The color green was always the quiet one.
You would never see green preening for the cameras like you would hot pink or glittering gold, green being the reliable backup singer, the everyday working stiff content to color anonymously the grass and trees and never once complaining about the additional holiday workload of Christmas or St. Patrick’s Day.
Even the name “green” is a little stodgy, a little uninspiring, nothing the likes of silver or purple, two names who have the audacity to claim that no other word even rhymes with them, the two probably taunting green mercilessly inside the closed Crayola box.
But green has gotten its groove on. In a culture infatuated with celebrity, green is America’s next top model, its new idol, the one who won’t be voted off anyone’s island. It is now hip to be green.
I’m a few decades late to the green party, unfashionably late to this party celebrating an overdue social responsibility for all things environmental, its grassroots efforts finally going mainstream America, albeit slowly.
So I’m at least trying to mingle, taking the small steps of rudimentary recycling and using paper instead of plastic, or giving favor to consumer products that are manufactured with recycled materials or produced in an environmentally friendly way, built or bundled green, so says the packaging anyway.
If I’ve troubled myself little about living green, I wonder now what responsibility I bear for dying green, more specifically, disposing of my soulless body, the final item on our to- do list that we must stubbornly delegate others to finish.
Cremation is clearly the green standard for environmental impact, and while I may yet be talked into it by self or others, I’m having some difficulty warming up to the cremation process.
There is something about the gift of life, the sacredness of life that even the flesh and bone of a corpse deserves better than the same fire that consumes the chaff of this world.
Or maybe it is just the cowardice of my soul, a soul that I want to believe is jettisoned from the body at death, and what irony that would be; to spend a lifetime trying to feed fear to the fire, but when it comes my time for the kiln, fear is nowhere to be found.
While I loathe my irrational fear, I must also temper my smugness, limit my finger wagging at those who have opted for above-ground burial, a most un-green way of leaving.
The mausoleums that dot this nation’s older cemeteries are the pyramids of this continent, giant slabs of stone and granite that house the remains of the aristocrats who could afford it. Maybe they sought infamy or immortality or simply feared the earth like I fear the fire.
I suppose the underground burial would be the happy medium, the middle ground if I may, the chartreuse color rating on the green chart of environmental impact.
Death seems the appropriate, even dignified time for simplicity, so I shall opt for the plain, pine box coffin, and a nameplate in lieu of a headstone, a nameplate just big enough to include some clever epitaph about love being all that matters, one of the few truths I know with certainty.
My only frivolous request – and aren’t we all granted one last request, time permitting – is to be buried in a new suit. A green suit, naturally.
Marty Likens (martylikens@ ) works for Shamrock Foods of Commerce City.
