I would love to have a traditional norse funeral.
What occurs:
You’re body is placed on some sort of wooden float.
You’re put into the water
Somebody puts flammables and lights your body on fire.
They let your float drift away.
As your body burns, your soul floats free and the valkyries either take you to valhalla or hell.
A feast occurs.
I don’t know what I’d have for my eulogy.
The money that I will have saved during my life will be given to my children. My books/collectables would be auctioned off and the money given to charity.
[Comic Book Guy] “Lucite . . . hardening . . . Must . . . end . . . life . . . in classic . . . Lorne Green pose. Best! Death! Ever!” [/Comic Book Guy]
snicker
That’s great! I think you should also make a audio tape of yourself, so when she wants to hear, “No dear, those pants don’t make you look fat,” and “I’ll take out the garbage in the morning,” all she’ll have to do is press PLAY.
My funeral wishes are extremely spartan. After reading * The American Way of Death * by Jessica Mitford, I’ve had a horror of the funeral industry. I want to be used for all of my spare parts, and then cremated as a pauper-- in a cardboard coffin, with no embalming. Nor do I want a service of any kind, other than my friends gathering around a keg in the backyard, telling funny stories about me, and the shit I haplessly got myself into.
Scatter my ashes in a pretty place, or use them to fertilize the roots of a young tree. If someone in my family demands a headstone, I want an ordinary field stone, carved only with “Lissa” and the years of my birth and death. However, I refuse to allow it to be placed in a cemetary: it has to go to a “natural” setting. (Anyone’s backyard will do!)
Then, use the thousands of dollars you saved on the disposal of my corpse, and donate it to a charity in my memory.
Since a funural is a service done more for the sake of the people left behind than for the one that has just left, I’m willing to leave that up to my family and loved ones, just as long as it’s not a religious ritual.
They can say goodbye to me in whichever way they please.
After getting any organ that could possibly help anyone anywhere in any way shape or form outta me, I want the remains to be cremated, and the ashes scattered at Arlington Racetrack. No, most people DON’T understand me.
I’m an organ donor, and I want whatever’s left to be burned and scattered somewhere - I’m not sure where yet. Some of my friends and family are religious, and some are not, so I think a memorial service is a good thing to have for those still here.
My father told me that when he goes, he wants me to rig his corpse to sit up at an oppurtune moment during the service, hopefully inciting panic. My mother’s not too keen on the idea… but if she goes first, all bets are off! Personally, I hope they just throw me in the woods to be devoured by the squirrels and things. Insert myself back into the ecosystem as soon as possible.
I’m not an atheist, but I don’t believe in an afterlife and don’t even see any reason for God to be invoked at my funeral. So for me, it’s either going to be the Viking funeral, fossilization, or “Gotcha ya!”
That sums up a large chunk of how I feel about it.
I haven’t been to many funerals, but the religious components of them always make me wretch. If it’s my time to go and there must be a funeral, I don’t want it to have those parts. As someone else said, to treat my death that way would be an insult to the way I’ve lived my life. Given the choice, I’d rather not be treated with disrespect regardless of whether I’m alive or dead.
But really, it doesn’t matter. My s/o wants to have me cremated in the event that she’s still around. I guess that’s what will happen.
In the event that she’s not around, I’ll donate my body to the paranormal
[nitpick]Non-belief in god isn’t quite the same as non-belief in an afterlife[/nitpick]
Yes, my burial is mainly for the benefit of my family, but, and this is a point a lot of you seem to be missing, I don’t think its fair on my family to decide what best suits me. If they want something in particular, they can go for it, but I think it’s polite to express some desires so they’re not left worrying what they decide may be innapropriate.
I think I’ll go for cremation, and get scattered either at sea, in whatever graveyard my parents are in (or alternatively in a local graveyard I happen to like to sit in). I wouldn’t object to a tree planted for me either. I don’t care what anyone else might plan, but these are my suggestions.
I realise it’s a bit daft of me to think messing around with decomposing bodies is a bit ick, but, well, I’m not perfectly rational. I think I owe it to my family to express some preference and that’s what I’ve done.
