In this week's episode of The Matcha Guardians, we dive into a profound discussion on end-of-life care with Seth Viddal, co-founder of The Natural Funeral in Lafayette, Colorado. Seth shares his personal journey into the funeral service industry, which began through his own experience of losing close family members and the realization that the conventional funeral services did not adequately serve his family's diverse needs. This realization spurred him to create a funeral home that offers personalized and meaningful services that actively involve families in the process.
Seth's approach to funeral service is unique and deeply compassionate, focusing on family empowerment and ecological responsibility. He emphasizes the importance of personal involvement in the care of deceased loved ones, offering options that allow families to be directly involved in the preparation and memorialization of the body. This can include activities such as bathing and dressing the deceased, which can be therapeutic and meaningful for grieving families.
One of the standout offerings of The Natural Funeral is water cremation, also known as alkaline hydrolysis. This environmentally friendly alternative to traditional flame cremation uses a small amount of water and alkaline chemicals to reduce the body to its basic elements. This process consumes less energy and results in a liquid essence that can be returned to the earth as a bio-stimulant, enriching the soil without causing pollution.
Seth also introduces us to the concept of natural organic reduction, also known as terramation or body composting, which is another eco-friendly option offered by The Natural Funeral. In this process, the body is placed in a chrysalis vessel with organic materials like wood chips, straw, and alfalfa, and inoculated with beneficial bacteria and fungi to accelerate decomposition. Over a few months, the body is transformed into nutrient-rich soil, which can be used to nourish plants and return life to the earth.
Throughout the episode, Seth explains the ecological impacts of traditional burial and cremation practices, highlighting the environmental benefits of the alternatives they offer. He also touches on the legal aspects and growing acceptance of these practices across the United States.
Seth's dedication to providing meaningful, eco-conscious end-of-life services is truly inspiring. He and his team at The Natural Funeral are paving the way for a more personalized and environmentally responsible approach to funeral care, resonating with families who seek to honor their loved ones in a way that aligns with their values.
The Natural Funeral: thenaturalfuneral.com
Matcha S2 Seth Master
Speakers: Elara Hadjipateras, Diana Weil, Jon Gay, & Seth Viddal
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Voiceover: Welcome to The Matcha Guardians Podcast, brought to you by matcha.com. Here we focus on the biggest trending health topics of our time, featuring the greatest and upcoming wellness advocates. Now here are The Matcha Guardians, licensed dietitian, Diana Weil, and medical journalist, Elara Hadjipateras.
Diana Weil: Hello, and welcome to this week's episode.
Elara Hadjipateras: This week we have an amazing guest with us, Seth Viddal, who is one of the co-founders of the Natural Funeral Team in Lafayette, Colorado. They're doing super exciting things. I know that normally when people think about the topic of death and end of life care, it's not very exciting, but Seth makes it super exciting. So, we're happy to have him here today. Thank you, Seth.
Seth Viddal: Thanks Elara. And Diana, I'm real excited to talk with you all today.
Diana Weil: Seth, I think that just looking at you, you just have this positive, bubbly spirit, and yet, you're kind of in this dark — well, I mean, I guess what some might say is sort of a dark, sad business, but I'm just really curious about your path that got you here.
Seth Viddal: Thanks for asking. And I do find a lot of joy in being able to serve families with the options that we can offer them today. My path to funeral service started as a funeral consumer. So, in the mid-2010s, in three consecutive years, I buried my father, my younger brother, Sam, and my mother. While my parents, it’s natural that a parent dies before their children, their deaths were sudden and not expected. And then, of course, the death of my younger brother happened out of the natural order and was a shock to all of us. But what we found was these three radically different people were kind of lumped into the same category of the style of funeral service that was offered to my family. And so, for these three real diverse people we had the same funeral kind of cookie cutter over and over, and it cost a lot of money. And the care of my father and my brother and my mother was outsourced to people who didn't know them in life. And they did what I consider to be a very good and respectful and professional job, but it wasn't particularly connected to my family's path of grief. It was very much like paying someone to do a task that our family was incapable or unknowledgeable of performing. And that left a hole in me. And it really started to create questions in me about, are we offering families all that we can in this end-of-life moment? This is such a transformative moment for families where this love that we're actively giving to someone in our daily circle has no place to go. And it's replaced with a deep grief and can the funeral experience itself be something that begins to help families, not fix that grief, but participate in that grief and dive into that in a way that is really meaningful to the family. And in my experience, it was not, as a consumer. So, I was fortunate to meet up with some folks who wanted to build a funeral home that aspired to be that to families. And we've created that in Boulder County, Colorado with the opening of The Natural Funeral back in 2019.
Elara Hadjipateras: I have not been to a funeral in several years. The last funeral that I went to, it was a family friend. The husband unfortunately passed away of an opiate overdose. And I remember it was open casket. It was the first open casket I had ever seen. And it was really hard and really shocking. And it felt very cookie cutter, that would be a good word to describe it. It felt very impersonal. There was lots of photos of the deceased kind of in this … it felt like we were in this random carpeted room. Everything was very sterile. You're only really in that place once. You know how you were saying, Seth, you're in this room where you hold a lot of the sermons right now that feels amazing, and there's this great energy. It was the opposite when I stepped into that room. It was this vacuum, you could just kind of feel the air go out. So, could we just kind of take a back step here and think about, before you got involved in doing end of life care and funeral homes, what is the stereotypical funeral home process? So, when your parents passed away, how did you know which funeral home to go to? Did you just Google it? What was the process that you went through?
Seth Viddal: Generally, in society, we either go with the funeral home that's closest to our house, or we use the funeral home for our parents that we had previously used for our grandparents. And so, generations ago, the decision was made about what's the family local funeral home. And so, we often just go back because those people gave us some service before that it got the job done or it was good enough, or they had nice tea and cookies, but we go back for some reason, which is that they checked the box that it met the state requirements. And there are some real practical things that has to be done when a death occurs. And some of them have to do with the memorial and the interaction of bringing the family back together with their loved one to create something really meaningful. And some of them are just a practical matter of, “Hey family, are you going to choose cremation or burial?” Because it's necessary that we do something with the body.
Jon Gay: I've also got to imagine, Seth, that in someone's time of grief, it's a very high stress moment for them. And to not have to think about what they want to do, to know that, for example, the town that I grew up in, every Jewish funeral was done at the Goldman funeral home, and I had a relative pass recently, and now it's Goldman's son that still runs the Goldman funeral home. Okay. That's just where we go. That's one less thing we have to think about in the midst of dealing with life insurance and paperwork and wills and trusts and all that. It's like, set it and forget it. One less thing I've got to worry about. Right?
Seth Viddal: That's right. But when we categorize something as significant as demarking the loss of someone who was our most beloved, it's maybe a disservice to that process to take the easy choice. And so, what we find is yet sometimes people come to us, like a family that I met with following the tragic loss of a child. And that family is pausing for long enough, just a moment in their grief to decide whether they want to outsource that service to someone who's going to embalm and chemically prepare and preserve that body for a displayed style viewing, maybe in an open casket. Or the family decides, do I want to be the one that brushes my child's hair for the last time? Would it be better to ask a funeral professional to sanitize their body? Or would it be more impactful if I took essential oils, and I bathed their body? A professional can sanitize; a family can bathe. A professional can serve; a family can love. And so, when we outsource that step, I have a deep regret for the families who miss the opportunity to see what can be present for them when their hands and their heart are the ones guiding the care of their person. And so, that's the type of thing that sort of step one, that's one of the things that we enable here. And we're going to talk today throughout the course of our conversation about a lot of things that are ecologically informed. But what we're talking about right now is the aspect of our service that's family informed. And it's a natural progression of me telling you how I got into the business. It was because of the detachment from these services for my family. A benefit of creating your own funeral home is that you get to sort of set every aspect of the business to your own values. And it happens that the partners that I work with today and myself are very ecologically minded. So, we sort of serve on the pillars of community service, family empowerment, and environmental activism. And when you bring all those things together, families who similarly lived a life of environmental stewardship and camping and the families that drove the hybrid cars and composted their kitchen scraps and reused materials in their lives, those are the ones who look at the conventional funeral industry and say, “Where do I fit into that?” Because it seems like I'm on a conveyor belt for you to put some chemicals and embalm my body and then surround me with a bunch of product and metal caskets and vaults and things that I wouldn't have picked in life. So, why am I going to pick that kind of service for my body in death? It's a meaningful experience of letting every family come to our funeral home, lighting a candle, pouring them a cup of tea, and then understanding how can we serve you in this moment. And I don't have any baggage that I'm bringing with me to that question. I have curiosity I'm bringing with me to that question. And I have the experience as a funeral consumer of knowing that there's something beautiful out here for you, if you'll work with us in this dance.
Elara Hadjipateras: Do you feel like you're attracting a younger clientele? So, people are actually seeking you all out before they’re may be at their end of life and they're kind of thinking, “Hey, I'm going to plan ahead because this is actually something to be really excited about that I want my family involved in.” So, it's not this thing that kind of falls in your family's lap where they think,
“Oh my gosh, what do we do? We've lost them. We want to do what's best.” But are a lot of people planning through you, I guess, in advance?
Seth Viddal: Elara, people are planning with us at a rate of about five to one. So, for every family that I'm serving who has a loved one who has died, there are five families who will serve that day by putting a plan in place for the future. And this is probably not going to make a lot of sense, necessarily to your listeners at this moment in the podcast because they don't know yet about some of the things that we offer that are different from the conventional industry, but stay tuned listener because when we get there, you're going to understand why 20% of our clients actually come to us from other states. So, the model is not just breaking with a crack in it, it's shattering, and it is an onrush of young people and environmental stewards. It's activists, it's people whose death occurs in New Jersey, and they know that if they go to the same funeral home that they've gone to generationally, their body's going to be embalmed and put in a cemetery and watered for a hundred years and the grass will be mowed. And as a revolutionary act they're saying, “I will not tolerate that when I die. Here's my documented plan and it's going to be a positive to the earth.” And never mind the fact that if that means that I have to put my body or hire or contract for someone to move my deceased body from this state to the next state, because what I want is not yet available to me locally from a legislative perspective, then consider this my final march, my final act of environmental stewardship is it's this important that the laws move in this direction. So, it is amazing the youthfulness and the geography that we're reaching. I love sharing this story. It happened just about two or three months ago, our pre-planning person who sits down. It's not uncommon for them to meet with folks in their 60s and 70s. That happens all the time. And sometimes octogenarians come in and they're deciding, “Okay, I'm going to go ahead and make my plan.” She was sitting down with this young couple, I thought they were here probably applying for a job or curious. And when they left, I said, who are those folks? And she said, it was a married couple, they're both 39 and they both prepaid for their funeral plan. I said, “Oh no. Is one of them ill and they both want to make a matching plan?” She said, “No, they're both going to run a marathon next week. They're in the best shape of their lives, but they're not going to go one more day without saying, we found it. Eureka, if there's a way to return our body to the cycle of life, this is it. And we're signing up.”
Diana Weil: That's so funny because I was just thinking that, I was like, “I got to tell my husband that this is what we're doing.”
Elara Hadjipateras: Right. This is what we need to be doing. I'm like, I don't even have a life insurance, but I feel like I should have this plan.
Diana Weil: Seth, can you back us up though? And kind of what you were just saying, what is a green burial? What is a natural funeral? What do you do?
Seth Viddal: So, this is kind of an insensitive way to put this. But when you walk into a lot of conventional funeral homes, the choice that you're offered is smoking or non-smoking. Would you like your body to be cremated or put in a casket and put the ground?
Jon Gay: I just got that, that took me a second (laughs).
Seth Viddal: The multiple choice is a A/B question. You don't generally get offered something that connects with you in a way, unless one of those two options does. What we do when folks sit down here is we're actively listening to what's important to them. And so, when we opened our doors in 2019, we had a client who came in and said, “Hey I just relocated from Florida.” And they were here making their plan ahead of time. And at that moment it was for a green burial. And they said, “In Florida, I heard of this thing that's called water cremation. And they're not offering it at funeral homes. My veterinarian told me about it. And when our beloved family dog died, they gave us an option between a conventional flame cremation and a water cremation. And they told us the water cremation was better for the earth and it cost about the same amount, and we were hooked.” And they said, “Have you all ever thought of doing something like that, a water cremation for people?” And my mind was blown. And I said, “I have not, not only have not thought of it, I've never heard of it, and I cannot wait to do some research on this.” And that was in early, I think March, of 2019. And in August of 2019, we did a water cremation on the first-
Elara Hadjipateras: Wait, let's roll back the clock. Explain to me just what is a water cremation?
Seth Viddal: A water cremation is also called alkaline hydrolysis. And water cremation uses a small amount of warm water and alkaline chemicals to reduce the body to its liquid form, rather than in a flame cremation, your body is converted into smoke. There are three forms of elements. You're either a solid, a liquid or a gas. And in our human body form, we are a little bit solid, our bones and our hairs and some parts of us. And we're about 65 to 70% water or liquid or blood or we're made up of solid and liquid. And in a flame cremation, the process is to reduce your body to a gas. And what remains in an urn is actually the skeletal remains. The bone remains that are not incinerated, and they're reduced to a powder form, and they're given back to a family in an urn. And we call them ashes. They're not ashes. Ash cannot actually survive the process of cremation. It's two 1800-degree motors that project down a flame onto the body. Ash is just re-incinerated. So, when people talk about cremated remains that they get back from a cremation, it's skeletal remains that have been reduced into a powder form. In a water cremation, the body itself is not converted into a smoke and sent out a chimney that creates pollution in a neighborhood. The liquid part of the body is maintained, and the body is converted into what we call its liquid essence.
Elara Hadjipateras: Have you guys seen the movie Dune 2, where actually, they dehydrate everyone and then all the liquids go into this one reservoir. So, it's like a reservoir of souls. That's just what this made me think of. That's where my mind went.
Seth Viddal: I have not seen that yet, but that's a beautiful image- the reservoir of souls. I want to hold on to that term because let me tell you what happens with this. There's a little bit, perhaps of an ick factor for a listener to overcome.
Diana Weil: I was going to say, I’m like, does it have a scent, this liquid?
Seth Viddal: The scent would be more related to the chemical compounds that are used in this process than related to anything I would describe as a body scent. So, it is a chemical process. It's a process of chemistry, and it occurs over about the same amount of time as a flame cremation. So, a flame cremation's two to three hours. Our water cremation is about three to three and a half hours. And in that time, rather than the body being sent out a chimney in the form of gas, it is converted to its liquid essence and held. Which means that the nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and calcium and magnesium and all the good elemental stuff that lives in my body, that's the same thing that every plant builds its body out of in the world, is kept, maintained. It's not wasted. It is put into a reservoir of the souls, as you said, Elara.
Elara Hadjipateras: A reservoir of the souls. Yeah.
Seth Viddal: And it is offered back to the earth in the form of a bio stimulant. So, at the conclusion of this process, our body is not waste. Our body is not pollution. Our body is maintained in a process that uses less than 10% of the energy of a flame cremation. And rather than polluting a neighborhood, we fertilize a farm. And so, the liquid essence, which is only measurable at its elemental form, completing this scientific chemistry process, there's no DNA, there's no pathogen, there's no pharmaceutical, there's no Seth, there's no Elara, there's no Diana. There are just the physical elements that we built our body out of. And to me that's a fair trade. I got to use this vessel for my whole life. And if I can meaningfully return it to the cycle of life when old Seth over here is done with it, that's a great use for the body. And I'd rather commit to that than something that pollutes and consumes. So, this person told us about water cremation. And very shortly afterward, we had researched it. We made an investment in a company that produces this system. And in August of 2019, we did the first water cremation that had occurred on a human being in the state of Colorado. And that process, I'm glad to say, has paved the way for hundreds more customers to come through The Natural Funeral
’s doors, but also we've now expanded to offer that service to other funeral homes around the state. So, they don't have to make that preliminary investment in their own equipment or in the science and in learning how to hydrolyze bodies. Let's face it, that's a specialized trade that takes the just right heart and hands to work out. And we're grateful to have those people as a part of our organization.
Elara Hadjipateras: I also love the fact that you've gotten these ideas for having different sustainable burial methods from walk-ins. It's like, “Oh, I haven't heard of this.” It blows my mind that we were doing water cremation with animals and dogs before ever considering it for humans. But anyway, continue.
Seth Viddal: It was actually invented back in the late 1800s as a method for dealing with livestock mortalities. That's how it came into existence, was around that practice. And it was in the 1980s that the Mayo Clinic and UCLA's medical school started to use what's called alkaline hydrolysis (we call it water cremation), with medical cadavers that were there in their institutions. So, yeah, it has evolved and come a long way, water cremation is currently legal in 28 of the 50 states. And that number is growing each year. So, following consumers asking us for water cremation, at least they asked us, “Would you consider this? Would you learn about it?” And we did. And we made the investment in the system. And now, pardon the pun, the floodgates are open and people are coming to us from all across the country looking for this service. So, back in 2020, the Natural Funeral was approached by entrepreneurs who were looking to advance legislation around a term called natural organic reduction. And that said another way, it's body composting. It's surrounding a body with organic materials and returning it back to soil. And I mean, it is truly the most dust-to-dust sort of thing we can do with our bodies. So, the natural funeral offered testimony ahead of this even being a legal option in Colorado. And I'm grateful to say that Colorado was the second state to enable constituents to legally access natural organic reduction. But there were no operators. And so, we made the commitment to do that. And there are three operators in Washington state who have terramation funeral homes. By that I mean, they don't do green burial, they don't do water cremation, they don't do flame cremation. Their singleness of purpose is natural organic reduction. And so, I visited with each of those operators out in Washington State to understand: how is this rolling out technologically? How are we adapting a vocabulary that includes turning a human being into soil and to decide, does this make a good business sense for us to try and do it here? So, we offered the testimony, and we were ecstatic to see that it passed with bipartisan support. So, it unanimously made it out a subcommittee. All the Republicans said yes, all the Democrats said yes. Because basically this was presented as this is a natural way to return our bodies to the cycle of life. There's nothing political about it. If you are an environmentalist and an activist, it checks the boxes for doing something good for the planet. If you are a libertarian and you, you want power and autonomy over what's done with your body, and you want freedom of choice, it makes perfect sense. And so, this has been something that's had amazing support. So, in 2021, natural organic reduction became legal in Colorado, we were the second state. And the Natural Funeral’s offering to that space is a design that we've created called a chrysalis vessel. And our chrysalis vessel mimics the dimensions of a green burial grave. It's about seven feet long and three feet wide and three feet deep. And in that vessel, in that pod, we surround a deceased human body with wood chips, straw, and alfalfa. And then we inoculate that vessel with a tea that we have brewed. The tea that we have brewed contains 25 unique bacterial strains that are helpful in the decomposition of the human body. They're actually complimentary to our own ecosystem, which our own biome that lives and continues to live in us. And then also in that tea, there are 15 fungal spores that we include in that inoculation. So, the digestion, the decomposition that occurs is over about the next two to three months where the body inside the chrysalis, along with the wood chips and the straw and the alfalfa, has an accelerated composting time of just a few months. And so, in this process, we are returning our bodies to the cycle of life by creating living soil. That’s terramation.
Diana Weil: Wow. I think that that's — I mean, that's very special. And I mean, I want to get into the legality and also the ecological impact of cremation and burials. But one question that I have for you is that in classic funerals, the body is often shuttled away. You don't see them; you don't get to spend any time with them. And in fact, I think a lot of people have this idea that it's illegal … that if a family member dies, you immediately have to call services to have it removed. Whereas this process- you're kind of alluding to the fact that you can spend time with your loved one, you can clean the body, you can comb the hair. Can you talk us through a little bit about the process, the emotional process that the family's going to go through with this versus kind of a classic funeral home?
Seth Viddal: Yeah. And that process that families can go through is really independent of the disposition that they choose. Whether it's green burial or terramation or water cremation, that shouldn't speed up or slow down the process of being with our loved one and having ritual and demarking this extraordinarily important moment. I have to tell you, as a professional, the saddest I get is not usually when the hard cases are here and a person is having that meaningful interaction with their spouse or their parent or their child, and they're shedding great big tears. That's not the saddest hardest moments. I actually can see in those moments, the future gratitude for them not short-cutting those steps. And it does make me sad when I think of like the body snatchers that the death occurs at three in the afternoon and at 3:05, the hospice or the family's on the phone and say, “Come get them. We don't know what to do.” And there is something special when a family realizes, “You know what, the medical event that this person was experiencing or the illness, the discomfort, the coughing that's over now, the emergency's done.” And now we're shifting into not trying to cure this person. Not even trying to take away their pain but trying to process this beautiful life lived. And so, it makes me sad when someone skips that or says, “No, just put me in a box and put me in the ground.” I'm like, “Well, goodness gracious, we celebrated your retirement and we celebrated when your kids were born and we celebrated your birthday every year. Maybe your family and community could get a little, a little soothing of their own spirits by creating something meaningful.” So, we definitely encourage people to think the medical emergency's over, we're not going to snatch your person in the middle of the night, if you ask us to come and pick them up, we have 24-hour service, and we'll respond accordingly. But we also are going to encourage you to take this meaningful moment with your person. There's no one in charge of you. There's no one that's controlling what needs to happen next. And if you want to hold their hand for another hour or two, do that. If you want to read some stories to them or play some music or read them a favorite verse or poem, do that, light some incense, burn a candle, take a deep breath, find your root, and we'll be there when you ask us to come.
Jon Gay: I want to ask a secondary legal question to follow up on Diana's question. If someone wants to have a funeral in the way, in the ways that you're describing- the way that you offer Seth- is that something they need to communicate to their family? Do they need to have it legally documented that this is what I want when I pass? And it probably varies state to state, but asking generally.
Seth Viddal: Yeah, you're absolutely right, Jon. It does vary state to state. And we like it when people have a plan that's really neatly tied up with a bow on it. And we just basically have steps to follow when the death occurs, and we know which family to call and what their disposition choice is, it's often left to the next of kin if there's not a documented wish. And each state has a formula that describes who that is. In Colorado, it's generally the spouse, adult children, parents. There's an order to who has the right to determine what happens with the memorialization and the disposition of the body. But absolutely, Jon, the simplest and the way that the family knows the way that a person who's dying knows that they're going to get the funeral that they want, is to put that plan down on paper and then let their family know where to find it.
Elara Hadjipateras: I think you have to do that or else, I'm sure that you've ran into situations where someone passes away and then you have people bumping heads, siblings not agreeing with the spouse in terms of what so and so wanted. They're like, “Well, he said I wanted this,” but someone else has another ad in their head.
Seth Viddal: Absolutely. That happens all the time. Yeah.
Elara Hadjipateras: How do you handle that? How do you kind of navigate?
Seth Viddal: Well
, funeral service is a lovely dance with families. And I like to consider that if you've seen one family, you've seen one family. And the next family that comes is going to have a radically different dynamic and set of circumstances. And so, being really present based with people, having cultivated that intentionality and that focus of active listening, it helps us to reflect options to people that they might not have known were otherwise possible. And it also helps families to find alignment because when you sit down and you're the funeral home and you're really hope that the outcome is that they buy the most expensive thing, then you're already in the game. You're already playing for one of the sides. But when you sit down- and our process is to light a candle and pour a cup of tea with each family on the China that was my grandmother's wedding present, we're inviting them into our home, into our family. And then with radical curiosity, we want to know what's important to them. When you don't have an attachment to what comes out of their mouth next, but you're on the edge of your seat with a prejudice toward them wondering, I don't know what they're going to say, but I'm rooting for them. And whatever they ask, I hope that we can carry it out. And if it doesn't break the law and it's ethical, then I'm going to try everything in my power to serve this family with what they need and not overlay my needs and wants on them. Yeah. That's an easy way to align families.
Diana Weil: So, you kind of just mentioned this but the funeral business is a business. And I think that there's a lot of lobbying going on. So, I'm really curious about the legality and what is legal and how that became that way and how the green burial is sort of … I would imagine a lot of people would like this sort of service, and I'm guessing it's not something that's widely available in every state. What is the funeral business and what are the laws around this?
Seth Viddal: Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. So, there are 22,000 funeral homes in the United States, and the funeral industry is approximately a $26 billion a year business. There are major players. There are players in the funeral industry who are traded on the stock exchanges. There are corporations who have shareholders who demand profitability from the corporate entity. And that's what's guiding the funeral service that they provide to families. It has to be, it's written into the corporate bylaws. This is how we do business. And then there are independent funeral home operators. And so, one thing that I would just urge your audience, maybe there's not a natural funeral or an ecological green funeral home in your community, yet, I would encourage you to find someone who's independent and at least self-directed, at least the person who you're sitting across the desk from is empowered to serve your family in a way that's tied to their heart. Corporate structure, their hands are a little more tied and they have to serve families a certain way. In terms of the business side of things, you mentioned the lobby side of things. That's a big installed base of funeral homes and cemeteries and cremation retorts and stacks of embalming fluid and right. Like that's, that's a big machine to disrupt. And so, there has been this sort of negative to neutral kind of “wait and see” from the big machine of the funeral industrial complex. But the independent funeral homes who are aligned with this are reaching out to us on a very regular basis. And so, legally, terramation, I told you Colorado was the second state to legalize. 11 states have written laws to allow for terramation. And there are about another 11 this year in 2024 alone, who still are going to vote on legalizing natural organic reduction. So, I see terramation as the most disruptive oncoming technology, if you will, to the funeral industry since cremation, since flame cremation was introduced to the funeral industry back in the late 1800s.
Elara Hadjipateras: Well, my question with terramation is where do they end up being buried? Because in my mind, I think, wow, I would love to be buried on the farm that I retire in, in 50 years. That must be one of the issues we're facing, is you're not just going to bury someone in a traditional cemetery. I would guess.
Seth Viddal: When we talk about legal final disposition, let's think of cremation as an example that we can all understand. Cremation, when the body comes out of the retort and is put into an urn, the skeletal remains are put into an urn, that disposition is considered final. There's no tracking of what a family does with those cremated remains. Some religious families take them to a church, and they put them in memoriam there, some bury them in a cemetery, some scatter them in a park. Some go to their favorite place where they camped, where they got engaged and scatter them there. Some divide the cremated remains amongst family members, and they take them on journeys to the four corners of the earth. And so, final disposition was the cremation. And similarly, in terramation, the final disposition is when your body is placed into the chrysalis vessel, when the soil, the living soil that we take out of the conclusion of that terramation process when we have it, that's not a part of burial. There's not a tracking or a requirement that something has to be done with that soil. What that means is families have the exact choice that you just said, Elara. If you grew up on the family farm, if you especially enjoyed the irises that grew in the field on this side of the farm, then your body ought to go back to those irises on that side of the farm. And if your family decides, well, Elara had these four beloved places, you can nurture them all, and your body can just return to the cycle of life symbolically, I'm going to do good in the world because I've made this choice. You can return to the cycle of life at your discretion, at your family's discretion. Yes, the soil can be buried, but so too it can be placed in the flower garden.
Elara Hadjipateras: Well, I wonder if we're going to see some change of laws where if more people are doing water cremations and terramations and say a lot of people are picking some public setting for, everyone loves this one lake and everyone's pouring these water cremations into this lake. I would just imagine we might run into an issue where people are like, “Well, you kind of have to have a permit to do this.” There's going to be some sort of, I guess, I don't know, ripple effect.
Jon Gay: No pun intended.
Elara Hadjipateras: Yes, exactly.
Seth Viddal: So, I certainly want to make sure that you know that you have to have permission from the landowner to do any sort of scattering. That's whether you're returning regenerative living soil following a terramation, or whether you're scattering the cremated remains from a flame cremation, whether it's public property or private property. There are mechanisms to obtain permission in each of those types. In no means do I want to suggest that there's a wild west and that people all pick a spot and everybody return their body to the cycle of life there. What's actually special about this is as humans and the way that we interoperate in society, you have your sacred spaces and your favorite property and trails, and I have mine. And so our, our families can do something that's meaningful to us independently. And also, I would share that when you scatter the ashes or the cremated remains from a cremation, at best, they're inert. And at worst, they're actually pretty high pH that that is pretty salty and can actually be a little bit harmful to plants with immediate contact without dilution. When you're returning the output of water, cremation or terramation to the earth, you are in fact doing the planet a favor. You are in fact taking nutrients and elements that us living beings borrowed from Mother Earth and you're giving them back. This is not an act of pollution or overwhelm to the earth. We were gifted these nutrients to begin with, and she knows exactly what to do with them when she gets them back.
Diana Weil: Okay. So, I always wanted to be cremated because I wanted to return back to the earth to nurture a plant, basically be the compost version. But that's not true. And I learned this from you. What are the ecological impacts of cremation? And I mean, I think that there's some very obvious ones with sort of the traditional burials, but can you kind of discuss the problems with both of the classic being buried and embalmed and all that kind of stuff, and also cremation, because I didn't realize that there were issues with cremation from an ecological standpoint.
Seth Viddal: Yeah. So, a long time ago, burial was the most common option for our bodies. But when we think about what that's evolved into, when we embalm a body, we're draining the fluids from the body's veins and arteries and vessels, we're draining the fluids from our bodily organs. And we're replacing that with chemicals and plasticizers that are there to preserve the body. And the amount of embalming fluid that we put into deceased corpses every year in the United States is a tragedy. And if you took that level of poison and you put it in the ground somewhere that was not in a human body, someone from the Environmental Protection Agency would come and arrest you. Because you're putting a toxic carcinogenic, generally, formaldehyde-based chemical into the ground, and plants and animals are going to uptake that. Plants in their root systems- that's going to introduce that to that ecological system. And you're taking up space in the ground and you're going to be buried in something. They're
not just going to push you into the grave, you're probably going to be put in a metal box. And depending on what funeral director speaks with you, it might be a real fancy metal box. And then so that the ground doesn't cave in over time because the part of us that goes in the ground is eventually going to decompose. Even with all of our best efforts at permanent preservation with these horrific chemicals, the body is still going to decompose. And so, there's going to be settling in the ground. So, over the metal casket and the body, we place a vault, a concrete vault that's reinforced in the ground. And that's so we have a nice even surface to mow, and we don't have lumps in our beautiful, pristine, expensive cemetery. Then you got to water all that grass and who's going to do that? Because 20 years from now, if somebody comes and visits (and statistics say that not many visitors come 20 years later to a grave site), but it's still getting watered and it's still getting mowed. And so, there's land that's not coming back, and it's kind of a consumptive act. So, I think I explained the resources used and the energy used in that. And so, for a long time, people have thought of cremation as being a more environmentally sensitive option, except it's so stinking resource intensive in the natural gas that it uses to actually perform the cremation. It's a process of applying fire to the body. And so, we generally, in this country use natural gas-powered retorts that burn for a couple of hours, and they use an enormous amount of fuel. Most experts agree that it's the equivalent of about a thousand-mile car ride that we use to incinerate each body. And what are we doing with the body? The body we're converting into smoke. If we're lucky, the crematory has a really nice scrubber on their system so that it's taking some of the pollution out of what's being emitted. Cremated remains themselves, I told you, are the skeletal remains. And so, there's a high amount of calcium perhaps available in those remains. But by the time they're incinerated, think of it like walking up to a campfire the next day. The logs that went in the campfire, if they had decomposed naturally on the forest floor, well, the forest is going to make soil out of them, and then the next tree is going to grow in their roots in that soil. But if you burn that same log, those ashes are no longer a gift to the environment around them. In fact, if you're a good camper, you're going to bag them up and truck them out and leave them no trace, because they're not of benefit to nature. So, we've used a lot of fuel and created pollution, and by contrast, water cremation and terramation are closed loop systems with the earth that intentionally use the least amount of energy possible with the highest good coming from our bodies.
Diana Weil: Alright, Seth, I mean, truly, I'm just so fascinated by this, and thankfully we're not quite done with you, but we do have two questions that we always like to ask our guests, and we haven't prepped you on these. So, if you need to take a minute, that's totally okay. What is a life lesson that you have had to learn the hard way?
Seth Viddal: There are so many. I think the best the best lesson or the one that I never forget is the one that was difficult to learn. I had to learn the hard way that you don't have to go back to the same funeral home that you did just because that's what your parents picked, or your grandparents picked. And I've learned that you can ask for what you need in your moment of great grief, that it is really hard to be in a position that is so vulnerable with fresh grief, and then be asked to commit to make decisions that are extremely expensive, and that you have to make under the duress of being in grief. And so, a lesson that I have learned is about working with people who have the same values that you do. And the further that you can put a plan in place regarding what's going to happen to your body or the body of your loved one, the more likely it is that that plan is going to get walked out in the way that you intended.
Diana Weil: That's such a great answer. And I think can also be translated to other things in life. You know, if you have been seeing a doctor and that doctor is no longer aligning with your values, it's never too late to switch. Or if you're at a school. I mean, I think that that's such a lesson that translates to so many aspects of life. I really love that.
Elara Hadjipateras: You can always shift your perspective. You can always go at a different way. You're not on this one-track path in life. There isn't a set way to do it. You can always switch routes. Which brings me to our second question, which right now- I like to preface it with right now- because I think that this is something that probably changes throughout our lifetimes and even hour by hour, day by day. What would you consider to be a mantra of yours at the moment that kind of helps you get through the day, gets through a hard moment?
Seth Viddal: So, I have several that I use but a mantra that I'm living in right now is to keep a song in your heart. I use that as a reminder of that the frequency that we're living in right now, it need not always be joyful. It need not always be easy. In fact, some days it’s barely bearable. But if I can remember to keep a song in my heart, I can change that music to adapt to my needs today. And basically, it's reminding me to put one foot in front of another. And it's something that I can offer to people who are hurting, and I can remind them that it's available to them too. And that it conveys quite a bit in a real simple and short phrase. And so, I remind myself often, especially when I'm dealing with something difficult, to keep a song in my heart. And even as I hug a parent who's lost a child, and we're parting ways for the day, having completed an extremely emotional service in that hug, I can tell them, keep a song in your heart, and it means something equally important to them in that moment.
Diana Weil: Seth, I'm so glad that you exist in this planet. I think that your services are so needed. Can you share with people where they can find you and learn more about what you offer?
Seth Viddal: Thanks for that opportunity. I am with the Natural Funeral, and we can be found at thenaturalfuneral.com. We're not extremely active on social media, but we're doing our best. And so, we are reachable that way. And we have two funeral homes in Colorado, one in Boulder County, and one in Larimer County. And we have a care center in Colorado, in Jefferson County, where we do our ecological services. So, we'd love for folks to find us, and we have open houses at all of our facilities every month. We love connecting with the community.
Diana Weil: And people who are out of state can also inquire about your services, correct?
Seth Viddal: They can. We serve people from all over the country, with a water cremation only being legal in 28 states and terramation only legal in 11, but only offered in two people are coming to us from all over. And I think, I would share that we are in a growth mode right now. And because people are coming to us from across the country, we're looking at ways to reach out and, and have our services be closer to them, so people can stop having to be an activist by putting their body on a plane, and we can just exist in their neighborhood. So, folks that want to reach out, we'd love to hear. You can come in for a tour, you can call us and make a plan. And if you're interested in believing in the growth of the Natural Funeral across the country, we'd love to hear from those people too.
Jon Gay: Seth, I know this is going to be part one of our two-part conversation involving end of life. You want to tell us a little bit about our guest that we're going to have in our next episode? Because it takes a special kind of temperament to do what you do, and it takes a special kind of temperament to do what our next guest does as well.
Seth Viddal: Yeah. So, I had the great privilege of meeting Mike, who you'll talk with next, about eight years ago. And I met him where we were both doing a training to sit with hospice patients who were at the end of their life. And we were both curious about how can we show up in a meaningful way and bear witness to people's final season on this existence. Since then, we've remained amazing friends. And while I've been planting the seeds in this business and getting this business to grow, he's continued to sit bedside with thousands of people through their moments of death. And he's done that for years actively. And he and I, our paths crossed again just about a year ago when we decided to work even more closely and even more aligned. So, he's one of the finest hearts that I know and one of the most giving men that I've ever met. I'm so excited that your audience in the next episode is going to get to meet Mike Reagan.
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