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Cremation or burial?

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20:10 / 13.10.03

I have just been in the Dolomites (in Italy) scattering my father's ashes. We scattered them on the top of Sass Pordoi, a mountain with, in part, this view:

It was his request; he was a successful landscape photographer and the Dolomites are what inspired him to try for this career.

It's interesting the locations people choose and the reasons they choose that particular place and I was thinking, if you wanted to be cremated, where would you have your ashes scattered? Or do you think you would rather be buried?

21:06 / 13.10.03

cremation after useful organs ave been extracted for use by NHS hospital/grey aliens. not sure i have much preference where since i'll end up dissipated all over the world...

Spyder Todd 2008

21:26 / 13.10.03

I'd want to go all "Squadron Supreme" and have my ashes put in the ink of a story of mine. But I'm weird like that.

21:31 / 13.10.03

Olulabelle - what a fantastic landscape!

Totally burial for me (yeah - in the rain, after a funeral procession with beplumed horses, etc). And I want people to sing hymns, wear black, and cry.

21:46 / 13.10.03

Neither, I would like taxidermy performed on me. Then I want animitronics put into my arms. Then I want to be placed into a giant cuckoo clock. From which I will randomly emerge and announce the time. Ideally I could wink and give a thumbs up or point like the fonze, this will depend on how far animitronics have come by the time i die. I will leave it to someone in my will.

21:49 / 13.10.03

not to make light of your your father's passing Olulabelle, but this is something i have been mulling over for some time as the ultimate revenge on my family members.

21:58 / 13.10.03

LOL - Oh, no, no - that's what is interesting. This isn't intended to be a gloomy discussion about death, more so about how you view it/yourself after you have gone.

22:41 / 13.10.03

olulabelle, I'm sorry to hear about your dad.

as for me, I want to be cremated - why waste the space? you can also be composted, but that's not really available around here (yet).

I thought it would be cool to have my ashes put in small vials and distributed to anyone who wants them at the funeral. that way, people who want to have a hand in what happens to "me" can do what makes THEM feel good. after all, funerals and all that shit are for the living, not the dead. if they feel that the right place for me is with them always, that's where I'll be. if they get a kick out of flushing my remains down the toilet, that's what they'll get.

I doubt anyone would do it

22:45 / 13.10.03

I would, I think it's a wicked idea. I have to say I'd be a keeper though, just because it'd feel all a bit *wrong* to go flushing someone down the loo.

07:26 / 14.10.03

O: Sorry to hear about your dad. My dad's ashes are still sat in our front room. My mum says he's waiting for the snooker to come on. I'd like to take the ashes back to Jamaica and scatter them one day but I doubt if I ever will. he didn't express a wish either way.

I think I'd like to be put back in the Earth myself, having taken so much out of it. Mind you, hopefully when I go back in I'm going to be a (hopefully) a malnourished wrinkly old stick of rind so I won't exactly be shoring up the ecosystem. Nice to think that someone maybe be using me as oil in a few hundred millenia hence, though. I did see something a while back that gave details on ecofriendly coffins - it was linked in with an annual exhibition of weird new coffins, I think. Will post it here if I can find it.

07:43 / 14.10.03

I want to be buried, and I want a perspex headstone. I've yet to find anywhere that would allow that, though - the rules here in the UK seem pretty strict. You pretty much have to conform even when you're dead, which sucks big time.

07:45 / 14.10.03

Can I ask why people care what happens to them after they're gone? I'm not being flippant, I'm just curious why people are so concerned with what happens with their own body after they've left it.

08:06 / 14.10.03

Dunno Jub, as to why I care, I don't know if I will when I'm on my deathbed, but one important part of things is to give the family and friends an oppotunity for rememberance and "closure" - horrible piece of jargon that, and you never really close these things fully, but you know what I mean. We've got to have our rituals for these rites of passage.

Tryphena Absent

08:34 / 14.10.03

I want everyone to sing Jerusalem and sob. Then I wish to be burnt in a Crematorium (I would like an open pier. Damn the law.) and then I want my ashes stuck in the sea by a load of people wearing black with their hair streaming in the wind.

Tryphena Absent

08:35 / 14.10.03

And they better be standing on top of a white cliff and not on some lame beach. My ashes want to crash in to rock, not get washed up with the seaweed.

09:54 / 14.10.03

Good for you, olulabelle, giving your dad such a romantic send off.

Full Eva Peron for me when I go, with all the restraint and string arrangements of a Douglas Sirk movie. I want policemen in leather on horses doing crowd control because of the number of grieving mourners. I want every greenhouse in Iceland and in Holland emptied of lilies for strewing by those cathartically and extravagently grieving. No Oxford Street store will have any black bombazine left because of all the preparations for my grandes pompes funèbres.

I want Madonna, Cher and Kylie to form a gospel choir. I want the Pope wheeled in to apologise for all the grief he has caused and to announce that homosexuals henceforward will in fact go to Heaven like everyone else, only instead of virgins, harp and halo, we all get forty men with bike shorts and loose morals each.

I want Ganesh to read some Auden but not the ubiquitous Funeral Blues. Then he can throw himself on my funeral pyre. Or probably not. I wouldn't fancy him with all the crispy bits. No doubt he'll be comforted by Cherry Bomb, Mourner-in-Chief, and she'll take him out to Duckie and help him discover his joie de vivre and a new paramour.

My ashes to be scattered on the beach at Palolem in the south of Goa please. By Anjelica Huston.

I don't want any fuss...

10:03 / 14.10.03

no fuss for high maintenance xoc!

10:06 / 14.10.03

I want a viking funral with flaming arrows and plenty mead, but i want to be sent of in a flaming car straeking down the moterway for all the world the world to flee

10:28 / 14.10.03

I used to think cremation but then I went to a funeral early this year which changed my mind.
It was for a family member who commited suicide. Her family were Quakers and she was buried in a wicker coffin in a grave dug and filled in by members of her own family. The grave was in the grounds of their meeting house where she used to play as a child and was unmarked so that eventually it will just become part of the rest of the garden.
There was something very personal, appropriate and environmentally sound about the whole thing.

Tryphena Absent

10:36 / 14.10.03

I love Quakers.

11:26 / 14.10.03

Okay, this would never happen due to laws and a lack of accomplices but this is honestly what I would have with my druthers.

Closed casket funeral with me not actually inside said casket. In actuality my body has been butchered, cooked up, and liberally distributed throughout the complementary food available at the funeral (or wake) in a discreet manner. It's strange, because this appeals to both the practical joker in me and my more sentimental side at the same time.

hanabius yamamura

13:40 / 14.10.03

... and apparently, czernobog, according to a programme i watched on the national geographic channel, something similar happened in some polynesian/micronesian(?)cultures until about 70-ish years ago ... it had something to do with incorporating the deceased member of your family into yourself so they would never truly leave ...

anyway, personally, i'd like cremated then put in an appropriate container and taken up in the space shuttle ... once up in orbit, i'd either be ejected into space to either orbit the planet or drift off somewhere or, preferably, be scattered in space so some of me would drift off and kind-of be 'one' with everything and some of me could drift back to earth - might make a nice meteor shower of sorts as well...

hanabius yamamura

13:42 / 14.10.03

... i should hasten to add, the cultures in the programme knew what they were eating ...

13:43 / 14.10.03

I keep disturbing my family with the request to "chop it up for parts, burn the rest, mix it with glitter, and throw it in the Atlantic."

I think they know I'm serious. Even about the glitter, though that is just for a nice shiny dramatic effect -- moonlight, water, sparkles, all that. I've always had a very strong tie to the water and to the ocean in particular. Since they don't take too kindly to just dumping bodies in it whole around here, well, I might as well be useful about it.

Spyder Todd 2008

14:41 / 14.10.03

Question, could I be cremated and still have a headstone somewhere? Because I really really want a headstone.

My biggest fear with cremation is that I'd go into a serious trance, and everyone would think I was dead, and then they'd fry me just as I was coming out of it....
But barring that, I'd still go with the ink thing.

14:44 / 14.10.03

Would that be a lot worse than waking up in a box 6 feet underground Spyder?
*shivers*

14:57 / 14.10.03

You can be cremated and your ashes can then be buried with a headstone. Your family could erect a headstone in the back garden...

16:50 / 14.10.03

hmm, Kitster, that's very tricky from a legal perspective, I fear. I know this because Jonny 'Animal Magic' Morris told me. He wanted to bury his wife in the garden when she passed away, and they got all shirty with him.

And as for this anthrophagia malarchy, didn't the savages get some awful BSE-type brain disease and die out 'cos they scoffed their deceased relatives?

i'd like cremated then put in an appropriate container and taken up in the space shuttle

Why not just wait until you're old and join a shuttle crewe? Hell, it's a guaranteed way of getting your ashes scattered in space from what I hear.*

I'm very glad of this thread, because until today I thought a dolomite was a sort of pervert.

* Dear America, I am v.sorry. I am a bad person.

17:47 / 14.10.03

Kuru, Bill, quite right. But all you have to do is make me into sausages that contain no brain nor cerebrospinal fluid and you should be fine. Wasn't there a liberal peer who created a fuss a few years back by demanding to be made into cat food when he went?

The Zoroastrians (Parsees), thinking fire holy as they do, refuse to burn their dead and instead place them on a high plinth (like The Towers of Silence in Bombay) for hungry cultures to recycle. Having problems these days because of a lack of vultures. Tibetans do similar and call it Sky Burial. Seems quite romantic, really.

I might stipulate that I want to be smeared in tuna juice and recycled by penguins but I'd have to be made into bite sized chunks first.

All very well and good this speculation but I really don't care one way or the other what happens when I'm just gristle without animation. It's all about easing the process for those who remain and who care enough to miss me. Ganesh suggested once that I should be plasticised by Gunter von Hagens and displayed in the British Museum or some gloomy, gothy fetish club. If it means I continue to serve some purpose and edify someone, cool by me.

I can't, in all seriousness, imagine a better send off than being scattered to the four winds in those Dolomites. Something less majestic and a bit camper might be more appropriate for me and those dear to me.

I have a friend whose family abjures all the funeral stuff. Bodies go to medical science. When the University Medical School gets in touch to alert the family to the final farewell, which they organise a year or more later, they don't go to that. They seem to cope fine with it but I've always been grateful for some rite to mark the loss, giving the chance to do some concentrated grieving to help you move forward again.

17:50 / 14.10.03

Oops. for hungry cultures to recycle

That would be the von Hagens option then. Or maybe some remote tribe in New Guinea might be prevailed upon to deify me.

18:44 / 14.10.03

Like Spyder, I used to want a headstone, but be cremated, and my ashes to be in a little clear bubble in the stone.

But now, so long as I was definetaly dead, and there was available space, I think I'd like buried. My great-aunt died last year, and was cremated. It seemed quite impersonal (probably was just that particuarar place + service, mind), and at the end, they pushed the coffin, it rolled down the slope to be burned. Reminded me all too much of buying a loaf of bread at safeways. However, when I went to Dave's funeral this year, it was a burial, and it seemed a lot more emotional and meaningful.

Saying that, where Olulabelle's dad is is beautiful, and obviously meant a lot to him, but im not very fussy- i dont have much emotional connection with anywhere, really.

But i still want a (very loud) bell attachted to my arm. Though after having my organs donated, there's probably less chance of still being alive.

18:57 / 14.10.03

I've always said I wanted to be put out to sea in a burning boat. Something a bit larger than a canoe. With a guitar in my hands.

19:18 / 14.10.03

Xoc got there before me; I'd like a sky burial (with vulture ratehr than culture, I don't like natural yoghurt)

07:41 / 15.10.03

I remember reading a story about Darius - ruler of the Persian Empire - decreeing custom as king, after the Greeks he consulted said they would only ever bury their dead, and Callatiae he asked said eating their dead was the only respectful thing to do.

11:05 / 15.10.03

all you have to do is make me into sausages that contain no brain nor cerebrospinal fluid and you should be fine.

So, basically, even in death all you're thinking about is getting young Posters gagging on a mouthful of Xoc sausage? You should ashamed.

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