One evening last week, around 75 people gathered in a vast Sodo warehouse for an event that may have been the first of its kind in human history: a housewarming party for a funeral home where bodies would not be burned or buried, but laid in individual vessels to become clean, usable compost.
It was an eclectic group (doctors, architects, funeral directors, state legislators, lawyers, investors), but they had come together to celebrate the first site for Recompose, the fledgling Seattle company that hopes to change the way people think about what happens after we die.
“You all have one thing in common,” Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, told the crowd beneath the mammoth, curved wood ceiling. “You are all members of the death-care revolution.”
But for some at the party, it took a little time to get there.
Recompose, the human-composting alternative to burial and cremation, finds a home in Seattle’s Sodo area @brendankiley reports https://t.co/LrbKtzHjWk pic.twitter.com/k32nIR8HVh
— Ken Lambert (@SeaTimesFotoKen) November 19, 2019