Quotable: Living Will

In Anything We Love Can be Saved: A Writer's Activism by Alice Walker. From a speech given in 1990 at a festival honoring author Zora Neale Hurston, on why it no longer upsets Alice that her heroine lies in an unknown, unmarked grave:

"But what is a dead body, what are bones, even of a loved one? If you mix Zora's bones with those of Governor Bilbo, for many years an especially racist oppressor of black people in Mississippi and, psychologically, of the whole country, the untrained eye would not be able to tell them apart. And nature, in its wisdom, has made sure that the one thing required of all dead things is unfailingly accomplished. That requirement is that they return to the earth, which in fact, even as living bodies, they have never left. It matters little, therefore, where our bodies finally lie, and how or whether their resting places are marked--I speak now of the dead, not of the living, who have their own needs and project those onto the dead--for our ultimate end, blending with the matter of the earth, is inevitable and universal. I hope, myself, to become ash that is mixed with the decomposing richness of my compost heap, that I may become flowers, trees, and vegetables. It would please me to present the perfect mystery of myself, prior to being consumed by whomever, or whatever, as rutabaga or carrot. Sunflower or pecan tree. Eggplant."