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Dealing with your future corpse

CapelDodger said:
I've made provision for a green burial in my will. I've also made provision for my heart to be taken out and delivered to the woman who broke it, which I'm pretty sure isn't legal anywhere. She'll appreciate the joke, though, which is why I love her so much.
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It probably won't be legal some day in the future when James Randi's ashes are blown into Yuri Geller's eyes, but I bet someone out there will make that happen.
 
quarky said:
becoming pig-slop is actually fairly reasonable. No shortage of pigs; they would gladly consume the slop that we become, and turn it into bacon.

I'm not sure if this would be a completely safe approach. Maybe.
Might prion-like disease vectors remain intact, with such a direct approach?
i don't know.
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Such as Kuru? Pigs may be similar enough to humans that it may be possible for them to harbor the disease, and pass it on to humans once again.
 
How about a rip through the shredder then into the MIlorganite processing line?

Or shred, then check out "Molecular Depolymerization", a system of heat and pressure that turns EVERYTHING into fuel oil.
 
You don't get to keep the coffin in Turkey and I assume other Islamic countries. The body goes into the hole wrapped in a shroud. Burial plots are also reused.
 
Rara said:
My son died two years ago. We live on a small island,so we had to travel to the mainland to collect him.

We hired a van,transferred to ferry,and then used our estate car to take him home .

He is buried on our land.He is in a cardboard coffin,and we have gradually brought stones from the beach to create a cairn.

Unfortunately,because we had to travel on a ferry,we also had to purchase a wooden coffin.

He killed himself,so there was an inquest about six months later,but he was released to us straight away.

Again,because we lived so far away from where he died,we had to use the services of a funeral director,to collect his body from the hospital (actually,I`m not sure where he was),until we arrived.

Both my husband and I will be buried here also. I had said,before my sons death,that I was to be buried in a shroud only. i now realise,that it is easier to handle a body in a coffin...or maybe some sort of board/sled?

my neighbour had to assist my husband in transferring him from one coffin to another. The funeral director suggested an internal body bag,and it was a great help.

The area where he is buried,will be fenced this year,as we will use it to move on tree saplings from being indoors, a tree nursery.

my only concern for our burials is having someone to dig the graves. My other sons did not feel able to help with my sons grave being dug....so who will dig ours.

Maybe,it won`t be so hard to bury us,as it tends to feel more "natural" to bury your parents,than to bury a young,22 years old,sibling.

my husband and I have talked of digging our own graves,and backfilling it with sand,to make subsequent grave digging easier.

we have stipulated most strongly,that very little,or even no money should be spent on funerals.

We had a memorial ceremony,for him,which was humanist (well just made up actually)

Bodies,coffins,graves...none of that bothers me,they are only the artefacts of death,the loss of a person isn`t about that,it is about their essential being missing.
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Rara, thank you for sharing that very personal story. Am I correct in thinking you are crofting on Shetland ?
 
I've always thought it was messed up how families go out of their way, especially poor families, to pay for a funeral and burial. It seems such a waste. When my mother died, I was 25 and had no idea really what to do, it was not expected. She had mentioned cremation in the past, and it was the least expensive means to an end, and I've always found funeral burial to be cheap and tacky.

She loved the Washington Peninsula, and made us drive there from Oklahoma every other year just about, having lived there when she was younger. We had a free service at the local Nazarene church she sometimes attended, and then had a nice road trip through her favorite places to visit ending at Ruby Beach in Washington, where we spread her ashes in the Pacific.

It was a good ritual, and it brought emotional closure in many ways. And we spread her ashes before a very distinct rock formation as the tide came in. So while there is no grave to visit, I always feel closest to her when I make the drive there and stand on that rock formation. We did the same thing for my father this summer.

I think I will want the same for me, though having a tree growing out of my body seems cool.

Having my skeleton artificially fossilized would be awesome too, but I made a thread about that and it's not as simple as it sounds.
 
Wowbagger said:
Why not donate your mortal bodies to science? It might be expensive, too. But, at least some benefit could come out of it.
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Ha.

My parents had to deal with the deaths/funerals of their parents while I was still an infant, so I have no memory of whatever difficulties and pain they encountered. Based on their experiences, my parents decided - over 40 years prior to their actual deaths - to donate their bodies to science, so as not to have to put their kids through the same ordeal. In order to minimize body transport distance (my dad was an engineer), they chose the UCLA Medical School, close to where they lived.

So when my mom died in late 2003, we called the number on her donation card, and UCLA came and picked her up and took her away. Then, a few months later, this happened:

UCLA Suspends Body-Donor Program After Alleged Abuses

Medical school's actions follow accusations that cadavers have been sold illegally to outsiders.


March 10, 2004|Charles Ornstein and Alan Zarembo | Times Staff Writers


The UCLA medical school announced Tuesday that it would indefinitely suspend, and perhaps permanently close, its body-donor program in response to a burgeoning scandal over the allegedly illegal sale of hundreds of cadavers.


The decision by top medical school and university administrators came amid a court hearing in which lawyers representing relatives of cadaver donors sought to force the closing of the program, arguing that it was in such disarray it could not function properly.

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UCLA had contended, both in court papers and at a news conference Monday, that closing the program, the oldest in the nation, would impair medical education and research.


But officials abandoned that position as disclosures mounted about the scope of the scandal.


"Partly because it's gotten so much widespread negative press, it seemed like it maybe made better sense" to suspend the program than operate it under a cloud, said Dr. Alan G. Robinson, UCLA's associate vice chancellor for medical sciences.


In other developments Tuesday, a major pharmaceutical company, Johnson & Johnson, acknowledged that a subsidiary had bought body parts from UCLA cadavers through a middleman, Ernest V. Nelson, who was arrested over the weekend on suspicion of receiving stolen property.


The subsidiary, Mitek, "did not knowingly receive samples that may have been obtained in an inappropriate way," Johnson & Johnson said in a written statement. "We are sensitive to the need that all samples are appropriately and properly obtained, stored and shipped."


Lawyers for the families of cadaver donors on Tuesday filed suit against Johnson & Johnson, alleging that the company should take responsibility for "accepting stolen parts."


Medical school officials said they wouldn't decide whether to reopen the willed-body program until they received suggestions from former Gov. George Deukmejian, who has agreed to oversee an administrative investigation and suggest reforms.


In the meantime, bodies that had been scheduled to go to UCLA were being sent to UC Irvine, which itself was embroiled in a scandal involving stolen body parts in 1999. At that time, the director was fired after allegedly selling six spines to a Phoenix research company for $5,000. Campus officials there say their program now runs well and they keep better track of bodies.


Phone calls to the UCLA program to report a death were being transferred to UC Irvine, said Michael Godsey, director of UC Irvine's program. That campus received its first UCLA cadaver Tuesday, but Godsey said UC Irvine would not use the UCLA cadavers unless the families give them permission.

"The only services we're providing is a place for the bodies to be taken and held in storage until the use can be determined," Godsey said.

At UCLA, the bodies in the refrigerator will remain there under lock and key, officials said. They could not say how many there are.
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Link to full article: http://articles.latimes.com/print/2004/mar/10/local/me-bodies10

Since the UCLA body donation program was shut down, we had to shift my dad to the only other body donation program in town: the USC Medical School. So when my lifelong Bruin fan dad passed away in 2004, he ended up in the hands of the crosstown rival.

Who knows where mom ended up.
 
My grandmother, who strangely though being one of the most strictly religious Christians I've known, was cremated. But only after donating her body to the OU Medical Center here i n Oklahoma City. 3 years or so after she died, we came home to find a large package had dislodged the mail box from the wall on our porch due to it's weight, and grandma's box was laying on the ground amidst pieces of of mail box.
 
Blue Bubble,yes we are crofters.
having private land makes all the difference. We had considered running the croft as a greenfield burial site,but there are too many problems,drainage,parking etc.
But if anyone needs a plot let me know....as long as your family does`nt want to park here..we`ll be fine.
 
Actually,my husband had at one time been the village grave digger....but an incident in a very wet grave...both of us trying to bail it out as the coffin was taken into the church..put paid to that.

The council then took it over and now use a small digger...oh and they had the grave yard drained...after being told for many years it needed doing.

It was simultaneously, the most embarrassing and hilarious moment of my life. knee deep in water and mud,trying to discretely empty the grave,while the whole village pretended they could not see what was going on.
 
Halfcentaur said:
Having my skeleton artificially fossilized would be awesome too, but I made a thread about that and it's not as simple as it sounds.
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Really? What's the problem with it? I mean, take out the organs that anyone could need and mascerate the my remains, but then dip them in tree sap and let it harden properly and you've got a fossil. In fact, you don't really NEED to take the organs out--we've got numerous examples of lizards and the like that have been preserved in amber--but it's helps tip the odds in your favor. Have yourself buried in a bajada in Death or Pahrump Valley, and you'll stick around for a long, long, long time.

Yes, I've thought about this a bit too much. It's an occupational hazard--once you start studying taphonomy things like planning your own funeral at 27 years old don't bother you.

In fact, if it weren't for my facination with turning myself into a fossil I'd donate myself to a body farm. They probably represent the greatest (in terms of both the quality of the data and the size of the dataset) study of taphonomy in human history for large mammals. I've been toying with the idea of contacting one to ask about that kind of thing, but my wife gets upset when I get put on new federal watch lists (I know I'm on the FBI and CIA watch list, because I or my relatives have been contacted by both agencies).

quarky said:
Modern western cultures lean over backwards to do the opposite; preserve the state of deadness for as long as possible
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It's the way we deal with things. Take a look at the EPA guidelines for sanitary landfills sometime--the whole goal is to keep the garbage in the same form for as long as possible.

I will say that you're mistaken on Christian views, though. Up until very recently (like, within my lifetime) Roman Catholic dogma, at least, was that the body would physically rise from the dead when Jesus returned. This lead to a fun conversation between me and a priest. I've got enough genetic problems that I don't WANT my current body. If I make it to be raised from the dead and I get this crapy thing back, Jesus and I are going to have a long discussion involving my maul. Apparently, threatening to club Jesus is something the RCC finds offensive.
 
Having the shrunken head of a dead loved one would be pretty cool. Hanging from the rear-view mirror.
 
I assume it would be disrespectful to rig it so that the jaw moved and played a recording, so it looks like it's telling really bad jokes?
 
Dinwar said:
Really? What's the problem with it? I mean, take out the organs that anyone could need and mascerate the my remains, but then dip them in tree sap and let it harden properly and you've got a fossil. In fact, you don't really NEED to take the organs out--we've got numerous examples of lizards and the like that have been preserved in amber--but it's helps tip the odds in your favor. Have yourself buried in a bajada in Death or Pahrump Valley, and you'll stick around for a long, long, long time.
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How about a real, mineral-replacement sort of fossil? If there was a recipe for that, it'd be awesome. Especially if the result were a pretty, colorful rock---a marble-y, agate-y sort of thing.

What do you think of "Doctor Fossil's Dermestid Beetle and Serpentinization Parlor" as a name for a mortuary?
 
ben m said:
How about a real, mineral-replacement sort of fossil?
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The term "fossil" technically means "anything that's biological in origin and more than 10,000 years old". Mineralization, permineralization, casts, and molds are merely the most common types of fossils--they hardly represent the entire spectrum. I've even found bone that has has NOTHING done to it--it just sat there in the mud by a river bank for 10,000 years. It's a fossil (it'd better be--that civil engineer will be MAD if he finds out I diverted his excavator for no reason!).

But your point is valid. And I can think of several ways to do this. The simplest would be to cut a hole in the bone and inject clay minerals into it, then bake it to make the bone ceramic. Another way would be to put it in some water that's super-saturated with silica, and in such a condition that the water disolves calcite. I've seen a lot of brachiopod and crinoid fossils that are exactly that (there's a transition from calcite-depositing to silica-depositing water in the ocean). Finally, make a mold of the bone out of clay and fire it. It's simple, cheap, and is no different than a huge number of fossils we have. You can even make a cast if you want to. Or, you can make the mold out of something semi-flexible, and make the cast out of metal. Now there's a thought--a bronze skeleton of me. I like that idea! :D

What do you think of "Doctor Fossil's Dermestid Beetle and Serpentinization Parlor" as a name for a mortuary?
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I'd buy stock in it, if you'd let me burrow your beetles from time to time. The wife objects to having flesh-eating bugs in the house for some reason. I think she never really understood what marrying a paleontologist involved (at least I'm not trying to do a cold-water masceration).
 
Dinwar said:
I assume it would be disrespectful to rig it so that the jaw moved and played a recording, so it looks like it's telling really bad jokes?
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Depending on your family history, what you suggest would show the utmost respect.
 
Dinwar said:
The term "fossil" technically means "anything that's biological in origin and more than 10,000 years old".
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So my idea of encasing the body in a transparent acrylic block and irradiating it to prevent decomposition would yield a product that would some day be considered a fossil?

Good to know.
 
Yup.

There are areas where the time averaging (basically mixing over time) is more than 10,000 years--modern mollusk shells in areas of the Gulf of Mexico, for example, may lie next to fossil shells. And there are fossils we dig out of the rock that are unaltered--except for the fact that the critter is no longer in it, they look like they did when the animal was alive. There's no way, barring oxygen/carbon isotope analysis, to determine how old it is, because the species is still around.
 
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