I find the whole tradition of holding wakes and funerals to be offensive. Leaving your corpse on your dinner table overnight for people to wail over, or filling it with chemicals, dressing it up, applying make up to it, and putting it in an open box so that people can file past and then go back to your home to console your grieving spouse and stuff themselves with potato salad and Jell-O is, IMHO, simply repulsive. As is being put in the ground to rot and be dug up again in another 200 years (if you’re lucky). Worst of all is the obscene cost of all these services, a financial burden your loved ones will probably be forced to bear.
I at least want something good to come of my death, rather than fueling morbid sentiment among those who cared for me and lining the pockets of those in the funeral industry. So I would make sure before I died that (a) all of my usable organs would be harvested and given to those in need of them, especially children, and (b) whatever is left of my remains be donated to science so they could be used to further medical or forensic knowledge. If neither (a) nor (b) is possible, I want to be cremated ASAP and have my ashes scattered somewhere I was happy during my life, e.g., off the coast of southwest England.
What about you? Have you ever given any thought to what you want done with your body when you die?
The last time I was asked by my family about what to do with my body, I told them to just haul it up in a helicopter and drop it on a Republican.
Or when I was feeling more serious, to just do whatever is cheapest. I’m not there any more, they should get rid of the leftovers by whichever means causes them the least expense and hardship.
Cremate, bury me at our cabin. No pomp or anything, I’ve told TheKid to have a party.
Now I just have to hope I don’t go before my mother, as she hates cremation. She’s already told me she will fight it. She’s of the mindset that funerals must be sad, must have a body for people to say “She looks good…”, must have a cemetary plot for people to visit. Nope.
I’d like to be reused fairly quickly, in some functional manner. Plow me under a field for crops to grow from. Mix me in with hamburger and feed me to all my friends. Put me in a pot and plant a tree on me. Hell, use my bones for knife handles and my skin to bind books. Cremation and scattering the ashes, at the very least.
The last thing I want is a pity party while they preserve my body with toxic chemicals, seal me in a box, and throw me in a hole where I won’t even rot for years.
I would prefer to be buried without a coffin in some woods, let me degrade. The idea of my embalmed corpse floating corpse juice in a metal coffin forever is nasty(not that I will care of course.)
Second a cheap cremation, they run around $600-$700 as long as you don’t buy a fancy coffin to burn.
I will be buried in a Catholic cemetery by my Mom’s body and if he dies first, my father’s. He bought a four-person plot when Mom died and there’s room on the headstone* for all of us to be mentioned.
*Great story on that. My parents were visiting September of 2009 and I decided we should go to a tourist site we picked from one of those displays of flyers outside the Chinese restaurant we had just eaten at. Mom picked Rock of Ages quarry in Barre, VT and while we were there she mentioned what color granite she would want for her headstone. I thought, yeah, whatever, Mom! having no idea that unbeknownst to me, her breast had been being replaced by a tumor for many years, and she didn’t get it diagnosed or treated. She got sick that December and died 1/10/10.
So we go to the cemetery in Connecticut and decide to order the headstone right away. And they tell us – they get their granite from Rock of Ages! “Well, then I know just what granite she wants!”
I agree about the wake. One thing I do not feel like doing when there’s a dead body lying around is stuff my face full of food.
But let the mourners do what they want.
For my actual body, harvest any organs that are usable, and then let me decompose and feed some worms. Cremation is a waste of food that would be good for the bottom of the food chain.
On the off chance I were to die under more primitive conditions than the above, I think there’s something romantic about being interred in a cairn on some bleak moor or headland for future archaeologists to discover and puzzle over.
Actually I’m curious about this - if you’ve been harvested for spare parts, can “science” still use the remains? Because I was going for the “donation then cremation” route but if the leftovers can be used as well, why the heck not?
Cremation reduces the body to carbon dioxide and basic compounds and minerals, all useful to plants and other growing things. Toss your cremains in the the ocean and the circle is just as complete as feeding meat to worms. Tree gotta eat, same as worms.
As for me, “Crackle, crackle, crackle, which is a bit of a shock if you’re not quite dead.”
