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.
Donate your body to science. My mother did that. She used to joke that they would put her body in a car trunk in the desert, or some other location, and see what time and decay did so they could measure the process. For all I know, that’s literally where her body is right now. They also do other experiments. Then, after a few years, they return cremated remains to you.
Try to find an institution that will take your body. I’ve looked into it. There’s a place in a neighboring state that will take mine, but if I die more than 100 miles from them, someone will need to arrange to transport the body to them. There’s not much more to it for me.
Edit to alter link to a better site
Word of warning though, check out the company before you do so. My mother in law was in the medical field and had a coworker that did this. The company ended up refusing the body because they had too many bodies. I’ve also heard of your body being used to test munitions, which is pretty much the opposite of what a lot of people would want.
Hey look, once my body is donated it’s not my business what they do with it. I’m the same way that once I hand over spare change to the guy on the street, it’s not my business what he does with it.
Yeah, but if, like OP, the intent of donating your body is to ensure that one exploitative industry (the funeral industry) doesn’t profit from your death, you probably also want to make sure that other industries (like the military industrial complex) that you also don’t like aren’t going to be able to benefit either.
Sanity in the comments. Huh. Interesting find
Yes, that is possible. The paperwork for the place I am looking into specifically asks if you object to that and a number of other possible uses to which they may put your remains.
Not that I’d personally care, but I don’t know that I’d trust that they wouldn’t just ignore those instructions. Who would call them out?
Indeed, dead men tell no tales, right? I’m with you though, I said yes to all the questions. I don’t care if they shoot my corpse, or beat it with a bat, or use it as a party favor at the lab Christmas party. It’s just meat, as far as I’m concerned and if their experiments help posterity then I’m all for it.
i don’t care what my corpse is used for if it helps people
Testing how shit blows you up is a weird way to describe ‘helping people’
tbh being blown up would be pretty cool
Also keep in mind if this is your wish you can’t be an organ donor. Having a rotting corpse without any organs is a pretty unrealistic scenario and the data isn’t as useful.
Among the other warnings here, if getting the cremains is important to you, be careful; my mother did this and we never got anything back. We almost didn’t get anything of my father back, but my sister was tenacious.
Just so you’re aware, it’s my understanding that during cremation you’re likely getting first only some of the remains back and second likely not only theirs. I don’t think it matters, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the remains of your father was some other ashes entirely. It doesn’t really matter though. It’s just a bunch of carbon at the end of the day.
John Oliver did a story on that one for people in the US. Donating your body to science doesn’t mean it’ll end up as dissected cadaver for medical students.
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.
I want to be turned into a drone. I’ll be just like this cat. It will be a much larger version. Used for deliveries or emergency services. And I will be completely naked.
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”.
Don’t die. That’ll teach them.
That’s my plan. So far it’s working out!
You’ll get bored eventually.
It’s been 20 hours so far since you last reported, Still holding up?
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.
A big part of your question hinges upon where you call home. Some countries have strickt restrictions.
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.
You can shop around for crematoriums near you. Most of them in the US pick up the body as part of their fee. $300-800 to cremate a body. They mail you the ashes in a plastic bag. Some will offer urns, but that’s an extra charge you can skip. Most states don’t consider burying ashes the same as burying a body. Different laws. You can prepay, and have a card in your wallet with the company’s info on it in case someone stumbles upon your body.
My wife and I have spoken about what we want done. My plan for her is to cremate her, then go to a local nursery and find a nice hearty, long living, low-maintenance flowering tree she would have liked and plant her and the tree in my back yard.
Only half-jokingly, my suggestion te my wife is to have me cremated, then mix my ashes in with some concrete to make a life-sized statue of me.
Stick me on the front lawn and dress me up for holidays, put a pointy hat on me and make a giant lawn gnome, stick a bowl on my head to use as a bird bath, or dump me at a cemetery and let me be my own headstone, doesn’t really matter to me, I’ll be dead, I won’t care, but I figure she might as well be able to get a chuckle out of it, and maybe ruffle the feathers of some HOA Karen while she’s at it.
She actually really likes the idea. She wants to have my statue posed like Buddy Christ from Dogma.
And maybe go ahead and do the same with the ashes of any dogs I’ve had and stick them right next to me. Better than having them take up space on the mantle forever, and they’re more deserving of a monument than I’ll ever be.
Bonus, she’ll think of you and visit you way more often than if you were shoved in a back corner of a cemetary.
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”. 😉
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?
Well then it’s “as you were” - back to your executor/family/friends to decide what to do. I personally don’t care. I’ll be dead, and I’ve done my best to avoid the fuss and expense.
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 Caitlin Doughty and the Order of the Good Death.
Edit: spelling
If you really want to stick it to the funeral industry, and you’re including crematoriums and all other aspects in that, I think the only option is burial at sea.
Put it in your will that you want your friends and family to go on a deep-sea fishing cruise. Specify they must bring you along, and once they reach the approved and legal dumping location and have you naked and weighted so you sink, they can raise their glasses, make a toast, and pitch you over the side.
Meant to include this link:
Out of all the options, this one seems like the best to fulfill OPs intentions, although if you dont know someone with a boat, it does not make it cheaper.
Plus. funerals are for the living, not the dead. Some families may want more than GPS coordinates as a headstone (or they will need to put one elsewhere).
I personally would be fine with this disposal method for myself, assuming it was not too inconvienent or costly for others.
My family tends to be less concerned with our remains. My grandfather used to say that when he died we should just “jam a ham bone up my ass and let the dogs drag me away.”
Never quite understood what the purpose of the ham bone up the ass was, but I don’t judge. No kink-shaming.
Edit: I should add, we did not shove anything up his ass and let the dogs drag him away. He was cremated. His instructions were to proceed with the cremation immediately with no time for family to say goodbye. However, my grandmother and my father (only child) decided to ignore that. We met at the funeral home before the cremation and just sat in the room with him.
To this day, he’s still the best looking dead person I’ve ever seen. He was dead, and he looked it, but he looked like himself. Just dead. He looked normal, not some plastic, uncanny-valley version of himself that someone thought he should look like.
The cheapest method is to abandon the body. People die without family all the time and the State has a method to dispose of unclaimed corpses. Cost $0
That doesn’t stick it to the industry though. Still gets them paid. It’s not about saving the money from what I can tell
Abandon the body on the doorstep of the funeral company you’re angriest at. If there are several, first disassemble the body into as many pieces as there are doorsteps.
And then the state foots the bill…providing money to the company you are angriest at. That doesn’t work for OP’s scenario
I agree with this sentiment. It’s insane to me that people need to cough up thousands of dollars to see their loved one off. It’s so wrong, although I do accept that funeral providers can’t simply give away their services for free. I would support a taxation that had a provision for funerary needs for all citizens. Universal death care. I mean, we’re all gonna die. It’s not like you can say “oh boo hoo I’m paying all this tax just for some other cunt to die on my dime??” because your day will come soon enough and you don’t want your family having to blow their savings on putting you in a hole.
I wanna be harvested for organs like a Chinese dissident, and whatever is left can be mulched and used to grow trees or something.
But if we’re talking “cheapest”, in the UK and Ireland there’s a pauper’s grave thing where the state will put you in a very basic grave and with a very basic marker. Not sure if you need to be poor to qualify, or if they’ll just do it when asked.
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.
I’m surprised they have so many bodies to use
Seconded. Many schools have programs that will help with funeral costs if you donate.
