A longtime Carmel Valley activist gears up for one more fight: the right to be buried in her front yard.

Darby Worth starts the discussion with poetry. She doesn’t ask if the listener wants to hear it – she insists. She reads verse after verse, green eyes glittering and deep voice rich with dramatic flair. Her tongue doesn’t trip on a single syllable. First up is Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes,” which asks the question, “What is it going to be like, in that cottage of darkness?” Then she reads “On the Way to the Exit,” a work by James Broughian, which starts, “I am glad for one thing, in my impending demise… ”

And then comes former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness,” a rumination on losing one’s mind: “Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye, and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away… ”

The poetry is accompanied by hot tea and snacks: a buttery nugget of a cookie covered in powdered sugar; a glass jar filled with Annie’s Homegrown cheddar bunnies, which Worth deems too good to waste on kids; and fat cashews dipped in yellow candy coating, or as Worth calls them, “my vitamins.” The living room of her little stone cottage in Carmel Valley is flooded with light and decorated with the art she has spent a lifetime collecting – paintings and sculpture and mobiles, nothing commercial, every piece unique. Her collage materials – for Worth has been a rabid collager – sit on a card table in the corner.

Worth has said farewell to three husbands; two via divorce (she calls them her “wasbands,”) and the last and best, Stanley Worth, at his death in 1991.

Until a fall in June crushed her hip and knocked the ball joint off her femur – it’s now held together with pins and she gets around with a walker – she worked relentlessly in the yard of the little stone cottage, growing herbs and planting dozens upon dozens of bulbs. Her driveway is decorated with signs heralding her activism against war, but mostly against corporate personhood. A life-sized cutout of a naked George W. Bush stands in the carport; a sign covering his crotch reads, “The Emperor Has No Clothes.”

Everything about Darby Worth screams life. She may be 90, but she is intellectually curious and more with it than some people half her age. She has aches and pains, and her heart isn’t in the best of shape, but her doctors tell her that her kidneys will go before her heart does because of all the medication she has to take.

But we’re not here to talk about her life. We’re here to talk about her death.

And more specifically, we’re here to talk about what Darby Worth wants to have happen after it happens.

“I want to be buried in my front yard,” she says. “Dig a hole. I’m not that big.”

Turns out, being buried in one’s own yard isn’t illegal. It’s just breathtakingly expensive and wound up in so much red tape that it may take every bit of life Darby Worth has left in her to get the kind of afterlife she wants.

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There are two “natural” burial or eco-cemeteries in California, one in Joshua Tree and another in Mill Valley. Their rules allow a body to be unembalmed, placed in a simple pine box or just a shroud made of biodegradable cloth and placed in the ground. But that’s not what Worth wants. She wants to end up in her yard at the place she and her husband bought in the 1960s, just across the road from Bernardus’ Chef Cal Stamenov’s home orchard.

And this is where what’s called home death care comes into play. Here are some basic rules, as outlined in the Consumer Guide to Funeral and Cemetery Purchases, a booklet published by the California Department of Consumer Affairs’ Cemetery and Funeral Bureau (CFB).

By law, if you choose home death care, you don’t have to use a funeral home or funeral director when preparing a body for “disposition,” as the guide calls it. You don’t have to be embalmed.

“You can arrange for your body, or that of a loved one, to be cared for and prepared for disposition by family and friends at home,” the guide states.

But if you choose home death care, you have to do the following: file a properly completed Certificate of Death, signed by an attending physician or coroner; obtain a permit for disposition from the local registrar of births and deaths; and make arrangements with the cemetery or crematory.

It’s that last part that’s problematic. In order to be buried on her own property, Worth has to, in essence, become a cemetery.

There’s a 23-part application to creating a private cemetery. It starts with a filing fee of $400 and moves on to creating a corporation, filing articles of incorporation, getting a permit to sell and issue securities and an application to the county planning permission for a cemetery use permit.

From there it gets more deeply financial. She has to form an endowment trust. A majority of the board of directors has to sign a statement that includes designating a cemetery manager, as well as a statement demonstrating the fitness of everyone from the corporate directors to the cemetery manager to engage in the cemetery business. There are six or seven other complicated steps to take, but there, at the very end of the list, comes the big money bomb.

Worth has to deposit $35,000 into an endowment care fund as required by state Health and Safety Code, and she has to take out a $50,000 bond, also required by the state Health and Safety Code, as coverage for endowment trustees.

Then she would have to wait. Once all the documents are submitted and approved, a field representative from the state’s Cemetery and Funeral Bureau would have to inspect her property and sign off before she could get a certificate of authority to open her own cemetery.

“My commitment is challenging corporate personhood and abolishing corporate personhood. That’s been my whole thing… well, except for a few other things,” she says. “But I wish to fertilize my own lawn.

“If someone can say to me, ‘This is the reason you can’t,’ and it makes sense, then I would understand,” Worth says. “But this is bullshit.”

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Worth keeps a list of the officials she’s called. Every member of the county Board of Supervisors is on there, and so are staff at the county health and planning departments. Carmel Mayor Jason Burnett is on there, and so are a handful of other local mayors. (She’s trying to figure out where the county mayor’s group is holding its next monthly luncheon so she can go there and lobby them.)

Nobody’s quite sure what to do. Of the supes, only Dave Potter’s office has returned her calls.

“It’s a very long and expensive process to complete,” says Bryan Flores, one of Potter’s assistants. “She needs an answer as to how to develop the process.”

County Planning Director Mike Novo says he’s never had a situation quite like Worth’s. And while he says Planning Department and Health Department staff are trying to get her the best information they can so she can go through the process, Novo’s not sure she should.

“I wouldn’t advocate for her to go through this kind of bureaucratic process just for a single burial,” he says. “She would have to go through a use permit process – that’s $9,200, although we can negotiate a smaller fee – and we could do it fairly quickly for something this small, but even then it would take a few months.

“But it doesn’t look like there’s an easier path,” Novo says, “other than a religious exemption.”

A religious exemption is the toughest of three existing exemptions to get – the other two involve having cemetery rights grandfathered in – and it’s outlined in an arcane provision of the state tax code. In short, Worth would have to deed her property to a church, and that church would have to use the property exclusively for religious worship services. (In other words, it couldn’t serve as a church-owned residence for, say, a pastor or other religious staff.)

But Worth already has a potential buyer for her house in mind; a woman she met through friends whom Worth says understands and agrees with her yard-burial desires. It doesn’t seem to skeeve out her neighbors, either. One of them comes by to drop off some tomatoes; Worth tells him what she’s talking about and asks his opinion.

“It’s your property, Darby, you can do what you want with it,” he says.

If it comes to it, and Worth dies without the situation resolved to her satisfaction, she has a provision in her will: She will be cremated. It’s not her first choice, she says, because she doesn’t want to be responsible for screwing up the ozone layer any more than it is.

“Government bureaucracy is enough to dehumanize anyone. Let’s use the word dehumanize as much as possible,” she says. “It’s the red tape that strangles and dehumanizes, and we seem to be strangling on red tape.

“It’s beginning to take the humor out of this.”