Take Me To The Water

Hunter Beattie was sitting outside a cemetery in early 2022 when he read that Desmond Tutu had died. Tutu, the South African Anglican bishop and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, had chosen aquamation—cremation by water rather than fire—to dispose of his remains. 

“I’d never heard of it, but all of the articles about his decision basically explained how unsustainable our modern funeral practices are,” said Beatie. “Preserving the body with embalming fluid, placing it in a non-biodegradable casket, and then in a concrete burial vault—often in the middle of town, in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, when all of the cemeteries are nearing capacity.” 

Then there’s the carbon footprint of combusting a body at 1,600 degrees, as well as any plastics and mercury dental fillings. “Within two weeks of serious research and sleepless nights, I put a deposit on an aquamation machine,” he said.

At first, both Beattie and his wife, Veronica Penn Beattie, questioned his sanity. Still, they bought a 3,000 square-foot former pediatric dentist’s office in Hillsborough and painted over the murals of Minions and Disney characters. The building is just past the Grace Hill Church and an industrial park with signs for the Joe Van Gogh’s coffee roastery, a carpet and upholstery cleaner, and an electrical supply company, and across from the Orange County Emergency Services Center. 

Theirs was the third aquamation facility in North Carolina—the first was in Shelby and the second in Wilmington; there’s now a fourth in Mooresville. They named it Endswell, inspired by the name of a restaurant they passed on a visit to New York. “It immediately felt right,” Beattie  wrote in an email. “I thought ‘well of water’ or ‘swell of water,’ and ‘all’s well that ends well.’

“Even though it doesn’t always end well, the ultimate task becomes coming to terms with loss and learning how to live on and cherish the memories of your loved one,” he said. “It felt comforting, positive, and forward-looking.”

Aquamation, or alkaline hydrolysis, is a process in which the body is placed in a stainless steel tube that looks like an old iron lung or closed MRI machine. A lye solution made up of 95 percent water and 5 percent potassium hydroxide is heated to between 200 and 300 degrees and swirled around the body, breaking the chemical bonds and dissolving flesh, fat, muscle, and blood into a soapy slurry of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements. 

After about five hours, the sterile liquid—called hydrolysate—which has no identifiable DNA, swirls down the drain to the water plant, where it flows into the Eno River watershed.

“It’s the same concept as a pressure cooker or Instant Pot,” said Barbara Kemmis, executive director of the Cremation Association of North America. The resultant solution is alkaline, so it’s neutralized by infusing carbon dioxide, “the same gas that carbonates our soda.” 

The Hillsborough water treatment plant has no problem with it.

“We looked at it pretty closely and talked to other municipalities, and we didn’t see a major issue,” said Jeff Mahagan, deputy utilities director for the plant. “Basically it’s just high pH that they neutralize and send to us.”

The process leaves behind nothing but bones, medical devices, and implants. Anything metal is recycled, the plastic is thrown away, and the bones are dried and ground into cremains—what people think of as ashes—in a machine called a cremulator and returned to the family in a biodegradable bamboo urn. 

The Work of Death

Unlike with cremation, aquamation creates no air pollution from fillings, chemotherapy drugs, clothing, boxes, or dioxins from burning the plastic many funeral homes use to wrap the body. There’s no risk of pacemakers exploding as there is with cremation; devices just sink to the bottom of the tank.

The first year after Endswell opened was tough, even if the community was welcoming. A lot of curious people dropped by, and a Death Café, at which people discuss end-of-life issues, and Final Exit group, which discusses choosing how to end your own life, began holding meetings in the space. But most people who died that year had already made their plans. 

Plus, Beattie was handling everything himself: picking up the body, washing it, setting up the memorial space, comforting the family, disposing of the body, picking up paperwork and death certificates, helping to write the obituary, hand-delivering the remains to the family to save them the trauma of walking back through the door of the last place they’d seen their loved one’s body. “It’s such a small thing to offer, but I think it’s actually a really important part of what we do,” he said.

Beattie wasn’t always at ease with death. He was nervous in July 2022 when he went to a funeral home to train on the aquamation machine. “I felt the intense heat from the cremation chamber as we walked by, saw those whirring gasses going up through the chimney, and I started to freak out,” he said. Then he walked into the back room and saw a dead body on a stretcher. “I started to sweat profusely and thought I was having a panic attack,” he said. “It was that feeling of food poisoning, like I ate a bad oyster. This is going to be horrible.”

It took him half an hour to compose himself, but over the course of the three-day training he became comfortable caring for people’s bodies. “I came to realize that no matter what you believe in, whether it’s consciousness or the soul, it’s gone. And now it’s our time to take care of the family in any way we can and to provide the service of disposing of the body.”

Lori Shapiro, 70, experienced the Beatties’ patient hospitality after her husband, Jack Ramsey, died in a car accident. They arranged to have his body picked up from the Orange County Medical Examiner and brought to Endswell, then the next morning they cleaned him and wrapped him in a shroud. The couple had been married almost 34 years. “That was the most intense thing that has happened to me,” Shapiro said, “and they just sat with me and let me cry.”

When she was ready, they took her back to view her husband’s body. For a few hours on each of the next two days she peeled back the shroud and kissed his face, rubbing oil into the skin along with her love. “And they let me do it,” she said. “It was not an inconvenience, it was their pleasure. Their honor.”

Hunter even went with her for Jack’s green burial, where Shapiro held her husband’s hand through the shroud until his body was lowered into the ground.

The whole process at Endswell costs $3,500, compared to the national median cost of $8,300 for a funeral and burial and $6,280 for a funeral plus cremation, according to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA). The $3,500 at Endswell covers everything from the death through the delivery of the cremains. “We never upsell,” Hunter said. “Ever.”

Alkaline hydrolysis has been used for more than 50 years, said Kemmis of the Cremation Association. It started with diseased animals. The Department of Natural Resources in nearly every state would use huge vats the size of buildings to destroy a herd of deer with wasting disease or millions of chickens with avian flu. The process spread to the disposal of lab animals, and then in 2006 the Mayo Clinic began using it to dispose of bodies left to science. 

The bodies of pets across the country are often handled this way, lowered in individual baskets into a communal bath, their fluids commingling. The remaining bones are ground and returned as ashes, Kemmis said.

But the law requires that human bodies be disposed of individually. In 2010, Florida, Minnesota, and Illinois began writing regulations to allow alkaline hydrolysis. North Carolina amended its cremation statutes to allow alkaline hydrolysis in 2018.

Adoption of the process has been slow nationwide, said Jack Mitchell, immediate past president of the NFDA and a sixth-generation funeral director in Baltimore. 

“My impression is that initially families look at it as a more environmentally friendly option, which sparks their interest,” Mitchell said. “They learn that the remains are reduced by going into a fluid and everything except for the bones essentially melts and then the remaining liquid goes away to waste water, and just feel like, we refer to it as an ick factor, it just sounds a little gross, whereas burning, their perception is a little bit cleaner.”

The Catholic Church objects, too, insisting that all body parts be kept together in anticipation of the resurrection—even though embalming also involves draining blood into the sewer system. The church has come to accept cremation as long as the ashes are not scattered. Beattie said he has worked with local churches, including members of Catholic congregations, without any pushback.

Mitchell expects natural organic reduction, or human composting, will eventually overtake aquamation in popularity. In composting, the body is put into a chest freezer-sized container with greens like alfalfa and browns like wood chips, the air circulated, and the organic material turned for about two months, until the body is gone and the resultant soil can be used in plantings. 

‘You Return Your Body to the Sea’

Beattie, 38, wears skinny jeans. His hair is coiffed. He is comfortable talking about death, and honored to play host to families as they move through a profound and inevitable transition. He offers coffee and wine, lights candles, and props up photos of the deceased, then leaves the family alone to process their loss. 

He’s lived in Orange County since moving from New York to join a “weird hippy dippy interfaith community involved in prison reform” in Carrboro. He met Veronica, now 35, at college, when they were both working at an educational nonprofit that ran dropout prevention programs for at-risk youth. 

Instead of a wedding, they backpacked all over the world for a year before settling down on a mini-farm in Hillsborough, romanticizing the intergenerational homesteads they’d seen in Europe. Instead, Beattie was home alone with the pigs and turkeys while Veronica worked in the solar industry. They let it go and moved to Chapel Hill, but chose Hillsborough to start their business in part because of the lower cost for a building.

Hunter wanted to offer a selection of urns, besides the bamboo ones included in the price, and he deeply disliked what was offered on other funeral homes’ websites. “They were importing just these mass-produced, often kind of tacky, shiny dolphins and American eagles soaring across the flag for the veteran, but made in China. And we have amazing artists in our area.”

So the couple visited regional artists, buying up the urns of ceramic, wood, felt, and gourds that now line Endswell’s walls, making it feel more like an art gallery than a musty, traditional funeral home. 

Endswell has since partnered with a facility in Raleigh to offer fire cremation, since more people are familiar with that process. Their staff of four now handles 10 to 12 deaths a month, and partners with a few companies that transport the bodies.

Wendy McBride, 72, and her husband Richard, 83, plan to donate their bodies to Elon University’s anatomical gift program. But they worried about putting a body full of formaldehyde into the soil, or contributing to air pollution if they were cremated. Then the couple–who, coincidentally, had met Tutu 20 years ago—heard about aquamation. 

“I started thinking of this as either you return your body to the earth or you return your body to the sea in liquid form,” said Richard.

“And now we get to do both,” said Wendy.

After the students are done with them, their bodies will be brought to Endswell and then their remains placed in the memorial garden at Hillsborough United Church of Christ Church.

Pat Merriman, 88, an artist and psychologist who once taught death, dying, and grief classes at a community college, had heard about the state’s first aquamation facility, in Shelby, but it is three hours from her home in the Chapel Hill retirement community Carolina Meadows. “I could see my kids stuffing my body into a car so they didn’t have to pay for an ambulance,” she said, laughing. 

Endswell solved that problem. Plus, when she moved into the Meadows she’d given up her garden, compost pile, and rain barrel. Aquamation, she said, “is the one contribution I can still make to the environment.”

The Beatties are now expanding their effort to “reclaim death care from the funeral industry,” as their website says. They recently launched a nonprofit called Farewell Earth to advocate for eco-friendly death care and end-of-life planning, and for reclaiming ritual and remembrance. 

They are also collaborating with green burial advocates and death doulas, estate planners, and hospice workers to bring the realities around death out from behind what Beattie calls the “thick veil of the industry.”

“At Endswell we dispose of the body, but that’s not the meaningful part,” Beattie said. 

Janine Latus is an award-winning journalist, author, and advocate best known for her international bestseller, If I Am Missing or Dead, which tells the story of two sisters who grew up to fall victim to angry and controlling men. She has written for magazines like O, Parents, Fitness, Smithsonian.com and Saturday Evening Post.