain standing for decades.
26:24 Maxwell Museum of Anthropology will take almost anyone.
26:29 And actually, what they're going to do is make a human skeleton out of you to be used for, again, educational purposes, probably at a medical school.
26:38 They'll piece your bones together and make a skeleton out of you.
26:43 These can also be used for research.
26:45 They do pretty much take anybody because if you have, like metastatic cancer that spreads to the bones, they want to be able to study that to see how that affects the bones.
26:56 They are not as picky because it has a lot of scientific value.
27:01 If you have osteoporosis, you know, they want to be able to study the effects of osteoporosis on the bones and also to look at how cancer affects the bones when cancer metastasizes.
27:13 They also can use people for crash tests, which to me is horrifying.
27:17 I would not want my dead body or the body of any of my family members to be placed in a vehicle just to see what kind of damage can be done to it when you run it into a bridge going at 110 miles an hour.
27:29 But I thought that was interesting that they do that.
27:32 Sometimes there's some options.
27:35 Again, if you are not open to the standard burial or cremation.
27:41 If you're a daredevil, you might want to be a crash test dummy.
27:44 If you have cancer and you want to donate your body for research or for education, that would be a good option.
27:52 Anyway, I thought y'all might want to hear all that.
27:54 It's different to see all the different things that you can do.
27:58 I would be horrified if, like someone made a diamond out of someone and gave it to me and then I lost it, or it got stolen from me.
28:05 That would be horrifying.
28:06 I do have a friend one time we were at the airport; she accidentally grabbed a suitcase that wasn't hers.
28:13 And when she got it home, it had someone's mother's ashes in it.
28:16 You never know what you're going to run across.
28:20 Yeah, so there's that.
28:22 But anyway, again, if you are in Texas, I'm sorry, you're having to endure this heat with me if you're not and you're somewhere cooler.
28:30 I am extremely jealous.
28:32 Although I would like a day at the pool so that I can get a little bit of color to me because I am so pale and pasty right now.
28:39 I just don't get enough sun.
28:41 I'm always recording my podcast or working or going to school.
28:45 But anyway, I hope y'all have a great week.
28:47 Thank you for celebrating my 100th episode with me and I look forward to talking to you next week again, reach out if you're interested in the prototype of the cereal box from pushing up lilies.
29:02 And we would love to have you take part in that initial prototype to give us your input on items that we could possibly use, and also packing and just different things.
29:13 Shoot me an email Julie at pushinguplilies.com if you have a story idea and I'd love to hear from you.
29:19 Have a great week.
29:20 Bye.
29:22 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
29:25 If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple podcast.
29:33 This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public.
29:36 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at PushingUpLilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.