I’ll be a neighbor to the OP’s wife in Knoxville. 
Personally, I love traipsing around in old cemeteries, especially ones with cool Victorian cemetery architecture, but absolutely don’t want any part of open caskets, embalming, vaults and that stuff. If someone decides to override my wishes and bury me, for Og’s sake, go green.
I took a death and dying class in college where they told us exactly what happens to bodies hermetically sealed in those expensive coffins and concrete bunkers. No, thanks. I’d much rather have my body decay normally and eventually become a skeleton than liquefy into a big ol’ mess. I like cemeteries and would prefer burial over cremation, but I’ve instructed the spouse that a simple pine box will do (and no open casket–that’s oogy. I don’t like people staring at me while I’m alive, so why would I want them doing it when I’m dead?). Aside from the liquefaction issue, I just don’t see the point in spending thousands of dollars on something that’s going to be buried in the ground and never seen again.
It might be kind of cool to be buried in one of those black pods like they put Spock in, but that’s just silly.
Hrm…while looking for the correct spelling of “liquefaction” I came across this…I guess this approach wouldn’t be too horrible. Or the “composting” thing at the end of the article.
I like your attitude. 
Well I’ve never been to heaven, but I’ve been to…um, east Tennessee? 
With me, it depends on who dies first. My wife would feel uncomfortable with anything besides a burial, so if I go first, I’m sure I’ll get a traditional burial. Hopefully she’ll be OK with the harvesting of any usable internal organs first, though.
If I outlive her, and assuming my son is comfortable with the idea (he’s 4 now, so he’s kinda too young to get a read on that yet), the plan will be to harvest any usable organs, then cremate the rest. Bury a thimbleful in the same gravesite as my wife, then scatter the rest of my ashes along the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park, along the stretch between Haystack Butte and the turnoff to the Grinnell Glacier overlook.
I plan to have my organs donated and whatever my wife and kids need to find closure they can do. However, if they are happy with my choice, I would add that I want my skeleton to hang in the bio lab of an all-women’s nursing school on the off chance that I actually have a soul that haunts my body 
Either that, or be immersed in an environment that is conducive to fossilization. Not that I would know it, but it would be cool to not only benefit current science, but possibly science in 200,000 years.
I don’t like the “liquefication” route. Too much like turning yourself into soup.
shuddering
The “hermetically sealed” caskets and embalming are to make the survivors feel better. Read a few true crime books where the victims have been disinterred for re-autopsy, and the medical examiner gets to handle a moldy, disintegrating corpse.
Nah, just put me in the ground in the pine box or a cut down refrigerator carton (even better) and maybe use a slab of petrified wood to mark the spot, with the words I stated above.
I’ve already decided on Hubster’s epitaph: “Let me gaze upon the heavens I loved so well.” He’s an amateur astronomer, and we chose our 36 acres in NE AZ for the optimal viewing conditions with his 14 inch telescope. I think I’ll save the box from the telescope as his coffin. He’d like that.
~VOW
I’m an organ donor, and I don’t care about being buried or not, but I do think cremation is a waste of biofuel. I’d like to disintegrate the natural way - eaten by micro-organisms, and become some rich soil for plants; or eaten by sharks, or whatever.
If you’re going to burn me, at least use the fire to generate electricity or something.
I think I’d kind of like mine to say “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
Stops zombies, too. If the legion of reanimated corpses can punch its way through a steel casket and concrete vault, I at least know to give up now. Any “safe room” I try to hole up in will have revenants busting through like the Kool-Aid Man.
Probably cremation for me - and then, if there is anyone alive who cares, a scattering of ashes in the mountains in the fall.
I would also be open to a Sky Burial. But I don’t live in Tibet and I can’t see anybody but my children going for it.
Since I’m rife with disease, I wonder if any of my parts would be good for harvesting.
No. Cremation is the tradition in my family and I’m happy with it. I’ll go to All Hallows by the Tower (of London). People pay to go into the crypt where my family’s ashes are. 
I’m kind of relieved that we have cemeteries in London, even if they’re all full. They can’t be built over or turned into anything else, so they stay as open areas of public land. Sure, you can’t play football on the graves (:D), but you can breathe fresh air as you walk among the grounds, the soil helps as flood defences, and birds, bees and other animals live there.
BTW, this is how they coped with overcrowding at a cemetery near me.
I’m planning on having my skull made into a drinking cup - that is, if my best friend survives me. We made mutual wills to that effect - the survivor makes the other guy’s head into a cup.
I only ask that some of my ashes by scattered on Lambeau field.
:: puts on evil hat ::
Oh, we can find a use for them. Yesssss, we can.
FDR was one of the first famous people to die after embalming came into vogue to request a green burial, though of course the term wasn’t used then. He’d originally wanted a burial at sea but Eleanor, who didn’t share his fondness for sailing and wasn’t former Undersecretary of the Navy, didn’t relish the thought so he changed that. He next requested in a document referred to but not included in his will that if possible his remains not to be embalmed (though he acknowledged this might not be feasible or legal) and to be buried in the rose garden at his home in Hyde Park, NYC in a simple wood casket with a cloth bottom. He wanted to decompose among his roses. He did in his will request that his rose garden grave be marked only with a small simple stone with his name inscribed.
He was overruled on several counts. In the first place his family couldn’t find his burial instructions until after he’d been buried. Since he died while president and then, like Abraham Lincoln, did a lot of traveling afterwards on special train he was embalmed and retouched several times. He was buried in a heavy and expensive wood and metal coffin. He did get the rose garden request, and the stone that marks his grave is simple in form but none would call it small.
I think the whole idea of injecting dead bodies with preservatives, then burying them in ornate boxes, sometimes inside concrete vaults…is hideously grotesque.
I’ve already told my family to cremate me when I die.
But I have a secret liking for the Chum Burial we came up with in that other thread. Put my body through a woodchipper aimed off the side of a ship about 10 miles out to sea.
I will be cremated and inurned in the family plot which was purchased by my grandparents in 1961. It’s all paid for.
I think a variation of the Sky Burial was practiced by some Native American tribes. The dead were placed on elevated platforms and allowed to decompose and be taken by the birds.
I personally wouldn’t be too keen on being chopped up and left to lay out on open ground, but the elevation on platforms doesn’t seem to be such a grotesque idea. The sky was considered to be the Spirit World and platforms were a way to help the person on his or her way to that destination.
I don’t think that would go over too well today, though, in populous areas.
And I still don’t want to be turned into soup!
Or incinerated.
~VOW
I would like a nice Irish wake, except there ain’t hardly anybody Irish still alive in my family. As for the body, I couldn’t care less – burn the motherfucker. Maybe I’ll put it in a will or something – at the maximum, just a simple shroud. It’s obscenely expensive even getting a regular pine box and I’d rather the living put the money for some better use than feting my dead ass.
How can they turn cremains into a diamond? The whole cremation process is specifically designed to separate carbon from your remains and send it up the chimney as gas. Why would there be any carbon left to make diamonds out of? I smell a scam.
