fuck thousands for a coffin. or hundreds for an urn. can i legally be burried in butcher paper?
can i donate my body to science and skip burrial all together?
i want my final action to be a big middle finger to the funeral industry picking on people in their weakest moments.
Don’t die. That’ll teach them.
Native American pyre
I’m getting planted as a tree
Thank you so much for the info! I want to donate my body so I can be useful and help folks a final time. I have been getting awesome tattoos so my corpse looks dope as fuck
i will donate my body to a necrophilia foundation
Wth
I’ll give his family 15 bucks for the skull and dispose of the rest. I know a guy.
Pay a local taxidermist to stuff you so your kid/friend/partner can have you hang out in their living room. I told my mom I’m gonna have her stuffed and posed like a bear.
Thinking about this now it makes sense why my mom picked my sister as the executor.
Regardless of the final resting place after the funeral - DON’T EMBALM. They’ll pressure your family into embalming to ‘ensure the dead look their best on the day of the funeral’, but refrigeration does the exact same thing. You might think it’s more ‘dignified’, but just do a quick google at what the process entails. It’s ALL smoke and mirrors, and I’d rather have people at my funeral actually understand what my body is doing at that point - not the image of what a ‘body at rest’ looks like from Hollywood.
Open casket funerals are weird.
Sometimes you want to be sure the motherfucker is dead.
the motherfucker
He prefers “Dad”.
My family has some experience with this
My mom’s cousin was a wonderful person, her husband, however, was an enormous piece of shit in just about every way you could imagine.
She got sick and died, he never had a funeral for her.
Then he up and died maybe a year or so later.
My mom was still listed as the executrix of their wills, so it fell on her to decide what to do with him.
And she decided on nothing. Let the coroner haul his body away and never claimed it.
After a while they cremate the remains, they hold onto them for a while to see if any other next of kin wants to claim them, then after a while they bury or scatter them somewhere if no one does.
I’m sure the exact specifics of how that all works varies a bit from place to place, but in general that’s gonna be an option. They can’t exactly force you to pay for a funeral you don’t want, and the local government has some plan on dealing with bodies no one wants to pony up for a funeral for (otherwise there’d be a lot of corpses of homeless people and such piling up in a freezer somewhere)
They can’t exactly force you to pay for a funeral you don’t want.
Where I’m at that’s exactly how it works. Even if you don’t accept the inheritance, funeral expenses are owed by the next of kin (jointly if there’s more than one in equal lineage).
They might not be able to force you to conduct the funeral, but they will enforce the costs regardless. If there’s an estate left, the next of kin can claim it back from the estate though, if somebody further down the line accepted the inheritance.
interesting. im guessing the parties that op has beef with still get paid in this scenario, though. they get paid with state money
Would the bodies really be at a funeral home though? Maybe like during covid when they were running out of space in some locations but generally I think it only gets sent to a business if the paperwork is done. Would be weird to just start sending random bodies to different funeral homes across the cities every time someone dies. (I have no idea btw)
I want my body dumped on the front steps of my least favorite living politician.
When they return my body to my next of kin they will dump it back on the politicians’ doorstep
I didn’t have a funeral plan but now I do.
Quite the game of hot potato
There is a German song with this theme called “Ne Leiche”.
My body is going to a medical school, to be used for student dissection. Once they are finished with it, it will be cremated. My relatives can have the ashes if they want, otherwise it will be disposed of. My name will go up on a plaque in a special memorial garden. It was pretty easy to organise, just a matter of signing consent forms with a witness. Family are ok with it.
There’s a chance my body will be rejected - infectious, too mangled, whatever - and in that case it’s bounced back to family to deal with. I favour forest burial wrapped in an old bedsheet.
Same. I can proudly announce that I finally got accepted into “Harvard Medical School”. 😉
bruh…
Yo how did you get that set up. I’ve been wanting to for years
I searched the university website for “body donation” and got a phone number and email address (dept of biomedical sciences).
There was a lot of info to read about what will happen. I had to let my doctor know so it’s on my medical record, and my best pal is down as the contact person. He has a phone number to ring so they can come and fetch my body asap, and decide if it’s suitable.
What inspired me was a documentary I saw years ago that interviewed a man who’d signed up for donation, then showed the process after he’d died, including dissection (from a distance). They also interviewed the students. It was very moving.
Just as a curious follow-up, did they go into what would happen if your body is rejected or is there already a back-up plan in place?
Direct cremation is the absolute chespest way to handle it. They’ll try to sell you a fancy urn, and may even say it’s illegal to use another type of container, but you could literally do what they did in The Big Lebowski and use a coffee can if you wanted. The guy who invented Pringles had his ashes put into a Pringles can. The ashes themselves come in a sealed plastic bag, anyway.
My mom’s are just in a wooden box I made for her when I was in highschool woodshop.
Cremation is fucked fir the environment tho.
TIL
It takes 285kWh of gas and 15kWh of electricity to cremate a single person. The CO2 this generates is roughly the same as an 800km car journey. Cremation also accounts for 16 per cent of the mercury pollution in the air, from dental fillings. (link)
In response to the environmental impact of traditional cremation, alternative methods such as alkaline hydrolysis, also known as water cremation, bio-cremation, or green cremation, have emerged as more eco-friendly options. Alkaline hydrolysis is a chemical process that uses water, heat, pressure, and alkaline chemicals to break down the body, resulting in a sterile liquid that can be safely released into the local wastewater treatment system or used as fertilizer, and bone residue that can be returned to the family. (link)
Guess I’m signing up to be goo!
Donating to a medical school is cheaper.
What would a medical school do with a Pringles can full of ash?
I dunno, but dangle a firework in it and you’ve got yourself a hell of a party popper.
Is there a Ralph’s nearby?
Left in the woods for dog walkers to find.
Or dropped in a peat bog dressed in medieval knights armor clutching a modded gameboy color.
Donate your body for medical students to dissect
This is harder to do than you might think. First of all you have to have it all arranged beforehand. You can’t do it last second. The bigger problem is a lot of places don’t have the facilities to come get a body from random places. On top of that they don’t want every body. Most places are looking for bodies that exhibit certain criteria. Certain diseases or certain disorders or anything that makes the medical useful for study.
When one of my grandfathers died, none of his children or ex-wives wanted anything to do with a funeral or burial arrangements. My parents found a place that accepted his alcoholism-ravaged body, and they took care of things. I’m not sure of the details, and seems likely it wasn’t a medical school, but some organization took the body “last minute”.
I’m surprised they have so many bodies to use
People are dying to volunteer.
Seconded. Many schools have programs that will help with funeral costs if you donate.
2 things that piss off the funeral industry
- Aquamation/water cremation/alkaline hydrolysis
- Human composting
Both are legal in my state. You should join the fight if they aren’t legal where you are.
Both are cheaper than burial. With aquamation you get back a bag of cremains just like with cremation. The only difference is instead of fire they boil you in an alkaline solution.
With composting it turns people into literal soil. You can take that back or donate it to a charity that is repairing a forest.
I second the Lemmy user who suggested Caitlyn Doughty and the Order of the Good Death.
I never expected Caitlin Doughty to be mentioned here. Anyways, if you want book recs read “Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs” by her.
Check out https://funerals.org/about/
