One of those memes

[watervole]

 15 When you are dead would you prefer your body to be interred in a huge pyramid built in the centre of your hometown with many riches or put in a bin bag and thrown into a skip? 

Actually, I want to be composted.  Doesn't yet exist as an option, but basically find a cheap hole and toss me in it with nothing that isn't biodegradable. 

I'd quite like to be buried in my back garden.  that's legal, but can reduce the value of the house, so isn't really fair on my executors.

I want my family to hold a barn dance rather than a funeral per se. Much cheaper and I'm sure my ghost (in the unlikely event that there is any kind of life after death) would enjoy it far more.

Comments

[pensnest]

I think composting would be best, too.

There's a woodland burial ground not far from here, not sure if that's quite along the same lines, but it's more tempting than the possibility of cremation. But it would be nice to benefit one's own garden.

[legionseagle]

My parents had a woodland burial. It was very soothing.

[damerell]

We may have done this, but I'd like to be left until I'm a bit manky, ground into a disgusting slurry, and all 85 litres of me squirted into Boris Johnson's bodily orifices.

[watervole]

Snort!

[yalovetz]

Yeah, my mum has requested a green burial in her will, also known as a natural burial.

There's more info on natural burial in general on wikipedia and there's information about natural burial grounds on the Natural Death Centre website.

[eledonecirrhosa]

I want to be buried. With a headstone giving archaeologists permission to dig up what's left after a couple of centuries.

[watervole]

I like that one. I really don't feel possessive over my bones. They can analyse them in any way they like. (or use them to improve the calcium content of the soil...)

[katlinel]

I like the idea of rotting quietly in the earth, hopefully nourishing the soil to the benefit of the plants and insects around.

Friends of mine whose son died from cystic fibrosis buried his body in their garden, but had to purchase a small amount of land from the farmer who owned the field their garden backed onto in order to comply with regulations about distance from various things (not sure what), but I don't know if the law re this is different in England.

[igenlode]

I think being buried basically consists of being composted, which is why old burial grounds are so uneven as the graves sink... The original idea of burial I think was to prevent the corpses being dug up and dragged to pieces by scavengers, rather than to preserve the bodies (as in the case of American and Egyptian embalming), but of course oaken coffins and so on can delay the process of decay in extreme cases by hundreds of years.

(When researching "Phantom of the Opera" fan-fiction I came across the interesting phenomenon of the ossuaries in Brittany, where the soil is thin and poor, and the bones of the dead were removed and stacked above ground once the flesh had sufficiently decayed, in order to make more room in the churchyards... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-25300-5_5 )

Probably the best and quickest means of returning dead humans to a useful function in nature is to let the scavengers take their course. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sky-burial (I note that this again appears to originate in a lack of soil and a reluctance to waste it on interment!)

[watervole]

In olden times, they were buried in a wood coffin and a wool shroud. (wonderful what laws can be passed to aid industry...)

http://www.historyhouse.co.uk/articles/buried_in_wool.html

The other thing that really hit the Zoroastrians' burial practices was diclofenac... https://www.4vultures.org/2016/08/24/decline-of-indian-vultures-forced-the-parsis-to-change-their-traditions-and-accept-cremations-as-an-alternative-to-sky-burial/

[watervole]

Some interesting stuff there. Costs around £1000 the one closest to me. £350 of that is grave digging. I wonder if they allow family members the option on doing the digging and save the money.