...do you care what happens to your body ? For a long time, I have felt that being embalmed and buried in the ground was kind of weird... gross.... morbid...and seriously delays the whole decomposition process.
I wanted to be cremated, and have my ashes dumped somewhere cool... Like Yosemite. But is it stupid to even care what happens to my body ?
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There are lots of ways to carry on being useful after death.
Burial at sea: feed the fishes
Sky burial: feed the birds
Tree burial: absorb some CO2
Donate yourself to a medical school: help to create new doctors
Donate yourself to a body farm: help catch criminals
Mummification: help future archaeologists to understand this crazy era
I really don't care what happens to my remains, but I don't want to add to the profits of funeral directors.
But that reminds me of an undertaker who visited our Rotary Club in New Zealand. He told us about a man who was keen to get the cheapest possible funeral for his dead father. So he drove around the city visiting funeral parlors with his dead father in the passenger seat. After getting a cheap quote for a box and plot, he insisted on digging the hole himself to save money. Unfortunately, the grave was a couple of inches too narrow, so when they tried to lower the coffin, it got stuck. The son then leaped into the grave and jumped up and down on the coffin until it reached the bottom. That's the kind of funeral that appeals to me.
Algebe
"The son then leaped into the grave and jumped up and down on the coffin until it reached the bottom. That's the kind of funeral that appeals to me."
You just made me rethink all my wishes....
I want to go out like Miles. One last gathering of those I loved in a celebration of life. Just one last memorable act and to leave nothing but happy memories behind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc7kxuz-EO4
edit: And to bring closure.
@David
Dammit, man. Got me all choked up. Thank you for sharing that. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go get a tissue and dry my eyes.
Re: Miles vid
On a side note, that looked like a group of folks I would really like to hang out with.
@Tin-man
"I need to go get a tissue and dry my eye"
it looks like your oil is leaking out don't spread it everywhere otherwise your wife can kick you out from house for doing mess. :))
Algebe, great suggestions. Body farm sounds natural, plus helpful.
David, I love Daschunds :)
So hey now, although it's not super important what happens to my body after death, I do like the idea of having a service.... Or send off... Or whatever you want to call it, at an amazing place, likely Yosemite, to give many friends and aquaintences an excuse, or a reason to go there.
Like, "Yea... He died... Kinda sucked... But WoW ! Yosemite was beautiful" !!! :)
I had a lot of tears going on watching that video.
Thanks for sharing the vid, David. I hope I’m able to figure out how to earn that amount of love.
After I’m gone, just cremate my body, I’ll never have use for it again. However, I do have one posthumous wish: to set the record straight regarding my atheism. For very practical reasons living here in the southern US, only 4 people including my wife know that I’m an atheist.
Save for the final niggly details, I have already written my obituary. I have purposely included the following:
“Although Xxxxxx was brought up in the Anglican Church, his faith was tenuous, mainly due to cognitive dissonance in his mind between his scientific knowledge and theism. To resolve these disparities, in late 2014 he began a Journey of Faith. Following an intense period of prayer, allied with biblical and historical study subjected to analytical thought, Xxxxxx concluded that there is no valid evidence to support the claim of the existence of any god and he became an atheist. To his pleasant surprise, acceptance of this conclusion released in him an intense feeling of liberation and all his prior mental conflicts immediately evaporated, resulting in a lasting peace of mind.
Due to antipathy and misunderstanding regarding atheism among family, friends and society, he shared his deconversion with only a very few individuals. However, armed with the realization that we only have one short, precious life, he cherished every second of consciousness, wonder and human interaction, and mindfully lived his life to the fullest. He was living proof that wonderful, loving, moral and ethical people can be atheists.”
Please excuse the self-aggrandizement; consider it written by another person.
No need to apologise for the 'self aggrandizement' Alembe. It's your funeral.
After my wife died I was naturally feeling disconnected with the world, the funeral arrangements were made by my fantastic son. Along the way he arranged for the placement of her ashes in a major cemetery in our city where it happens most of our relatives are buried.
My son, bless his heart purchased a double plot, reserving my place alongside my lovely girl. The problem for me is that I really dislike going to that cemetery. Its a morbid dreary place to my mind, despite the landscape of trees and flowering bushes. I simply don't go there.
I pay my respects to her when I see a sunrise over the ocean on the headland where I live, or when I glimpse something surprising in nature in general. I 'talk' to her a lot.
For myself I would rather my ashes be scattered out in the Outback, off that headland I mentioned, or in the wake of an aircraft in flight. I care little for what happens to my body after I am gone and I certainly don't want any sort of monument however small. My family will have to make do with the art objects I made, my pottery and drawings and writings such as they're worth and of course their memory of me..
after i die..
hhmmmm....
maggots comes out from my body and i'll be reborn again as flies
maagggiiiccc.....
im resurrected ...
It has been your body for the years you have been alive. As far as I am concerned it remains my property and I should be allowed to do with it as I wish. I am also opting for a simple cremation. I mean, card board box, no service of any kind, and into the fire. Funerals are for the living.
Hey Cog, exactly ! That's why I want a funeral or wake, or whatever it's called at an amazing place like Yosemite !
So that all of my living family and friends can enjoy it like I did.
I want to return to the food web from which the molecules I am made of were derived. Burying 6ft under is too deep. Cremation uses too much energy and sends my usable molecules to atmosphere as smoke. The only easily available method that allows you to be eaten by critters, insects, microbes, is the Body Farm in Knoxville Tennessee. They will send you the donation form or you can print from website. You do have to arrange transportation of your maggot farm, I mean body, to the site. Still cheaper than a funeral.
When my mother died, the undertaker offered to blend her ashes with plastic and mold her into a photo frame that I could have on my sideboard or bedside table. They had samples on display and a price list, so I guess some people must go for that option. That's about the most bizarre funeral idea I've ever heard.
I am in the: "funerals and related are for the living" crowd.
My wishes are for the people that care about me to do whatever that will help them with the loss of me. If they cannot agree, or want my wishes beyond "whatever helps them", then: donate my body for the sciences, and get on with enjoying their own lives. If I am a vegetable and cannot be saved, but if some of my organs can be saved for use for other people in need. Do that.
I have made arrangements for my ashes to be flushed down the toilet. I'm serious!
@Nyarlathotep:
Goin' up around the (s-)bend....
That is pretty funny.
I will donate my body to science. That means that medical students will likely practice cutting on it. Good. They need to practice. One of them might just have to perform surgery on someone I love.
As for funerals...the “Speaker for the Dead” notion appeals to me.
CyberLN,
If you want to be sliced and diced then you need to figure out how to get your corpse parted out so that your relatives can get the cash.
"People Who Donate Their Bodies To Science Could End Up Being Sold By ‘Body Brokers’"
https://www.littlethings.com/body-brokers/
"Cashing in on the donated dead
The Body Trade"
Made in America: U.S. body brokers supply world with human torsos, limbs and heads
"Part 9: Body parts from American donors have been exported to at least 45 countries, and thousands of parts are sent abroad annually. Demand is high in nations where customs limit selling or dissecting their own dead. In the U.S., though, almost anything goes."
"PORTLAND, Oregon – On July 20, a Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship departed Charleston, South Carolina, carrying thousands of containers. One of them held a lucrative commodity: body parts from dozens of dead Americans.
According to the manifest, the shipment bound for Europe included about 6,000 pounds of human remains valued at $67,204. To keep the merchandise from spoiling, the container’s temperature was set to 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
The body parts came from a Portland business called MedCure Inc. A so-called body broker, MedCure profits by dissecting the bodies of altruistic donors and sending the parts to medical training and research companies.
MedCure sells or leases about 10,000 body parts from U.S. donors annually, shipping about 20 percent of them overseas, internal corporate and manifest records show. In addition to bulk cargo shipments to the Netherlands, where MedCure operates a distribution hub, the Oregon company has exported body parts to at least 22 other countries by plane or truck, the records show."
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-export/
I have often thought about moving house, because I have no desire to be buried in the local cemetery.
I have historically been opposed to cremation and donating my body, on the grounds that it would make any attempt to reanimate me more difficult, and because I like the idea of potentially being dug up in thousands of years time.
I think ultimately, I would like whichever would cause my loved ones the least amount of distress - which I think would probably be cremation, because I imagine it would be less likely to cause morbid thoughts.
Hey did you guys know that their is a place that will take the ashes from your cremation, and turn them into a man made diamond ? I mean think about it, your ashes are mostly carbon. They say they average person contains enough carbon to make about 3 carats of diamonds :-)
Oh, did this ring belong to your late wife ? No, that ring is my late wife ! :-) lol
If I had the money i'd be made into a diamond. Even if I get lost the carbon crystal would remain until the death of our star.
I've genuinely always wanted a viking burial, but I doubt it is allowed.
But personally I couldn't fucking care, strap me to rocket and fire me in to space.
@ Random
Viking burial in non Viking country
Buy model boat, tell relatives your wishes, die, be cremated, put dust bones melted bits in boat. go to baoting lake/ocean/swimming pool.. set boat adrift (more reliable with small electric engine) set fire to boat. Cast off.
When I'm gone, there might be maybe a half dozen people who would actually genuinely miss me. (And I could be over-estimating that.) Long ago I made plans to be cremated. Doesn't make sense to me to waste a plot of land to store my remains forever sealed in a box and concrete vault. My only concern is that my wife does whatever she needs to do to find closure should I go before her. Otherwise, I will be dead and will neither know nor care what happens to the bag of bones that was my body.
I have always assumed that when I die, my dead corpse will simply break down and become part of the natural elements around it. I will be food for other creatures and the earth itself. I will waste away and parts of what used go be me will become part soil, part tree, part wolf....who knows, even part stardust somehow.
As humanity is finally becoming more deliberately creative and productive with the remains of our species, I would love to have my remains become part of an ecological preserve of some sort. I know what I value and only hope that when the time comes, those who outlive me, whatever contrary values and philosophies they might hold, will honor my true wishes and do as I have asked.
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