HW 52 - Third Third of the COTD Book

On the middle portion of the book, I talk about other burial alternatives, one being reef balling. Reef balling is the process when a decease is cremated, tan their ashes are put in a cement ball, that is than sunken to the sea, for aquatic life to flourish on. The purpose of this is so families feel and put their body in good use, and when it's being used in a way where colonies of fish, bacteria and algae or growing on it, which are some of the early building blocks of life, so it makes a person feel like they're apart of life.

“Carrie would have preferred to inter John in one of his favorite diving sites off the Cayman Islands." (Harris, 92)

"By placing material like rock, concrete, ships, and fabricated reef balls on our part of the seabed, we're trying to create structures that will serve as aquatic nurseries where there are none" " (Harris, 97)

"No sooner has the crane begun winching up the cable hen the plank reaches its tipping point, and the two tons of concrete and five pounds of human ashes that is John V. Slowe memorial reef shoots down the wooden slide and , with a crashing sound that the boat hull, splashes into the Atlantic." (Harris,

Reef balling to me isn't a bad idea, and has a lot of environmental benefits. One thing about reef balling is that I feel that it's mainly for people who aren't that religious, because there isn't that many religious significant to reef balling. Their are some problems with reef balling to me, one of the them is the fact it uses 2 tons of concrete, that's almost more than what the average tombstone uses, which isn't that economical. My favorite part about reef balling is that to me it seems better than just spreading ashes over a body of water and it floats and spreads around. While reef balling stays in one place and will eventually home fish and sea plants. I imagine that years into the future, divers will go down and see the reef ball extract it and the ash and bring me back to life, like some sci-fi thing.