I hope you mean after death (and before burial).
Did you know cremation “ashes” aren’t the ashes you find in a fireplace?
Funnily enough I was just listening to a podcast about John Paul Jones (the admiral, not the Led Zeppelin bassist). He died in Paris and was buried in an unremarkable cemetary, the site of which was built over many times. In 1899 General Horace Porter, the US Ambassador to France, decided to go looking for Jones’ body. After six long years and a lot of digging and money they found Jones’ corpse preserved in alcohol in a lead-lined coffin in remarkably good shape. It now lies in a fancy marble and bronze sarcophagus in Annapolis.
It’s already been done. Just not sure if this is real, so make your own judgement.
Seemerot is definitely a hoax. There have been artists that have encased animal carcasses in glass, but the only examples I can think of have been vented via ducts to prevent gases building up and leaking directly into the gallery space, so they probably were not anaerobic
It’s my understanding that the exorbitantly-priced “hermetically sealed, water-tight” caskets are not as wonderfully sealed for eternity that the funeral industry presents.
As for what happens in the box while it is still sealed, look up “coffin liquor.”
I’m not crazy about cremation, but I could approve the proverbial pine box.
~VOW
The weird thing, is he may be intact.
He was slowly poisoned with arsenic. There are accounts of the first time he was dug up, and apparently he was intact. If there was enough arsenic in his tissue there’s a chance there was enough to act as a preservative.
I will take a NON-airtight casket any day of the week. There’s nothing better than a freshly embalmed corpse with some earthy overtones.