Well, if the goal is minimal costs, I think if you donate the body for research or education purposes, such as at a medical school, they’ll pick it up for you and cremate it when they’re done.
As for that, flushing cremains might result in an expensive plumbing bill, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that.
Funerals serve an important social need, so I don’t think they’re going away any time soon. It’d be nice if the funeral industry would make some improvements though.
Trying to return to terminology. …
As best I can find in an area full of squishy feelings and current changing of mores. …
If the body is present at the ceremony as an intact hunk of dead meat, and that body is buried or burned by the end it’s a “funeral”. If the body is elsewhere or already disposed of somehow, it’s a memorial or celebration of life, sorta depending on whether the living want to look forward or backward and whether they want a sad or happy experience.
With that distinction in hand …
IMO some sort of gathering (even virtual) and remembrance of the decedent is a useful thing that ought to happen. The trappings that turn that remembrance into a “funeral”, namely a casket, a corpse, possibly a viewing of said corpse in said casket, a procession to a hole in the ground, and a burial (or pyre in other cultures), be it symbolic (a few spoons of dirt), or waiting until the Bobcat finishes filling the hole, is totally optional.
IMO … Memorials yes, funerals no.
That’s very nice! Your dad would have laughed.
I mostly agree with you, but last month I attended a memorial service that had the late departed’s ashes in an urn at the front of the sanctuary. Funeral? I think so.
IME, Jewish families still hold an 8-day-long shiva with several hours of visitation daily.
I volunteer on the A/V team at my church, and we’re an older congregation, so I’ve seen a lot of funerals. What I’ve noticed since Covid
What I generally see now is a single memorial service, celebration of life or whatever you want to call it. The deceased has been cremated or the body donated and the service is scheduled weeks or even months later to allow people to make travel plans. There’s one service where family/friends speak followed by an informal lunch or dinner.
And while my experience is with a church, that gathering can also be held at a VFW hall, country club meeting room or any other place big enough to hold the expected crowd.
This. When my older brother passed away several years ago, the main event, held several months later and organized by his adult daughter, was an upbeat memorial intended to be fun and pleasant for the participants while paying tribute to his life and accomplishments. As his daughter said at the opening, this is the way he would have wanted it.
It was held in a big reserved area of a brewery pub. Friends and colleagues came from all over, in some cases long distances, to relate often-funny anecdotes of their experiences with him. His granddaughter, who was old enough to be good at such things, had prepared a beautiful memorial video sourced from a wealth of materials celebrating his life. Instead of the sit-down dinner I was expecting, waitstaff circulated throughout the event with a tasting menu consisting of delicious miniature versions of everything on the pub’s menu.
It was all beautifully organized and a testament to his daughter’s love and her imagination and skill in organizing it. This, in my view, is how these things should be handled.
My most recent encounter with this was last fall. An elderly aunt of mine had died, leaving her largely disabled increasingly Alzheimery husband behind. He lasted another ~10 months. They had been a very social couple and best friends who did lots together. They were also both utterly devoid of religion, pretension, or ceremony.
Almost a year after the second death their kids finally put together a joint celebration of life for both of them. At a clubhouse where they’d been prominent members for years before their respective ailments took them out of the social circulation.
During the lead-up the long delay felt kinda weird to me as a distant spectator. In the doing it worked great. Everyone who attended had long since made peace with the reality of their demise, and it really was a celebration. Not a celebration through incipient tears & clenched lips.
Setting aside the religious or ethnic groups that place great store by dealing with the body & ceremonial aspects all but immediately after death, I suppose this lower key less traumatic approach might suit our modern era of emotionally uncomfortable people better.
Heh. After my father passed, he had opted for cremation. I looked at the list of stuff that was involved, and noticed some sort of “premium container” listed.
I asked the guy point blank - “Is that container going to burn up as well?” Him; “Well, yes. But it’s better than just a cardboard box, which is the least expensive option.” Me: “How so? It’s going to burn up either way. Let’s not literally burn money here… we want the cardboard box.”
Which was roundly applauded by the rest of my close family; my dad was frugal, to put it charitably. He wouldn’t have approved of spending more money on something that was going to burn up anyway.
It takes a lot of effort to make a dead body look good. If you’re going to show it off, it has to happen within a few weeks. With all the trouble people have gone through to put it all together, you feel kind of obligated to go up and have a look. It’s really kind of gross if you think about it.
If you don’t want people going through that for you, you need to spell it out in writing. Let no one think you would have wanted it that way.
Seven days. Literally the Hebrew word for seven. FWIW I know fairly few who still do the full seven but I do appreciate the proscribed structure of it. Rituals around death are IMHO very useful.
Caskets in NC Jewish tradition are simple - classically the plain pine box. No metal. All back to earth materials. Not big ticket items.
The Jewish tradition also includes mourners taking turns after the graveside service helping shovel dirt into the grave.
In Israel, we don’t even bother with the pine box or the embalming. Wrap 'em in a shroud and put 'em in the ground, as quick as you can.
And we don’t mean a few symbolic shovelfuls of dirt. Nobody leaves until the hole is full.
I don’t know if this is an option in the US, but in Australia, you can have a ‘private’ cremation, which means that your body is taken off to the crematorium without fanfare, cremated, and the remains are then given to a nominated family member. A wake/celebration may or may not happen later, depending upon the relationship the deceased had with friends and family I guess.
This is my option for when I drop off the perch. It’s cheap, there’s no bullshit, and I’m dead so I don’t give a fuck. 
That’s typical US practice too. The various commercial services are a la carte. Cremation, celebration, storage or interment/disposal of ashes, are all separate steps you can buy or not, do or not.
You can do one-stop shopping where the cremation people own a cemetery too and they’ll arrange the gathering for your mourners, catering and flowers, a speaker, and the plot of ground or mausoleum space, etc. Or not.
When my wife died a few years ago the funeral home / undertaker did the cremation, and her church did the celebration and interment in their mausoleum. Two different transactions with two different outfits; one commercial, one churchly. Nothing unusual about that.
I don’t.
Growing up in a family which had the open casket tradition I went to a number of funerals starting when I was around 8. I was struck each time by the embalmed body looking nothing like the person did in life. It was like someone had made a puppet of them. I found it bizarre, but it was the tradition. But when I was a teenager and a grandparent died I discovered one of my (adult) relatives would not go up for the viewing. He wouldn’t even come in the room because he found it so disturbing. At that point I decided I wouldn’t support this tradition either.
Maybe some people find it helpful in mourning, but I have a very good episodic memory and I don’t need to see a dressed-up, made-up corpse to help me get over the person’s death. I remember how they were in life very well and viewing an embalmed body does not give me any comfort. When my mother died my family insisted on the open casket. While I didn’t stay outside the room, I did not go up to see her and I’m really glad my memory of her does not include the casket viewing.
Again, maybe others find it comforting, but I just don’t get it. That, along with all the up-selling makes me very dubious of the funeral business.
Nor did I. I was fortunate that my older brother had come to visit when it appeared that Mom was in her last days. He took care of all the formalities – I couldn’t deal with it. He did have a last look at her in the casket, I couldn’t do it.
The whole process is needlessly morbid and depressing. It should be minimized, and the emphasis should be on the kind of celebration of life that I and others have noted upthread.
My husband’s parents have both died within the last 3 years. Neither one wanted a funeral. FIL’s sisters both predeceased him and MIL had only one surviving sister who was too old to make the trip even if there had been a funeral. They were cremated (they’d made their own arrangements) and last year we took their cremains where they wanted them spread.
In my family, on the other hand, funerals and services are a big deal. That includes 2 days of viewings, a funeral Mass (Catholic, yanno) a procession to the cemetery, then a restaurant gathering afterwards.
My husband and I have opted to donate our remains to the Maryland Anatomy Board. When they’re done doing whatever they do, what’s left will be cremated and returned to our daughter and she can spread the ashes as she wishes. No service or reception unless she wants one. No muss, no fuss.
When Dad died his second wife was in charge of the arrangements. They had an open casket and I went up for my look in turn. When Mom died a few years later I was in charge and I chose no open casket.
I can’t say I was much improved or harmed by either choice. IMO simpler is better and that’s most of what motivated my decision for Mom.
As we’ve mentioned in various other threads on point, at various times there have been moral panics about people being buried alive and about the wrong body ending up in a coffin. I suspect some of the current (but fading) tradition of people looking at the body is simply to confirm who they are and that they’re really and sincerely dead. Back in an era before good paperwork records and real medical care mistakes and “mistakes” might have been commonplace.
As to both my Mom’s body and my late wife’s cremains I was confident enough they were really and sincerely dead and that whatever we interred was truly their remains, that seeing for myself didn’t really fill any need. Not that looking at “ashes” gives the slightest hint of who or what they once were.
My original plan was to be an organ doner [fuck cancer for killing that plan] but have settled on donating for science. Maybe I can get my corpse something funky like testing explosives or something [my sister in law used to work at The Body Farm and I found it absolutely fasinating]