A Rainier Beach Filmmaker Turned Grief Into Documentary About Green Burials

Filmmaker J.J. Gerber has thought a lot about death and life. He believes that the process of death is personal. It can't be rushed or scheduled. When someone dies, it can leave a desire of wanting more time with the person that's been lost.

While seated at a coffee shop in the University District, he recalled that before he began his film The Life We Leave, he had been grieving for years. His mother passed away in 2018, and although he and his family knew she was dying, the death still impacted him greatly. When she died, Gerber felt rushed by outside pressures to complete the cremation process, giving him little time to grieve. A week after she was cremated, when the funeral home gave him his mom's ashes, he asked himself: What now?

Not long after the passing of his mom, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and death became hard to ignore. During that time, his son was born. Then in November 2020, he read an article about Micah Truman, CEO of Return Home in Auburn, Washington, who runs a company that offers human composting, a process that, after death, breaks down a human body into soil that can be returned to the earth. Gerber contacted Truman and asked to follow him with a camera.

When he began working on the film in January 2021, he intended to only serve as a producer and leave the directing to someone else. While interviewing a potential director, the person offered Gerber a different take: "You know all the characters," the director told him. "You have relationships with them, you know all the locations, you know everything about the topic. Sounds like you're directing it."

Now, The Life We Leave, Gerber's directorial debut, will have its local premiere at the 52nd annual Seattle International Film Festival on May 14 and 16. The film follows Truman and Return Home as the company provides families with an alternative to the funeral industry. Gerber, who lives in Rainier Beach, hopes the documentary will offer viewers a thought-provoking look at the possibilities that exist after death.

The green-burial process as described in the film is split into two phases spanning a total of 60-90 days. During the first phase, bodies are surrounded with alfalfa, straw, and sawdust, and placed in large metal boxes. In a process called natural organic reduction, microbes on the inside and outside of the body start to decompose the flesh, leaving only bones that are ground into small fragments, similar to cremation. The reduction process takes four to six weeks to create soil.

During the next phase, everything in the first vessel is moved inside a second vessel. The soil continues to be broken down into compost until it's stabilized. After phase two, families are given close to half a cubic yard of soil, which they can use for a garden or spread like ashes.

"In my past [films], I had been more looking at other people's lives," said Gerber. "And I guess this one is, too. I'm looking at [Return Home's CEO] Micah's life, but I didn't ever have that personal connection, that personal investment. The rest were always a job or a story that I was interested or excited about, but this one I felt like I had to see it through."

The film highlights the grieving process families went through while those they lost moved through the composting stages. Return Home is mindful that a key component families need throughout the process is memorialization. Loved ones can place pictures on the outside of the warm vessel or open the vessel's lid and set the photo inside.

As he worked on the film and met other people who were working through their grief, he found a community. Gerber connected with the families he highlighted, crying with them from behind the camera. As Gerber spoke about how directing the film gave him a chance to heal his own grief, he teared up. 

He said the film strives not only to show an eco-friendly alternative to burials, but also to advocate for spending more time with a loved one after they've passed to feel a deeper closeness. It's a process Gerber felt he never experienced with the passing of his mom.

Gerber said that he spoke to a thanatologist, a person who studies grief and the process of healing. The thanatologist told Gerber how effective it is to continue interacting and speaking with the person who has passed. "That opportunity to have one interaction with your person, to feel the warmth emit off them, creates a slower release, or a longer goodbye. Which helps with the grieving process," Gerber said.

When he considered asking people to come out to see his film, he shrugged. He described The Life We Leave as a vulnerable piece of art. He doesn't consider it an easy watch. He imagines viewing it as more of a shedding-tears-together experience, one that provides a space for ritual to happen, to release cathartic grief when sitting next to loved ones. 

Through a yearslong process that stretched from the legalization of human composting in 2019 to the completion of the film, Gerber and his crew found a story of transparency. "What we started to find is that those who were open to it were looking at this as part of their grieving process. They were looking at telling the story of their loved ones that died, and in a way, making it have some meaning beyond what it was."