Brie Smith is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Return Home, a company that specializes in natural organic reduction (NOR), also known as human composting or terramation, as an alternative to burial or cremation. Return Home was founded in 2021 in Washington, USA after the passing of a law allowing NOR, with the goal of providing a more natural and gentle way to care for human remains.

In this episode we talk about:

Return Home’s…

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Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: Who are you, and where do you work? And what’s going on?

Brie Smith: Yes, I just want to thank you Yvonne for having me on today. I am Brienna Smith, I go by Brie, and I am the Chief Operating Officer at Return Home. We specialize in an end-of-life option. That is an alternative to burial. And cremation, we call it terramation. And it is the gentle breakdown of the body into compost, to return to families in place ashes, or in place of a burial.

Yvonne Kjorlien: okay, I’m just gonna bottom line, this and say that it’s human composting.

Brie Smith: Human composting, body composting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. I understand that, yeah, this is a sensitive topic.

Brie Smith: It is.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Anything involving death is, but on the other hand, sometimes you just got to come right out and just say it.

Brie Smith: Yes, I have a lot of people in my life who have become very accustomed to me, very casually talking about their inevitable demise. So,

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s funny how it suddenly becomes a topic of conversation more often than not, right?

Brie Smith: Does with me at least. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. All right, tell us a bit about Return Home and how you came to be at Return Home, and its inception and all of that great stuff.

Brie Smith: Sure, sure. I can kind of start at the beginning. So, Washington state past unprecedented legislation in January 2019 and that was for funeral directors to begin offering what’s called natural organic reduction in the law, but the layman would call it human composting. And what happened is there was a general kind of panic amongst the industry and the area because there was really no prescribed method in which to accomplish what they were giving us laws to do. So they gave us the rules and regulations but they give us any processes or, machinery or anything that would end up making up what we at Return Home have built. So our CEO — his name is Micah Truman — he was sitting with his mom one day — she lives on Lopez Island — and she had some friends from New York in town, and they were sitting in a circle and Micah said, “Did you hear about this crazy thing? They’re gonna be composting bodies.” And these women are in, maybe they’re late 70s, and they all were like, we love it. We think it’s fabulous, ship me to Washington because I’m in New York. And in that moment he had this, clear vision of the fact that this is actually something that people really resonate with is, the natural breakdown of the body as opposed to something kind of expedited or being preserved and definitely a lot of people really are innately drawn to kind of a natural breakdown. And so that was kind of the inception point of. I can do something with this.

So what Micah did is he went to a group of individuals they are called mortality composters. Mortality composters are individuals who help with ranchers and farmers when they have a mast devastation of a group of animals. If it’s a flock of chickens, or if it’s a herd of cows, or some pigs, what happens is these mortality composters will go to the place where the devastation happened and they will set up the temporary composting facility where they will take those animals, make them into compost that the farmer or rancher can then use to enrich their property. And so, that is what’s happening, and it’s an old science. It’s a die-old science and it’s actually done throughout the whole United States in Canada. But these people had a very specific way to compost these animals and it was very — what some might consider — irreverent to a human being’s body. So they might stack the animals up and coat them and something nitrogen-rich like chicken feces and then they would break down super fast in a big pile because they’re all real hot. And these things were where the minds of the mortality composters were and then Micah came in with the mind of we need to make this acceptable for human care, and for the love that we want to show people when they pass away and to be able to present this to a family.

So ultimately, it took about two and a half years of Micah working with the mortality composters. I joined in about in about two years in, and also helped with kind of the idea that we wanted to make the service hands-on for families. But really the entire development of our vessel system and the organics that go inside our off-gassing and our biofilters, all of that was done with Micah and a group of what we call the Oceans 11 Team of, again, mortality composters and PhDs in composting. These are HVAC people who helped us build the facility, general contractors, and then of course, funeral professionals. So we all came together, again, two and a half years after inception. So, we opened to serve families in June of 2021, and we so have been in operation for just over two years. And we’ve served over 200 families.

I joined with Return Home after being a traditional funeral home employee. I had been in the industry since 2011 and I am still a licensed funeral director, embalmer and crematory operator. I was really drawn to Return Home because of the final product, really what we’re giving families back in place of ashes. I had worked the crematory primarily — it’s about 90% cremation in the county that I live in and worked in — and I didn’t take to cremating. It was not something I enjoyed doing. It was a very quick and kind of aggressive process that I never quite felt great doing and so when this opportunity came with Return Home and Micah knew that I was kind of into green options, it was a really natural fit together and it’s been my pleasure to grow from the services manager of the company to now to again COO and overseeing all of the operations, both in the family services and the composting itself.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s a lot. Thank you for that. There’s a couple things that I would love to address in all of that.

First is a little bit about your journey and how you became a funeral director, like how you found out that you wanted to pursue that path to become a funeral director, embalmer, cremation specialist. And then, once we’ve covered that, a little bit about what traditional funeral homes offer and that it isn’t mandatory, you don’t have to go through…you don’t have to be embalmed or cremated that they’re…all of this narrative around funeral homes, it can be quite misleading. So first let’s get into your journey…because not everybody, starts life wanting to be a funeral director.

Brie Smith: Yeah, neither did. It’s good to point out that this was not what I thought I would be doing with my life. I thought I would maybe go into sports medicine or surgical… I really always loved anatomy and

I blame a couple things . Blame is a funny word for it, but I give credit to the fact that my mother was a cosmetologist when I was young and she did hair and makeup for a mortuary. And so at night, my dad was a beat cop so he would be working the nights as a police officer. And so my mom would take me to the morgue with her and I would sit with her while she did people’s hair and makeup. And she tells the story that one day we were there together and a broom fell. And she had this moment of panic. And I very calmly looked over at her and I said, “Mom, it’s not like she’s gonna hurt you.” So, I just had a really solid comprehension of life and death at a very young age. I’m talking, six to nine years old, when I was going with her. I was also raised on a ranch. So, I really understood the circle of life in a way that not every kid is exposed to, I think. And then I took an anatomy and physiology class where I had to restore a likeness of a person from a skull and we used erasers and we used clay and we built this person’s face-up based on their sex and their nationality and their race. So what we did is we built these faces up and I found in that class that I had a real knack for what we call in the industry restorative art. It’s a level kind of beyond embalming, where traditional embalming you have a person who looks really beautiful and you make them look more beautiful with your efforts and the injection. In this case, these are for devastated individuals who have completely maybe lost half of their face or their hands have been mutilated or…it is a skill of mine to go in and restore them back to their likeness. And so, I really fell in love with that. And after that, it was a kind of a no-brainer for me that I was meant to do this for people.

The cruel irony being that I moved to the Pacific Northwest where barely anyone is embalmed ever. And I rarely got to practice my craft and I ended up essentially burning people all day instead of bringing them back to beautiful so their family could say goodbye. It was something that I was really passionate about but that I didn’t have the opportunity to practice as regularly as I would like to. So that’s what steered me toward Return Home.

And here we actually get to do quite a bit of restorative art. We just don’t use chemicals. And we’ve done chemicals visitations for about 70% of our families come in and see their loved one before they say goodbye. So it’s been really awesome to be able to stretch my skill set in a place where I can’t use the tools I’m used to using. So both myself and Katie, who’s our funeral director here, are licensed embalmers and we still do long bone donation cases and we still do autopsy cases, and we help these families say a final goodbye without the use of chemicals. That’s been really awesome. So that’s kind of been the development of my career so far.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. So you had a very early exposure to not just the funeral home but also to death.

Brie Smith: Definitely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Yeah, because a lot of people, especially those people living in cities, do not have that exposure.

Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah. The cyclical, farm life. I went in the summers. So I would go for branding season. All of these little snippets of life where I would see the crop come and go. And I would see the animals come and go. And it was just kind of part of the atmosphere that I was around that, nothing kind of lasted forever. And I think it gave me the ability to accept death in a different kind of way than what we might call a city slicker.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right. So let’s talk a bit about your experiences working within the traditional funeral home environment, and what you learned, and what you found that didn’t resonate with you and had you kind of, longing for something else.

Brie Smith: You know what, I think when you ask me that question, it’s multifaceted, because I worked for an excellent company, a family owned, but they owned many facilities. And I think one of my…the hurdles that I was having to go through on a regular basis was the fact that I wasn’t able to make personal or kind of customize our services, it was kind of a prescribed, “This is the menu you get to choose from,” and then the family would choose from the menu and then we would fulfill what they chose. It was a little bit much also to me to not get to give input. It was very hard to feel like I could better the systems or better the service in some way, and then not feel like I was maybe being considered because it wasn’t the traditional way of doing things or it wasn’t the way we were supposed to do things. So I think that there is kind of ingrained in the industry, in some ways, a real prescribed idea of what families should choose and what’s the best thing for them. When in actuality what I’ve learned since joining Return Home is that it is, again, it’s innate people, to be part of the planning of their loved one’s death, and not in the service but actually in the handling of the remains and of the reverence for the quiet moments together, instead of these big public moments that might have happened. And both might happen still. But at Return Home, my point of really bringing families back into the equation where the hands that love you in life can continue loving you in death is based on the fact that I couldn’t do that freely previously. And it was something that I feel like the funeral industry has kind of come in and removed families’ abilities to see their loved ones decompose in any way. If I’ve had a family see their loved one with a green belly and if I would have done that in my previous work, it would have been curtains. I mean it’s a really bad look to have somebody breaking down in front of the family…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: But it’s natural and people see it and they know that that person has pass ed away and there’s a grief and a connection with the grieving process that goes a long with seeing your person deceased and not seeing them in the hospital and then never seeing them again or whatever that might look like to some people. So I see it benefit the family in a major way in their grief, to be able to open the doors of the funeral home and say, “How much do you want to be involved?” And that’s what was missing previously that I’m really proud to be able to integrate here in what people might consider progressive or non-traditional services.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very cool. Just a personal story. So my father passed away in 2018. He just didn’t answer his phone and so my sister went over and checked and sure enough he had passed away at home. It took me a while to get up there and to assist in whatever. And by the time I got there, the funeral home had already arrived, and so I didn’t get to see him. And so my perception was he was alive one minute and then just vanished the next. And the next time, when I went to the funeral home, I actually asked to see him and they said, “Sorry, we can’t let you back for health and safety reasons.” I thought that’s kind of weird. So, I have this sort of left open. I had — without belittling the word or anything but — I “Did he actually die?” He could be like Elvis and frequenting 7-11 or, weird places. It’s this weird concept that, because I wasn’t allowed to see his body, I, in some capacity, don’t really know he’s dead.

Brie Smith: Yeah, that is a disconnect that I have heard so many times. And your story it really touches my heart because this is conversations that I’ve had with several people. Since they’ve chosen our service they’re like, “I didn’t get to see XYZ,” and being able to be here and do this this time, has completely changed my perception of what it means when somebody passes away in my involvement in that. To me it’s one of the things that inhibits people’s ability to get closure. Like you said, I don’t really believe in closure to be frank. I know that grief ebbs and flows, and I know that it never ends because I’ve over a decade ago, and it’s just how it goes. But being able to be the arbiter of somebody passing away, and then looking at that family and saying, “Do you need time with them?” Instead of me, just coming in, dispatching right away, and asking the question, not just being like, “Okay, the call came in. We’re gonna go. 90-minute call time: we did great.” It’s great for the business to be quick and to move like that, but what is great for the family? And that’s the question that we ask ourselves at Return Home and we end up asking our families. That’s why people have had such transformative experiences here because we give it back to them. And we say, “Let’s talk about what you feel like you need?” and then we’ll kind of go from there. Usually when you ask someone, “Do you want to see or put your hands on your loved one before they go into their terramation vessel?” and stuff, it’s so common for them to be like, “I don’t think so.” And then the next day, call and be like, “Actually, you know what? I do need that,” and then we make that happen for them and it helps them.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it’s like you go into a shock and you really aren’t…I don’t feel capable of making decisions like even small decisions, “Do you want to touch your loved one before they go into the vessel?” That’s a small decision. But under those conditions, it can be monumental. That’s a huge decision to make. You’re grieving, you’re in shock. And yeah, I agree that, yeah, that the loved ones are kind of disconnected from the process and the traditional funeral home environment.

Brie Smith: In the number of times, I sat across from someone with my menu and they chose their menu options and then I wrote it all out and then they signed it. And then the next day, they had no recollection of what we put together.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Brie Smith: So we encourage people to take their time with the arrangements because we are kind of what we consider eco-friendly, or green, or mindful of the environment. We don’t use a lot of paper. So we just send people a link and they can take their time with inputting the loved ones information. They can get help from family members and that database and bring people in to help them. So we’re not just sitting across from a family, having them choose, all of these. And the choice of whether to touch your loved one or not. How about the choice of a $2000 casket that maybe isn’t amazingly beautiful, but it’s within your budget or the $7,000 one that’s absolutely gorgeous, but in both cases, you’ll never see it again.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: But what’s the right choice? I mean, it’s so debatable what the value of the funeral home and the funeral director is, but I found that at Return Home, the value of the funeral director is being able to get that family to take their time, breathe in and out of the grief that they’re feeling, and move at a pace that works for them where they can decide to be participatory or not.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wonderful. So I don’t want to get too much into the history of funerals and funeral homes, but just suffice to say that embalming is a very recent practice.

Brie Smith: Yeah, the Civil War is when embalming really became the most prevalent outside of ancient Egypt basically. But in the US, the Civil War is what did it, because the men were passing away and they needed to make their way home afterward for services, for funeral services, and things like that. It became a common practice. There are pictures. It’s pretty common knowledge within the industry that, in some mortuary books that exist out there, there’s actually pictures of bodies that are kind of propped up as this is the work that I can do, along the battlefield because the embalmer really became really, really needed at that time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: They didn’t have refrigeration. That’s something that people don’t quite understand: is that nowadays in the modern world we have refrigeration and it almost in, certain circumstances, completely negates the need for embalming. There’s a time and a place for embalming, though. That is for certain. And it is an art that we do have respect for, but at the end of the day, it’s a lot less needed now than it would have been 150 years ago.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, and so much of this, the funeral business makes it seem mandatory. That embalming is mandatory. That you have to go through a funeral home: it’s mandatory. And you don’t know to question all this because usually, when you’re in this environment of being in a funeral home, faced with death, you are also within a grieving situation. You’re in shock. You don’t have the ability to make decisions, maybe even to think critically at that time. So, questioning any of the practices, questioning the processes, questioning anything that is said to you, just isn’t within your realm. So that’s why I wanted to bring this up now, so that people can question it now.

Brie Smith: Yeah. Yeah. One of the proudest, things of, I think I’m most proud of that we’ve accomplished at Return Home is really putting out on our social media the knowledge that we have transported people from Canada unembalmed. We cannot do it with any other country because pretty much every other country in the entire world requires embalming to cross the border. But Canada does not. So we’ve been able to accommodate those families. We’ve been able to accommodate families from over 20 different states, and the only state that requires embalming to cross state lines is Alabama. And other than that, you do not need to be embalmed at all. And in Alabama, you don’t have to if you’re not going to cross state lines.

So it is really interesting because I didn’t realize how prevalent it was that the funeral homes kind of might push embalming or imply that it’s required to have a visitation or to say goodbye and it’s simply not true. It can restore when someone has been really sick and make them look healthier. It can do a lot of really amazing things for people in need. But most people who die naturally, really never ever have to be embalmed. I think that that’s something that we’re proud to be able to share that information widely because it’s such a misconception.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. I like that. All right, let’s talk about human composting get into some of the science here because when we talked previously, when I first heard about Return Home and human composting, one of my first questions was, “Okay, you can do it with the soft tissue but what happens with the bones?” Because I know, as a former archaeologist, that I dig up bones all the time and there’s no soft tissue. But in, let’s say peat bogs, there can be no bones but soft tissue, skin left. So but it all depends on the environment. So how do you deal with that soft tissue versus hard tissue?

Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah, it’s die-old. I will say that. I’m so proud of our science here because it was kind of a deal breaker for me when I started. I was like, I have to do this before I joined because I have to know that this actually works and trusting our team to John Paul, who is our PhD soil scientist. He created everything that we do and I trust him so much and he’s such an amazing person. It’s just such a pleasure to be able to work alongside of him, truly. He created a system where we place the person in a vessel. They’re eight foot by three and a half by three and a half. So they’re just big rectangular vessels. There is nothing inside of the vessel except for tubes that allow oxygen to flow through. And what we do is we place a straw alfalfa and sawdust inside of the vessel about halfway up roughly, give or take, but it’s at a certain ratio of the organics to the person’s body weight.

So what we do is we place, those three organic materials inside of the vessel. We then lay the person in, and before this happens, we’ve gone through the steps of receiving them into our care. We give every single person who comes into our care, a bath because we believe it is just basic human decency to be clean. So if they are not clean, we clean them and we place them in a compostable garment. Then they go into the vessel just right on top of, we kind of make a cradle with a pillow and a little indention, they settle in there and then the remaining organics go on top. And so the person is kind of sandwiched or cozied in between the two layers of organics.  

And what happens over the next 30 to 60 days is we place them on a system where we have 24/7 monitoring. We constantly monitor the airflow, the temperature and the moisture levels inside of that vessel. And so we have a probe that’s in there that’s making sure that the temperature is the state minimum. For composting human remains is 132 degrees for no less than 72 hours. And that is to kill pathogens. So for us that number we far exceeded. Usually the people in our care are reaching about 150 to 160 degrees for maybe two weeks. So we have really optimized the internal environment and that vessel for the body to break down quickly. What happens is we make sure that the moisture is at the right level. We make sure that the temperature is rising the way it should be. And then when that temperature begins to drop, what we do is we have an external rotator, so our vessels go into this machine that reminds me of those old virtual reality rides that they used to have in malls. I know that’s really silly and specific, but it’s like a big ride that you place the vessel into and the person kind of rotates slowly over about two minutes and what it does is it equalizes the moisture within the vessel. And so we’ll see another spike in temperature because organics that have not used up the nitrogen or the energy that they have inside of them are being exposed to what you’d call the soft tissue. And that means that there’s another, spike temperature in another breakdown. So what we do is we kind of go back and forth to the rotator over the next couple of weeks. Again, everybody is different, so we gauge it based on the temperature and the readings that we’re getting from our cloud. But ultimately, when we see the fallen temperature and then there’s no spike after we go to rotation, that’s when we know that the soft tissue is completely gone. There is no more energy inside of that vessel to use up and there are only bones remaining at that time.

What happens after that is we go to what we call screening. Screening is very similar to after a cremation, where you would sweep out the contents of the retort, that is bones and anything inorganic. And then you go through those with a magnet to make sure that nothing’s inside of there that will go into the processor, which is what in the crematory breaks down the bone to make it fluffy or completely uniform, ideally. So what we’ve done is we took that science and we duplicated it. It’s just a lot bigger. We upend the vessel. We have a team who goes in and we pull anything inorganic. So we’re pulling, any metal replacements hip, stents, screws. We are also looking for things that are in organic that may have been inside of the body, like silicone. And we are pulling those, and they either get recycled or go to medical waste.

And then what happens is the bones in the compost, stay together and all go through a piece of machinery that’s called a processor. And essentially, it makes the bone uniform with the compost. So it’s breaking the bone down and making it unidentifiable amongst the compost that’s already there. And then what happens is the bones are — as you know, I’m sure very well  — porous on the inside. So, when we expose that porous material to these microbes, we see the temperature spike again because there’s microbial activity again. So, after the bones in the compost are broken down together, we go to what’s called the resting phase. Because what’s going to happen is we’re gonna get a spike in temperature, but then this temperature is going to slowly lower. The more moisture content is going to lessen, and they’re going to off-gas a little bit of CO2 as they rest. And what happens is they lower in temperature and moisture to the point where at the end, they’re ambient. There’s no more microbial activity. Then they’re ready to go home.

So the first phase takes about 30 to 60 days, depending on the person’s body makeup. And then the second phase takes pretty much an exact 30 days because, once that temperature drops and goes ambient, we’re ready to go home with the person. So that’s really the science behind what we do, granted there’s the mixture of organics and those ratios and the moisture ratios are very important. But we have really worked hard to make sure that each person is… we know if they’re emaciated going in, what we need to compensate for. We know if they’re obese, going in what we need to compensate for.  And so we’ve really dialed the science to be able to serve to serve our families and what I consider to be the most transparent and, in my opinion, the most gentle way that any facility provides this service.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I find that very interesting because I knew that cremation, the fire will only take care of so much, and that the bones, whatever remains, has to be ground down so it’s uniform size and there’s nothing identifiable. But yeah, with the human composting, like I said, that takes care of a lot of the soft tissue but then you’re left with the hard tissue, the bone. And breaking down that bone so then it becomes available to the microbes so then it can further break down the organic components of the bone tissue. That’s very interesting.

Brie Smith: Yeah, man it works. I mean just the small spongy bones might even break down. Can I say I’ve ever seen a metatarsal in the compost? Like not identifiably …but I like an archeal… I actually likened it… so funny that that’s what you did because, when I first started with Micah and we did our first screening because I was the one back there doing it or our team was very small at that time, I pulled a femur out of the compost and it felt like archaeology. It felt like, my God, this is so beautiful and clean of tissue. And I mean just the fact that it’s actually happening still to this day, two and a half years later, just kind of blows my mind. It really is so miraculous what happens. And it can’t be overstated, how obvious it is that the body is meant to breakdown. It just brings you full circle on this whole thing of, wow, really we are meant to, just the leaves fall in the fall if we left them there, instead of raking them up, they would nurture the earth for the springtime. And that’s what we are meant to do. We are meant to nurture the earth for the next generations to come. And because we don’t die all and go directly into the earth the way we used to, and we don’t use the bathroom and put it back into the earth the way we used to, we’re really depriving the planet of a lot of organic material. So I’m really proud that the company that I’m standing behind returns organic matter to the earth. I think it is vital to the health of our planet, and John Paul, who’s our PhD, says that about 50% of the soil health of the planet has depleted and that if we don’t start giving back to it, it will never be able to be recovered.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, That’s a whole other level. That’s a whole other podcast episode.

Brie Smith: It’s really. John Paul is amazing. So if you ever wanted to go down that rabbit hole, you just let me know because he is fascinating.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So on that note, let’s talk about the difference between terramation, water cremation, and green burial. You’ve got this whole lovely…For the listeners, Return Home has a whole lovely website, and under their resources, they have a lot of educational articles and if you want to delve deep, go there. But I thought the difference between terramation, water cremation, and green burial would be something nice to mention here.

Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s accessibility based a lot of the time and the differences is as far as what you’re choosing to do is, with all three lower, your footprint. I mean the bottom line is that they are all three much less wasteful than a traditional cremation or burial with embalming might be. I really loved green burial. I still do. I mean, but before even started with Return Home, green burial was my choice for myself. I like the idea of just a natural shroud made of either wicker or bamboo, or maybe just be placed in something that’s soft to the touch, cotton or linen. But to just be placed directly into the earth and breakdown is something that I find super beautiful. But a lot of people are turned off by bugs. I had no idea how many people would ask us about the bugs.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yep.

Brie Smith: We don’t have bugs. We have microbes. Bugs couldn’t survive the temperatures inside of the vessel. But for green burial, specifically, I find that people like green burial until they talk about the bugs and then they’re like, “Yeah, that’s kind of not for me. I really don’t want to be consumed by worms.” It’s weird. So to me, I think it’s lovely. I understand where people might get a little strange about it. It’s also using land in perpetuity. I think that’s something that’s really special about terramation is that there’s no requirement for zoning of any kind, and it’s just like scattering cremated remains. Whereas with burial, even if it is a green burial, you have to go, in at least Washington, to a zoned cemetery and that cemetery has to offer a direct to earth burial. Some of them will say that they do but they’re still inverting in outer burial container over you so that they can drive over you with heavy equipment and things like that.

So, yeah, green burial is very interesting and there’s a lot of nuance. Also, when you do a green burial, you’re putting the heavy metals that are in the person’s body in the earth. So, that’s something that didn’t use to be the case. We used to not put metal bits in people, and we do that now. So there’s a conversation to be had around that.

For me, green burial is my second choice to terramation. I still think it’s absolutely beautiful and I love it.

Alkaline hydrolysis that is what some people call water cremation, or aquamation. A very gentle breakdown. It does use some resources. It uses a lot of water because what’s happening is that you’re being placed in a container that is agitating and working with chemical to break your body down, but in a more natural or rather gentle way than a cremation might do so. The process takes a little bit longer than a cremation but at the end you’re left with more remains and they are stark white. So instead of ashes that come to you and they’re kind of gray and black and splatchy, alkaline remains our absolutely pure white and beautiful and you get more because it’s less aggressive. So the crematory is not breaking the bone down within the vessel that you’re in, that you’re in the pod for the alkaline hydrolysis breaks you down slowly. There’s more bone material because it’s not kind of blasting you away, if you will.

I really like alkaline hydrolysis. I think it’s a beautiful service especially for animals. A lot of people come to Return Home asking if we compost animals and the answer is no, not. We could, but it would be really costly to set up that facility. And so we’re just not in a position to do that right now. But a lot of places all over the US. and my understanding is in Canada, offer it for pets, alkaline hydrolysis, and it to me, is a beautiful alternative to just standard cremation.

 And then, of course, you’re getting an urn back, very similarly to cremation. With terramation, it’s pretty cool because the body is placed in the vessel with organic material that makes it so that we can return about 200 to 250 pounds of organic matter to the earth. We give the family the option to take the full amount with them. If they do, it is placed in burlap because we’re continuing the cycle of life and the compost needs to breathe. So, we put it in something that has air flow. Families go and do memorial gardens, they’ve gone to arboretums. they’ve gone to cemeteries.

So, the options for the terramated remains are pretty much what they are for cremated remains. Except instead of an inert charred carbon, you’re giving back something that has magnesium and phosphates and carbon and all the things that the earth actually wants and needs to thrive. But it’s got the same mobility as cremated remains, which I think is the draw for a lot of people. I think less people choose burial a lot because we’re nuclear we’re moving now, we’re not growing up in Eastern Montana and spending our whole life, there and marrying someone from there, and having kids and dying there. We’re moving. We’re going from A to B. And so the mobility of the remains is something that we find a lot of families prefer to taking up land indefinitely. So, that’s kind of like the quick breakdown of the comparison of the three. I feel like I covered. I’m pretty well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, no, it’s really good and I like that you brought up the cycle of life and contributing to the life of the Earth because with embalming and the traditional sense, you’re actually polluting the earth because all that formaldehyde, that then sits in the earth, and it’s probably contaminating the groundwater. Then you’ve got the coffin and what it’s made of, the lacquers that are used on that coffin, the materials, the textiles and whatever they’re treated with, and all of that is sitting in the ground. So it’s actually depleting the earth of its value. Whereas terramation is giving value to the soil.

Brie Smith: Yeah, and I mean it is directly contributing to families’ gardens just absolutely being gorgeous. I mean I would say it’s not like when you go to the store and you buy compost because even then they can be chemical laden.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.

Brie Smith: What’s so amazing about what we’re doing is it’s just…everything that your body could give to the earth that is good and then we can remove anything that might not be. We negate the pathogens and we negate the chemotherapy and the radiation, and you know what I mean? So these things that may be a consideration are a non issue and they’re actually processed through the terramation where really the only people we can’t help, as far as diseases or what’s in their body, is if you have a prion related illness. So Creutzfeldt-Jakob or Mad Cow disease would be and a no-go because the temperature inside the vessel won’t kill the prions. Only cremation can do that. So we have that limitation. But other than that, I mean we can really take someone who was unwell and their family saw them breakdown over time and they became just a piece of who they once were, and when we return them back to the family, that family gets to see that person’s life live on and really see it happening. It’s pretty cool.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. All right, I’m conscious the time. So you said Return Home is you’re in Washington State but you can accept Decedents from Canada. I looked on your website and I didn’t see any update about Return Home coming to Canada and setting up a facility. Is there any news on that?

Brie Smith: Yeah, so for us, it’s just about legislation, right? So It depends on the area that is looking. And in the US, we’ve had seven states now that have legalized the process and it is a state issue. So state by state, they make up their disposition laws and rules and regulations and they oversee them. So in Canada, is it province by province that they decide on those things or is it national? I don’t actually know the answer to that question.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I don’t know, either, I’d have to look it up.

Brie Smith: What I know is that there has been no legislation passed thus far in Canada, but that it is a big topic of conversation for a lot of people there. Especially, you know, it was amazing to me because I really thought our first case would be from BC. We’re in Seattle, basically proper almost.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: And so, our first family from Canada was from Toronto. And they flew with her to the facility to see her off at a service, and then they flew back to bring her home. So that family came to and fro on that plane and to me, absolutely, I would love to have them not have to do that. Our end goal would be to be local to people, where they wouldn’t have to make grand journeys to fulfill this process. But I’ll say the people who know about it and decide on it are all in and they love it and they’re so glad that their loved one can have the ability to be here with us. We do a lot of digital and virtual services and things like that because we do serve so many people from out of state.

But it’s so amazing to me to see that, the states are legalizing, Canada’s discussing it, and certainly when those policies go through we will be setting our sights on being accessible. I think that’s super important to the cause of what we do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. All right. You do have a very informative website: returnhome.com. And do you have a blog or some way to keep up to date on what is new?

Brie Smith: Yeah. So we, of course as you mentioned, have a really comprehensive blog and resource center. We do both and they’re for different things. So the Return Home blog is specifically more geared toward body composting and terramation and what we do, and then the Resource Center is actually just industry general, like you said, it compares and contrast things. So we have those resources.

My favorite thing that we do is actually something our CEO, Micah, does. Once a month, he sends out a newsletter and it’s just one email that kind of encompasses what we’ve done that month, but they’re very entertaining. And it’s very interesting to read up on the advancements of whatever’s happening in the space at that time. So when you go to our website, I definitely suggest signing up for the newsletter. You can also chat with our staff there. So if you jump on the website, down at the bottom, it’ll pop up, nd it’ll say, “Do you want to talk to us?” and you’re not talking to somebody elsewhere. You are literally talking to me, Katie, Jake. We take the chats, we take every single phone call. We don’t have a call service because we believe in being accessible, and people have all the questions, and we want to answer all the questions.

We also do a lot of social media outreach. So we’re at Return Home NOR on a lot of the platforms. So whether it be TikTok or Instagram, we are always posting educational content because there’s a lot of developments that happen in the space and we just want people to be informed on what atypical and that should…I feel like people should get to know their local mortician or funeral director the same way that they would get to maybe a doctor or somebody who’s in their life because we’re so resourceful. I think that being able to be a resource for people at Return Home, it’s such an honor and pleasure that people would come to us. Because they come to us, again, with questions about composting or just in death care in general – death, dying. We’re experts in beforehand, aftercare, and everything in between. And we know a lot about a lot because we’ve seen a lot. Everybody here who’s works with our staff has been in the funeral industry for, most of us, for at least eight years or so. And then Micah is the only one who’s kind of a newbie, which is really funny because he’s leading the whole thing. But that’s where you can find us and we really try to be available for those Q and A’s pretty much any time because we know there’s a lot to ask.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You’ve definitely given me a lot to think about and unfortunately, it’s in hindsight for my dad’s death, but foresight, I think, for my own planning and what have you because, yeah, like I mentioned, you’re just not in a space when it does happen and so being informed prior to is a good thing and, yeah, you’ve given me a lot to think about. So thank you for that.

Brie Smith: Gosh, it’s my pleasure to just kind of share the good word of “it’s okay to think about it.” It’s not like you would talk about death and you’re gonna die, that’s not how life works. And it can be a topic of conversation that you bring up and you think about and then it won’t happen for another 60 years. So it’s something to consider, to think about. Does it matter to you what happens to you. And if you’ve lived your whole life being a steward of the planet and you’re mindful of your waste and you’re that person, it doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense for you to just be cremated at the end. There’s things that you can do that you would feel good about and your family would feel good about that, that might just be a better option for you. So it’s something to think about.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. Thank you very much, Brie, and good luck with home Return Home.

Brie Smith: Thank you for having me. And, again, if you want John Paul on, you just let me know.