Most of us have a pretty limited idea of what happens to a body after death. It is buried or cremated, and eventually the family goes home with a grave to visit or an urn to keep. At Return Home in Auburn, the process looks a bit different. After a roughly two-month process, a person becomes soil.

That is the idea at the center of The Life We Leave, JJ Gerber’s documentary about Return Home, the Auburn operation pioneering human composting in Washington. The film premiered at SXSW, where it was a Grand Jury nominee, before coming to Seattle for SIFF, where it won the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Documentary.

On Saturday, it made its Vashon premiere at the Vashon Island Film Festival, followed by a Q&A with Gerber, Truman, Houston and others involved with the film. At the festival’s closing awards ceremony Sunday, the film took home two more honors: the Chai & Joy Mann Quartermaster Award for Excellence in Feature Filmmaking and the Audience Award for Best Feature.

When Gerber’s mother died in 2018, he went through the traditional funeral process and came away with her ashes and a keepsake. It didn’t feel right. Then, during the pandemic, he was up around 3 a.m. with his newborn son when he came across a story about human composting in Washington and the work Micah Truman was doing.

“That was the moment,” Gerber told the Vashon Island Film Festival audience. “I got it.”

From there, Gerber reached out to Truman and started following Return Home. He wanted to see how the process worked, but he was also interested in the families choosing it and what the experience was like for them. Several families agreed to let him film, giving him an unusually close look at what happens after someone dies and how families choose to say goodbye.

Filming began soon afterward, with Gerber interested in human composting and the kind of care he felt was missing when his mother died. But figuring out what the film was really about took some time. Gerber said the first cut ran about five hours and was “a mess.” As he and his team started cutting away some of the other storylines, they kept coming back to the people at Return Home. That was the part that worked.

“That was the most emotionally resonant,” Gerber said. “When you swept everything else away, they kind of closed the gaps. We were like, wow, there’s something here.”

Truman founded Return Home in 2019, after Washington became the first state in the country to legalize human composting. The Auburn facility became the world’s first large-scale terramation operation, transforming human remains into soil rather than sending them to a cemetery or crematorium.

John Paul, the scientist who helped develop Return Home’s process, wasn’t immediately convinced. When he was approached in 2019 about human body composting, his first answer was a simple “no.” He eventually joined the project and helped work out the science behind it, but Truman had another problem to solve: figuring out what families wanted from a funeral home built around a process nobody had much experience with.

At first, Truman thought he had the answer. Return Home would function much like a crematorium. Families would bring in their loved one, the facility would handle the process and the soil would be returned to them later.

“It was profoundly incorrect,” Truman said.

Families wanted to be there. They wanted to sit beside the vessel, participate in preparing their loved one and have some say in what happened during those weeks between death and becoming soil. Some families even wanted to place the organic material around their loved one themselves. The staff had to figure out how to make those requests work safely, and the facility itself began changing along the way.

Katey Houston was part of that evolution. She had spent 20 years in traditional funeral service, but COVID changed the way she looked at the work. During the pandemic, families were often kept away from graveside services and other rituals, and Houston said she realized she hadn’t become a funeral director simply to dispose of people.

To Houston, Return Home felt different. She called it “an Oasis in the desert,” a place where she could do what she had originally gotten into funeral service to do: create rituals for people.

There was another part of Return Home that mattered to Houston. She had worked in a more traditional funeral setting where she felt she couldn’t fully be herself. At Return Home, one of the first things she asked Truman was about the company’s tattoo policy. “Well, are they good?” he replied.

That freedom became part of the culture Houston wanted to build. She said the LGBTQ+ community is underserved in death care. Return Home has made outreach to the community part of its work, including showing up at Pride and other events.

Truman said the challenge was making that welcome extend beyond any one community. Return Home needed to be able to offer the same care to people whose backgrounds and values might be very different from those of its employees. The company’s approach, he said, had to be built into its procedures rather than left to individual employees to figure out in the moment.

“We have to proceduralize what we do,” Truman told the Vashon Island Film Festival audience. “How do you talk to a family? What are the ways we’re allowed to express ourselves? How do we dress?”

For him, that is part of the larger challenge of expanding the business without losing what made it different in the first place.

The personal side of the process also came through during the festival’s Q&A, when Judy, one of the participants, talked about choosing Return Home for her 100-year-old mother, Mary, a lifelong gardener and composter. She described an experience that was very different from the funerals she had known before.

“This was more like a family,” she said. “They invited us into their family. They took care of us.”

Truman’s own father died just a few weeks before the Vashon screening. During the Q&A, he talked about experiencing Return Home from the perspective of a family member himself, a striking turn for someone who has spent years building a business around helping other families through the same process.

At the end of the process, a person’s remains become roughly 1 to 1.5 cubic yards of soil, around 250 pounds, enough to fill approximately 10 to 15 burlap bags. Families can take some or all of it home, divide it among relatives, use it in a garden or around a tree, or return it to the earth through Return Home’s restoration projects.

The audience had plenty of questions about the documentary, but just as many about human composting itself and what the experience is like for a family.

The process may be about what happens after death, but much of The Life We Leave is about the people left behind.