During a rafting trip in the West, Angela Bean took a palm full of her son's ashes and spread them across rushing water. Her 27-year-old son, who died in a fatal fall from a pickup truck in 2015, had told her he wanted to donate his organs and be cremated.
Years later, Bean found out about human composting, an alternative burial method to cremation and conventional casket burials that had been legalized in Washington and other states.
"If California had that option back then, I know he would've liked to have been composted," the Oakland resident said about her son, who studied natural resources at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
