SO YOU’RE DEAD. NOW WHAT?

Ilike to think of myself as a cheery kind of soul, but of late I’ve started to consider my own mortality a little more than I have done previously. Don’t get me wrong, as Jerry Driscoll, the doorman at Abbey Road Studios says at the start of The Great Gig In The Sky from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon record “I am not frightened of dying. Why should I be frightened of dying?”, but I am aware that, to misquote Cat Stevens, we’re only dancing on this earth for a short time. I’m of an age where I pretty regularly hear through social media of friends and folk I knew in my youth having pegged it and within the last few years both my parents have carked it.

I’m an atheist and believe that when our numbers are up then we don’t ascend to some higher place or descend to some hellish pit, though a few experiences have had me question the nature of consciousness, but that’s a whole new topic and of discussion that I’ll no doubt waffle on at length about at some point in the future. Long story short is when we pop off this mortal coil that’s it, finito, the end and what happens to our bag of bones is of little consequence to the recently deceased.

Told you I was a cheery soul!

I was reading an article in an antipodean magazine about how cemeteries were becoming more suburbanised and that there was an opportunity for them to become areas in which relatives and loved ones could remember the dead in surroundings a little more fitting to their memory…that’s another whole other article in itself. Not long after having read this primarily town planning themed article I got a timely e-mail reminder that I need to pick up the ashes of my mother and father and my mind (not at all morbidly) turned to thoughts about the options that are available to us, or rather those taking care of the arrangements after we peg it.

We don’t have a family plot where I can be planted and, anyway, I’ve seen the film Poltergeist. Scary films about ancient tribal burial grounds notwithstanding, I don’t really see burial as a viable option given the (roughly) 150 000 folk who die each day around the world. I mean, where are we supposed to bury four and a half million corpses a month? There has to be a more space-efficient way of dealing with the dead and the obvious one is cremation, where ones lifeless remains are returned to loved ones as a handful of ashes. Actually, I’m guessing that it’s around a handful as I still haven’t made the necessary arrangements to pick up my folks ashes…. not that I’m overly sure what I’m going to do with them once I do get round to it. Perhaps a nice quiet family occasion where folk say their last goodbyes… that opportunity has long gone. Perhaps a scattering at a favourite beauty spot. I could always make like (allegedly) Keith Richards and snort my folks up like a line of cocaine.

So, a bit more reading had me discover that cremation isn’t actually all that great for the environment with Google telling me that an average cremation creates 535lbs of C02 which is the equivalent of driving in a medium-sized car for over 600 miles. That’s over 80 million pounds of CO2 a day… or 90 million miles…a day…or 32 850 000 000 miles a year if everyone who dies gets cremated. That’s around 69 000 round trips to the moon each year…stick that in your pipe and smoke it Jeff Bezos.

Cremation and burial are clearly not all that sustainable from an environmental or a space availability perspective and so I began to look at the options.

Before we get into the possibilities, let me tell you what I have, or had, in my mind’s eye following my own demise. I saw two options:

A full Viking ceremony replete with burning longship being sailed with my body down the local river was my preference, but it seems that is neither practical, environmentally conscious, or something any of the folk likely to be left behind really want to get into organising.

A normal event at the crem’ with family, friends, and a specially invited gaggle of beautiful but unknown women wailing at the back of the room to get collective tongues wagging (youngest son has been charged with this organisational detail already) followed by stale sandwiches and a fight at a local hostelry. Oh, and a Facebook message from my account to all attending to say “Thanks for coming.”

The second of the two choices outlined above is what is likely to happen, to a greater or lesser extent, but lets have a look at what other ways of disposal are available….without getting all gangland creative and using car crushers and concrete wellingtons.

SO WHAT ARE YOUR OPTIONS?

Let’s face it, you aren’t going to give a humanist celebrant’s platitude what happens to you when you die, but those that are left want the excuse for a lash up at your expense. Sorry, I’ll rephrase that. Those that are sadly left behind will take comfort in a ceremony that is poignant, meaningful, and gives them the opportunity to mourn in a dignified and respectable fashion….and then get uproariously pissed and start a fight over the stale vegan pork pies.

Alkaline Hydrolysis looked an interesting option when I was researching this topic. The other names for this form of decomposing your bod are “water cremation”, “aquamation”, or “resomation” and essentially your lifeless corpse is decomposed fairly rapidly by a mixture of water, heat, and alkaline chemicals that leave nothing but a sterile liquid and some bone residue. No toxins or emissions are created during the process and so it’s a bit of a green alternative, but it does cost significantly more at the moment than a straightforward burning, but less than a burial. If you happen to be a funeral director looking to buy a machine to do this, I’m led to believe that you can’t just carry this procedure out in an old bath, then you are going to be looking at anywhere from $200,000 to €400, 000 a go, plus maintenance down the road.

Now, if you are a super-rich nut job that thinks that in the distant future medical science will be able to revive your frozen remains, then you can opt for cryonics. Essentially this process involves your bodily fluids being replaced with cryoprotectants (I’m guessing those involved have a deal where they get bulk discount on anti-freeze down at Halfords) so that ice doesn’t form and bugger up your internal organs and cells. I headed over to “Tomorrow Bio” to see how much this would cost me and it turns out that you can go for whole-body or neuro cryopreservation with the latter just preserving your brain (still inside your head). Neuro cryopreservation is apparently going to set you back a minimum of $80K but then there are other ongoing charges. An “all-inclusive cryopreservation plan with Tomorrow Bio is $200K”. So this one is out for me unless the loving bereaved want to opt for the DIY option and buy a chest freezer at around €500 and a load of anti-freeze (around a tenner for five litres). Personally, I’m really not so sure about this whole procedure (even the pro version) as I think it’s all a bit far-fetched to think future generations are going to want to defrost me from my frozen state and give me new life. And just the head and brain thing? That just has too much of The Man With Two Brains

SO YOU’RE DEAD. NOW WHAT?

about it for comfort. The DIY version is a recipe for disaster too. Fifty years down the line I don’t want future great grandkids of mine being sent to the freezer for a bag of frozen peas only to discover great grandad’s head staring up at them from beneath the Findus Crispy Pancakes and Raspberry Ripple ice-cream.

Burial at sea came up as an option and this sort of appealed to me in the same way that the aforementioned Viking ceremony appealed, but I can’t help thinking that in years to come we’re going to have millions of half decomposed and barnacle encrusted cadavers washing up on the Spanish Costas ruining everyone’s summer vacation. I did look into the options around this particularly nautical arrangement and I was taken aback as to how reasonable this method of disposal can be. Fully inclusive options that include ten passengers, the MMO burial at sea license, crew, fuel and all the rest of it cost from £2185. I assume that this is not for an actual burial but more of a scattering of the ashes off the coast of Cleethorpes or something. But I may be wrong as a bit more research had me find a “full-body burial at sea”

by New England Burial

At Sea (dot com) costing $7500, including a four to six hour trip on a 65 foot yacht, though a natural burial shroud will set you back another $750. This seems quite reasonable and I’ve been looking as to whether optional extras like water skiing for mourners (avoiding my inevitably floating remains which would add a frisson of slalom-like excitement to the event) and a DJ playing yacht rock are available. Mark this one as a “definitely a possibility if we can’t sort the Viking thing!” people. The process is as follows: Body gets frozen to -196 degrees C, frozen body is vibrated for a bit to disintegrate frozen cells, the frozen gubbins is put in a vacuum chamber and water is removed. Any metal bits like pacemakers, gold teeth, and hip-replacements are sieved out or removed by magnets. Finally, whatever is left is popped inside a container made of potato starch and buried where is decomposes over six to eighteen months, though you can opt to be kept in an urn at home. Not currently widely available given the research I’ve done and so costs are unknown, but most seem to think it will be around the same price as a normal flame-grilled affair.

Space Burial sounds all a bit silly as all it involves is sending a just a little bit of your remains into space inside a capsule and one of the other methods of properly dealing with the rest of your body will be required to deal with the rest of you. Now, if some enterprising type with space exploration tendencies was to say colonise a planet, build a fleet of spacecraft able to fly up 150 000 dead folk a day to space cemeteries, then I think we are onto a winner here. No problems with pollution (apart from the dozens of rockets a day outputting untold and disastrous amounts of noxious gubbins) and no problems with ground space for the deceased. I like this idea. Come on Mr Bezos, I’m looking at you here!