Would You Want to Have a Viking-Style Funeral Pyre and Go Out Like a Jedi?

Listen, as Max & Amy talk about a measure before the Maine state Legislature this session would allow Mainers to choose a death ritual that stretches back to ancient times but has largely vanished from modern-day America: outdoor cremations. According to a story in The Press Herald, If adopted, it would let people in the Pine Tree State choose to go out like a Jedi or a Viking king in a blaze of glory in the open air. It’s a way of sending off the dead that’s still widely practiced in some parts of the world but there are only two sites in the United States where it’s legal, both in Colorado, only one of them public. It’s limited to no more than a dozen funerals annually. A bill before the state Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee would allow a nonprofit that possesses at least 20 acres to carry out open-air cremations, one at a time, and to scatter the ashes on the property. A nonprofit cemetery group called Good Ground, Great Beyond, formed in 2018, is trying to get permission to have outdoor funeral pyres on a 63-acre forested parcel it has owned in Dresden for the past couple of years.