Announcing Our LGBTQ End-Of-Life Guide Project Learn More!

What comes after The Life We Leave?

Keep exploring human composting and the future of ecological deathcare.

THE LIFE WE LEAVE by JJ Gerber is a new feature documentary that follows an ambitious entrepreneur and two funeral directors as they set out to create the world’s first large-scale human composting business in Washington State. Compassionate and informative, this film invites us to imagine what happens when we care for the dead in ways that also care for the living world.

Interested in learning more? Check out their Website, Facebook, or Instagram.

The Order of the Good Death is here to help you keep exploring with trusted information about human composting, practical resources, and ways to get involved in building a more meaningful, sustainable, and equitable deathcare system.

For more than a decade, The Order has worked to make a different death culture possible, not only through education and movement building, but through concrete legislative action: writing and consulting on human composting bills, providing testimony to state legislatures and Congress, and building grassroots public support that helps get those bills passed.

Poster for the Life We Leave documentary

Curious about human composting?

Learn what natural organic reduction is, how the process works, and answers to common questions.

Explore our human composting guide. 

Thinking about your own wishes?

Learn about providers, availability, practical considerations, and how to begin conversations with your family.

Explore your options. 

Want to help make this possible?

Learn how human composting becomes legal, find ways to support legislation, and connect with the movement.

Take action on Human Composting Legislation.

Photo still from the documentary The Life We Leave, featuring four people sitting on the floor with human composting vessels at Return Home in Seattle, Washington

From Curiosity to Change

Human composting is one part of a bigger conversation.

The way we care for our dead shapes the way we care for each other and the world we share.  We believe our deaths should be supported—financially, emotionally, and culturally—in ways our modern culture and death services often fail to do.

Explore the issues and The Order’s work to make the end-of-life more meaningful, equitable, and eco-friendly.

START HERE

Keep Exploring

Talking about death & the Death Positive Movement

Why talking about death can help us live more fully, care for one another, and imagine better ways of approaching life and death.

Green Deathcare

Green burial, aquamation, human composting, and other options for caring for our dead while considering the living world.

Keep watching, keep questioning

Discover films and documentaries that explore mortality, grief, deathcare, and the ways people around the world make meaning of death.

Learn About The Order

Discover The Order’s mission.

Get involved

Consider becoming a member of The Order and get exclusive education, events, resources, and community while directly supporting the work to build a better future of  deathcare.

Support The Order

Illustration of three stacked skulls with a hand waving