What to Do With My Dead Body?

It is quite the conundrum

It is a weird thing to say but never in my long life have I ever attended a funeral. Perhaps it was by fortuitous circumstances that I was never able to attend one. I have seen funerals depicted in movies and on TV and they just seem so disgusting to me. Why would anyone want such a morose event to occur in response to their kicking of the old bucket? Is it by decree of ego?

But once the body has ceased functioning the ego is gone along with it. Once the bucket has been kicked there is no longer any ego to be assuaged. Funerals are a celebration of an ego that no longer exists.

So I have put it in my will that there is not to be any funeral when I kick the bucket. No funeral, no wake, no memorial, no party, and no obituary. An obituary, after all, is an invasion of one’s privacy, right? And I’m a firm believer in our God-given right to privacy. We should be able to die in private.

That leaves us with the problem of what to do with our discarded bodies. Our bodies are NOT who we are. They are merely vehicles we temporarily inhabit in order to navigate this seemingly physical reality. When we exit the body that body should return to the Earth from which it came. That is what I firmly believe anyway.

But so many humans mistake our bodies and brains for who we are. So they embalm the body in order to preserve it then stick it in a box to prevent it from returning quickly to the Earth, and then they stick the box in the ground and place a gravestone above the box to commemorate and memorialize the dead body. This is so creepy and unnatural!

If you’re going to memorialize me, memorialize my body of work; the hundreds of thousands if not millions of words that I wrote during the time that I inhabited a body. Don’t memorialize the dead body. Don’t commemorate my dead body with a polished piece of granite marking where that dead body is being held captive from the elements.

Cemeteries creep me out.

In deciding what I want done with the body/vehicle I discard when I kick the bucket my main concern has been that the body returns as quickly as possible to the earth and that there is no physical evidence left of where that body was discarded.

Of course, it is also very important — and this, too, is in my will — that the body is not to be touched for 78 hours immediately following laying it down. This is important for the retrieval and uploading of the information stored in the body. After those initial 78 hours the body should then be quickly returned to the planet it is part of. (And that planet is Planet Earth, NOT Mars!)

I have always been intrigued by the funerary rites of the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism. After the proper three days of rest, the naked body of the deceased was placed atop a funeral pyre, allowing the vultures to come and pick it clean to the bones. The bones and the funeral pyre were then burned to the ground. This makes so much sense to me.

It is very similar to the funerary rites of several Native American peoples, who also built funeral pyres to cremate the dead bodies of their loved ones. Sadly, they never offered the vultures lunch. They burned the bodies straight away, believing that the smoke from the burning body/vehicle carried the soul up to heaven. Of course, the soul, once detached from a physical body does not need smoke nor anything else to navigate with.

Then there is the funerary rite of dumping a dead body into the ocean to be eaten by the fishies. While I like this idea, I am not a water sign but rather a fire sign. I’ve always preferred cremation over earth or water burials.

And nowadays there is a new idea that has come to light. It is the idea of a death pod where the dead body is ground up and placed in a pod from which a tree is grown and fertilized. Being a rabid tree-lover, I kind of like this new idea. But, then again, it seems like a lot of work.

While for most of my life I have preferred cremation over any other way of disposing of my dead body, I have recently changed my mind. Yes, cremation is still a great option but with climate change and an atmosphere full of pollution do we really need to be sending more smoke up into the atmosphere? Is there a greener way to kick the bucket?

Recently, I changed my will to reflect the new way that I want my physical body/vehicle to be disposed of when I finally decide to move on. I want my naked body to be taken to an undisclosed location way, way, way out in the middle of the desert and dumped there to be picked clean by the vultures and the coyotes and the bobcats and the bugs. The notion of my bones bleaching in the hot desert sun is very comforting to me. And it would be nice to know that some animals would get fed and the ground would get fertilized.

But there is still a small problem with this solution. The problem is that I no longer live in the desert. My body would have to transported a long, long way in order to be dumped in the desert. Unless it was transported by an electric vehicle, that would not be very green.

The only solution to this would be to move to the desert before I kick the bucket. Then it would only be a very short drive to the undisclosed location. Of course, then there would be the carbon burning involved in moving to the desert. Boy, kicking the bucket sure can be complicated.

Luckily, I still have plenty of time left to think about it.

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved.