in dealing with the Industry of Death.
I have been intending to write this article for quite a while, over 10 years in fact. The issue is death, or more specifically, what happens to you when you die and more importantly, what happens to your family and their well-being. In December of 1994, 15 days before Christmas, my mother passed away, leaving three children and two grandchildren. She had prepared a will and had chosen an executor for the estate. I was not so cursed as to have been named executor, and I have no particular complaints with how my sister chose to perform that job. Where the problems arose was the funeral home and the costs that they gave the grieving children. As a rational adult, you might want to cruise the choices available without a Funeral Director (who is a salesman for a Funeral Home, and so has a financial interest in your choice) or direct need staring you in the face.
What happens when you die.
In the United States, when a person dies, the funeral industry seizes your remains and as high a percentage of your assets and your family's assets as your survivors are able to give. This is not a painful thing for you, since death ends physical pain, but it is likely to be a hugely painful experience for the people who are charged with the responsibility to decide the exact method and style of your internment.
The best of conventional wisdom is shown by people who choose a local funeral home and prepay for a specific level of service, such as which casket, which burial site and how big a service. The best result of the best conventional wisdom is that they tend to lock your survivors in to the services of a specific provider with little or no consideration about what might be the best choice. What is really good about this level of pre-planning is that your surviving family will not be forced to make “market decisions” surrounding the death of a loved one, namely you. I don't care how old your children are, they are not prepared for the marketing machine that starts rolling when they enter a funeral home. There are few more emotional decisions than those surrounding the end destination of one's mortal remains. It is not possible to be unmoved by the myriad choices offered by the chosen funeral home, but you might be surprised to know that there are several choices that the funeral directors forget to mention.
One of the things funeral directors will tell you, or your heirs if they are required to make these decisions for you, is that embalming is required by law. If you have chosen to will your body to science, embalming voids the agreement. Your organs cannot be given to others as life-giving donations if your body has been embalmed, and schools that would have accepted this offer are not going to do so, and you have to pay the charge for this “service” even if it was not requested.
The two main choices offered by conventional funeral homes and Internet funeral services:
Less conventional choices include
The hardest part of this artificial choice is the emotion that comes into play. If you believe you need to raise a Taj Mahal to the memory of the deceased, or a pyramid, the costs are really going to soar. If you want this “last goodbye” to show the community, or the family or the deceased how much you valued your lost loved-one, this is understandable and every heart goes out to you in your loss. This is a market condition that funeral homes have enjoyed since the beginning of time and there is no evidence that they are going to start turning the bereaved away any more than hospitals turn away the ill with ability to pay.
The simplest solution is to have no estate of value to leave and no heirs to whom it may be bequeathed, however this is not the most common choice people seem to have made. As a rational adult, I am planning to leave my body to science and I will let you know how to do that before the end of this essay. I don't suppose you need any compelling reasons to use internment or cremation. As you have heard all the compelling arguments for years and you probably already have a choice made of those two, whether you ever tell anybody the choice or not. My bullet-list above is based on average costs involved for basic services. My own decision is based on the costs and my staggering egotism. The average cost of a casket these days could pay off the note on the average car, and I would rather have my loved ones spend the money on reducing the estate's debt than buy finely-crafted hardwood, brass or steel with luxury upholstery that will be dropped into a hole in the ground and (hopefully) never seen again. There is essentially no resale market for used caskets. My ego is involved in that I would love to be part of a cure for some (currently) incurable disease, or have my skeleton on display in a museum,
“On the left is the skeleton showing the level of surgical expertise in the late 20th century. Note the crudely trepanned skull. This subject had circular drainage holes actually cut through the bone of the skull to relieve the pressure of an embolism. Surprisingly, the subject, Wolf Halton, lived many more years and taught classes in the now-obsolete field of Informational Technology. Today's medical science have made these crude saw-cut drains unnecessary. Ahead, on the right is yet another survivor of the last millennium's crude surgical practices...”
I just enjoy the image, knowing that at the same time, I cut my heirs' funeral costs to nothing and got a neat headstone as well. Yes, I know that future generations will never know how well I made coffee or sang in the choir. My close family will not forget me entirely, but I hope they move on from the worst memories they carry. I strongly doubt that the family will remember me the more fondly because it cost them more financially and emotionally to have me properly disposed of. I teach by the example I live, and probably you do too, unless you have a very good publicist. The final lesson I want to teach is that I can continue to be a productive member of society even after I have passed away, and you can be too.
How I am going to do that
A quick Google.com search shows me 321,000 hits for “Donate my body to science” which gives me the feeling that there is a competition for my donation that I had never imagined. One useful site is http://www.livingbank.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Whole_Body_Donation. This site has a list of medical schools in each state that has a “Willed Body Program.” Once I have chosen my destination, I have to make sure I get all the proper forms filled out and that my heirs are aware of my decision, so they aren't buffaloed into doing anything, like getting me embalmed, that could make my preparations useless. There are laws prohibiting schools from buying human remains from private citizens, and so the recipients are not going to pay your heirs a princely sum for your donated remains, but for the most part, they will pay for transportation and eventual cremation. I am not going to leave this to my heirs to decide, because I have first-hand experience as an heir and know that this is one little chore that has a huge emotional impact on the survivors and may cause most of the struggle surrounding a funereal event. I am strongly drawn to donating my corpus to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, since there my skeleton would most-likely be placed into a long use as an example for students and law-enforcement personnel. This gives my ego a boost. My other choices, a little closer to home, seem to be Emory University, University of GA and so on.
Now it is up to you. Do you know what the alternatives in your state or country are?
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reality
July 2008 
Wolf Halton - The Little Cow
Access: Public
