Hamilton's Death Wish

Bill Hamilton said:

I wish, when i die, to be laid out on the forest floor in the Amazon jungle and interred by burying beetles as food for their larvae. Later, in their children, reared with care by the horned parents out of fist-sized balls moulded from my flesh, I will escape. No worm for me, or sordid fly: rearranged and multiple, I will at last buzz from the soil like bees out of a nest – indeed, buzz louder than bees, almost like a swarm of motor bikes. I shall be borne, beetle by flying beetle, out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars.

In his funeral, his companion, Luisa Bozzi, made allusion to his theory that clouds are actually adaptations, made by microorganisms for their own dispersal, and said: Bill, now your body is lying in the Wytham woods, but from here you will reach again your beloved forests. You will live not only in a beetle, but in billions of spores of fungi and algae. Brought by the wind higher up into the troposphere, all of you will form the clouds, and wandering across the oceans, will fall down and fly up again; till eventually a drop of rain will join you to the water of the flooded forest of the Amazon.

Amen to that.