Thinking Out LoudMy favourite listen this past year was Noble: named for the town of Noble, Georgia, where in 2002 an investigation began into a local crematorium.
I was expecting a true crime podcast, and Noble is that. Authorities found hundreds of bodies on the property of Tri-State Crematory – mass graves, commingled body parts, corpses abandoned in cardboard boxes. “Like a horror movie,” said one investigator.
But while “true crime” usually means “murder”, prosecutors struggled to pin down exactly what crime the crematorium owner, Brent Marsh, had committed. The families who thought their loved ones had been cremated – who had scattered their ashes, or kept them at home – were devastated. The DA pushed for a sentence of 8000 years – “four times since the death of Jesus”, Marsh’s lawyer observed. Marsh ultimately pled guilty to 787 counts, including burial service fraud and abuse of a corpse, and served 12 years in prison.
What is the “value” of a dead body? What do the living owe the dead? What Marsh did – and failed to do – was surely less heinous than murder. But our instincts revolt against it. Whatever we believe about an afterlife, the reaction to Noble suggests we cannot accept that a human is merely the physical matter that makes up our bodies. And so the remains of our loved ones matter, even in death, even if we don’t really think it’s “them” anymore.
Noble is also about forgiveness, and perhaps redemption. Brent Marsh served his sentence, returned to a tight-knit community that had once relished the idea of him going to hell, and even became the pastor of a small Baptist church. This story asks us to look at both the corpse and the criminal; to not look away; to admit that what we see is, yes, loathsome – but also sacred.
This Thinking Out Loud was originally published on Facebook.