How to Dispose of a Body

For everyone out there trying to live sustainably, you might also want to consider the best way for your loved ones to dispose of your body after you're gone. Is a green burial best? What about human composting (where it's legal)? And can you really grow a tree from your decomposing corpse?

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[liisahmanni]

Wow, you're a life saver with this one. Talk about perfect timing.

[captainhoratiobungleiii]

We gave my dad a green burial and planted a tree a year later. It's a lovely spot, so my mum and I are going in next to him

[jessicap]

Caitlyn over at Ask A Mortician has more detailed videos on these options. She's great.

[pri.sci.lla.]

The amount of resources (lumber, various metals etc.) that we use for funerals is astounding.

[michaelmcchesney]

When my father died, I went with my mother to the funeral parlor to arrange things. The funeral director was going through a catalog with different coffin options. He showed us a picture of a metal coffin that he promised would help keep the body preserved. He then looked up from the catalog, saw the look on my face, and added, "If that's important to you." "It's not, " I said. It's supposed to be from dust to dust, not dust to mummy. If we were looking to preserve my father's body, we would have gone to a cryogenic facility, not a funeral home.

When I die, my family can bury me in a cardboard box, for all I care.

[deed]

I have to admit, I was really hoping this was a collaboration with Caitlin at AskAMortician on this one.

[anarchyantz]

Hank: "There are plenty of other ways to dispose of a body".

FBI: "Yup, it's Hank again...."

[-ten]

Embalming is the worst thing for the environment. Also it's creepy AF on top of it.

[caspenbee]

My first death was my grandma's. I was pretty little. I remember being horrified as I looked down into the grave and realized it was a cement vault. I panicked, and I was *just* old enough not to cry out and make them stop. But it horrified me even then that she'd be rotting, lonely, in cement forever instead of going back to the earth.

[MarianahsTrenchGal]

As someone who really wants the greenest burial possible, I would be totally down with having my naked body just thrown into a dirt hole... but I know that a lot of ppl aren't comfortable with that idea since it doesn't seem respectful, so it's nice to know about the wicker/grass casket option. My grandpa just passed away a couple of years ago, and he was cremated because, at the time, he thought that would be the most eco-friendly.

[CyrusDemar]

Where I'm from (Denmark) conrete and metal casks are a rarety, also crematoriums are required to filter the smoke/fumes and more and more are using the excess heat for heating homes. Forrest burrials are also a thing here, in designated forrest of course.

[jenniferburns]

Please consider following up with body and organ donation. I think more people might donate if they knew what actually happens. A member of my family graduated from medical school a few years ago, and he told us all about how important cadavers are to medical education. His med school was very respectful of the bodies and had a memorial service each year to honor the donors.

[wendyfrith]

My boyfriend said he wanted to be buried at sea; not swaddled and waiting around for big fish or decomposition, but fed directly to small fish…and he wanted me to be the one who diced him, like an onion. Such an honor!(?)

[m.c]

Ah yeah I've been waiting for the tutorial. My house starts to smell

[cohutta]

Caitlin Doughty (Ask A Mortician) has a lot of great videos about these topics as well. Love seeing this information on this channel.

[rmdodsonbills]

I've told all my loved ones that my highest priority for my remains is that they don't spend a lot of money in the process. But that aside, I do like the idea of donating my body to a body farm to learn about how bodies decompose in "the wild" to then have data for calculating how long ago the person died when a body is discovered, either victim of a crime or of an accident. That really seems like the most green solution, but there are good reasons why we don't leave bodies just lying around. In any case, since I definitely won't be using the body anymore, I kinda don't care what happens to it.

[BojackHorseman]

Jewish or Muslims burials are essentially green burials. Done soon after death, embalming is considered desecration, and using shrouds or simple wood caskets. Interestingly in ancient Jewish burials they would actually gather the persons bones and move the to bone box or special tomb.

[NancyPower]

I like the composting option or, not mentioned here, the mushroom suit option. AFAIK, it's like a body bag - but full of mushroom spores which help to decompose the remains. 💀🍄🌱

[Gantros]

I personally advocate for human composting, since if it becomes widely practiced, it could used to convert cemeteries and other idle space into what I like to call ‘memorial parks’. I imagine the process like this: after composting, the remains are used as part of the initial feedstock for the sapling, which ideally would be a native species at the burial site. The tree location is geotagged and has a plaque with an internet link such as a QR code and a reference number for more traditional records that can be referenced for an obituary. I would take this a step further with an option for a life or death mask to be made, scanned, and later printed in a material that the tree would absorb as it grows, giving the tree a ‘face’. The reasoning for this is that psychologically, humans will behave differently if they feel they are being watched, even if the eyes aren’t real. Therefore, giving trees a face discourages them from being cut down if the original purpose of the park of a forgotten.

[StephanieDivis]

This felt like an episode brought to us by the Order of the Good Death! 🎉👏