i'd like to get scavenged by a wolverine. that'd be bad ass.

So a couple of thoughts:

- I'm going to be cremated (and I don't want to be embalmed).
- there used to be a tradition of leaving the loved one at home and there is a service in Seattle that can help you do that if you want a really traditional manner to say goodbye
- you could donate your body to science but keep in mind, you can't always say what will be done with it.
- you could also donate your body to the place in Tennessee that studies how bodies decompose to help law-enforcement better know what happens to people who get murdered (and their bodies dumped somewhere).

@1 I always wanted to have my body fed to sharks, but wolverines would now be a close second.

I am having a green burial. It involves a cedar handmade casket with a cotton mat inside and rope handles. You are buried in a certified green cemetery (Greenacres - Ferndale, WA) and your body and the casket naturally returns to the earth. Your headstone is an engraved river rock and you can choose a flowering type plant to be placed on top. There are no pesticides or herbicides used in the area so lots of little wildlife and very calm and peaceful.

We've got the Green Burial option here in Whatcom County. My spouse and I have purchased side by side plots in a meadow, our body will be wrapped in a linen sheath and buried-- no embalming, no grass to fertilize and cut, no statues or headstones. Riverstone marker is optional with name and dates. Our remains will become compost for the naturalized plantings (a tree and certain flowering plants) that we can start growing and tending there now, if we like. Memorial service to be held elsewhere.

I would rather that either I leave no effect on the earth (scavenger is good or cremation) or that my body go to good use (science, the guy that plasticizes them for art, etc). but I always figured that I won't care as I'll be dead. It'll be my kid's problem and he knows how to be cool.

When you're dead you're dead. If making a nice-sounding setup for your dead self is comforting, okay, but when I'm dead I'm not going to know anything about anything. Send my fleshmobile to science or something helpful.

I'm surprised at the number of people who have this all plotted out and locked down already. Am I inadvertently hanging around in some 40+ demographic?

Yup, I'll be dead, so what do I care?

My body's disposal will be someone else's problem, but I signed up for organ donation, so there's that.

Whatever they can't use, well, there's a dumpster somewhere with my name on it.

She is pretty great.

Am a female undertaker also (oooo, everybody look at me) &, to 7 & 8 I say-- it's not thinking of yourself so much as thinking about the ones you leave behind. The dead don't care of course, but the living do. They tend to care v. much.

Most of us die of old age. In varying ways, but almost always old. This means your organs & body are old, too.. & sadly, no longer viable to science or medicine. Everything is used up or ravaged by whatever finished you off. The donation programs will consider you for a moment, then check the box that says nope 99% of the time. If anything is ever viable, it's your corneas. Sightlife wakes me up in the middle of the night on a regular basis because they're in a hurry to harvest, bless them. The UW has a program that studies your brain if you die of Alzheimer's, which is quite common, but then release your body after. Your longbones could get taken too. But have been doing this for well over a decade & only seen approx. 2 entire bodies go to science. There's the rest of you left. Something must be done, right.

Green burial is not often done, but am hoping it will gain momentum. Also, as far as plotting this out, most people don't. & if they do, they wait until it's on the horizon. Usually 70s/80s. But, like I said up there, most people die of old age-- usually 70s, 80s, 90s, even 100s. We have some time to think about it.

I wonder if this chick's ever seen Six Feet Under