I'm going to get planted either at Arlington or Holly, with a little extra money for a vertical headstone, with minimum cost to the family. Unless I have grandchildren, there will be no one to mourne me, possibly friends, if they are still alive, most have preceded me.

After 42 years, the gubment can afford it.

No one says you have to be embalmed, if you shorten the length of the viewing to one day.

Burn 3 bodies, get the 4th one free. This was from a funeral director. After 3 corpses, it is so hot that if you put the 4th one in and leave it overnight, it is burnt by tomorrow.

Right. You need to get the burial done quickly unless you get stored in a cooler for a few days!;)

As far as I am concerned, what ever s cheapest. I'm dead and I see no reason to waste any money.

Don't the filters hold back a lot of that stuff?

In California, nobody except the mortuary's specially trained employees can get anywhere near a body more than 48hours old that has not been embalmed. Burial is ridiculously expensive, especially on the transportation end of it. We wound up cremating my father in law as that was the only thing we could afford. He was a Navy vet, and a veteran's organization would have paid for his burial, but the closest cooperating cemetery was almost 100miles away.
For me, I don't particularly care. Given my tastes for the outdoors, there probably won't be an opportunity for a burial for me.

At my friends funeral his girlfriend said that he was being creamated but there was a line so his ashes were not in the little wooden box on table in the funeral home yet.

I surmised they had his body in cold storage waiting its turn.

SSN 706
 

I'd kinda like to be cremated and my ashes spread at sea from a submarine. I'm not 100% sure if you can specify what kind of vessel you get thrown from, nor is my wife a big fan of cremation (good call on the fuel useage though...)

Burials at sea were always performed within 30 minutes of leaving the base (Groton CT), so we were relatively close to shore. There was (I was told, I was never topside to see this) a rifleman and a prayer/short saying spoken by a designated officer (only room for 4[?]) people in the conning tower of a modern sub) and then the ashes are thrown. I'm sure there is more to it than that, but whenever we were in the frantic state of going to sea, and the PA system announced "All hands - silence about the decks during burial"- it sent a chill down my spine (and reminded me to keep my head on straight when operating a nuclear power plant).
Lotsa good submariners on the bottom of the ocean, I was lucky to surface as many times as I submerged.

-John

Someday they will stop building cemeteries....you can't bury a billion people in concrete tombs with thousands of pounds of (wasted) raw materials for each person. Its insane. The whole country will be a cemetery in a few hundred years. In Europe they bury you in a wood box and re-use the grave sites every 35ish years....yet another thing they do correct/logically and we do insanely wrong.

What about chemical cremation?

Some day when it becomes a problem, they might. Europe has a land issue that we don't yet which is why they did it first. If you just dump the casket there in the hole, are you sure some stuff won't come up when there is a flood or some disaster?

In the European comic strip 2000AD and Tornado in the Judge Dredd world, they put the body in a casket, you pay your respects and it goes via conveyor belt into a hole in the wall. Body is plucked out of the casket and everything is recycled if you want to talk of efficiency.

They're just starting to introduce means of cooking the body down to a sludge with acid, saw something several months ago in a funeral industry magazine. Always looking for different ways to dispose of mortal remains.

As for embalming, the rules vary, depending on where you are and where the remains are going. In many cases, the funeral home may insist on it, if there will be a public viewing, or transportation to a distant cemetery or out of state.

Cremation timing can be tricky, because some crematoria will not complete the process until they have a signed death certificate, which can take several days...don't want to destroy evidence, just in case there is a question about what happened.

Aklim, you would be amazed how quickly human remains degrade. I was involved with a disinterment recently...gentleman had been interred in 1991, embalmed, in a hardwood casket with no vault or other outer container.

At the time of disinterment, some scraps of fabric were found, along with pieces of long bones and some rusty pieces of the metal mattress frame...that was it. Not much left.

there is some outfit that will first cremate you then turn your ashes into a precious stone...kinda interesting...a cardboard box in the pasture with all the other livestock that've been buried out there for generations will be fine for me.