Somehow, during my time on the California coast, everything I was thinking and learning about converged, and I had an epiphany: the antidote I was looking for lay in the mushroom’s ability to break down organic matter and environmental poisons. The Centers for Disease Control say we have more than 219 possible environmental toxins accumulated in our bodies — tobacco residues, dry cleaning chemicals, pesticides, fungicides, flame retardants, heavy metals, preservatives and so on. I began studying mycology and learned how to work with mushrooms in the lab, and started growing existing strains of toxin-cleaning, edible mushrooms on my own discarded body tissue — hair, skin, nails.

Many mushrooms are able to clean toxins in soil, a process called mycoremediation. These are some of the various mushrooms I considered for inclusion in the burial suit.

Originally, I thought I would create a new strain of mushrooms by training them to recognize my body tissue. But what I learned from mycologists along the way changed my mind. First, creating hybrid mushrooms is nearly impossible. Any new strain of mushrooms would likely revert to its original strain once in the wild, and the existing strains of mushrooms already do a fantastic job. So I didn’t need my own mushroom strain — I just needed to figure out how best to incorporate mushrooms and other biological material into fabric. Over the years, I developed two methods to do this. What began as an artistic provocation is today a company, Coeio, that offers the Infinity Burial Suit and other products commercially, and continues to design human-centered approaches to the end of life.

You might wonder whether we’ve had any takers, and I’m happy to say we have! In January 2015, Dennis White, a 64-year-old carpenter with a terminal illness, wrote to us and said that his “time is running out” and that he’d like a mushroom suit. We offered to make Dennis a suit and follow his family through the funeral planning journey. We went to Sunday family dinners, where we heard beautiful stories about Dennis’ life and the incredibly strong bonds he shares with his wife, children and grandchildren. We visited both green and mainstream cemeteries, met with death doulas and funeral directors and even stopped in on Dennis’ local cemetery commission. We made a film about Dennis’ journey, Suiting Dennis, directed by award-winning filmmaker Grace Lee. (Watch the film, above, or host your own screening of the film with one of our screening kits.)

In working with Dennis and his family so closely, we learned that the suit is more than just a product. It is also a powerful prompt that moves people to plan for their death, something that most of us don’t want to talk about, much less plan for. The mushroom suit set Dennis and his family on a path to learn about their options, grapple with complex emotions and make thoughtful, environmentally responsible decisions together. This is the process we want to reimagine, one that will be critical to evolving our culture’s views about death.*

Updated burial suit modeled after earlier prototypes. The two-piece suit lays flat for easy dressing of the body. Co-created with fashion designer Daniel Silverstein.

Right now, Coeio is getting ready to launch its first products. We’ve teamed up with “zero waste” fashion designer Daniel Silverstein and funeral directors to design the next Infinity Burial products, which are now available for sale — a new two-piece suit based on the original prototype, a shroud that serves multiple functions and a casket liner that can be used with any other green burial container. We’re happy to say that everything is being made in Brooklyn at Manufacture NY. We’re also very excited to offer these new products very soon through Fernwood Cemetery, the same green cemetery where I first learned about green burial years ago!

We also have burial containers for pets: a pet shroud, a pet pod and a pet bed that are sized to accommodate a range of animals, from hamsters to large dogs. We wanted not only to make funerals for our furry friends more environmentally friendly, but also help foster a change in how we talk about death and dying. A pet’s death is often the first encounter with death for a child, and it can be a powerful moment to initiate dialogue.