In Memory of Bill Hamilton

Luisa's words to Bill in the cemetery

Bill, now that you can't speak anymore, I will give you my voice to say what you wrote in your "My intented burial and why":

- I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests. It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just as we make our chickens secure; and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beatiful and un-fused elytra wich we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.-

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 and again; till eventually a drop of rain will join you to the water of the flouded forest of the Amazon.