The loved one lives again

Evelyn Waugh's 1940s send-up of the American funeral industry, The loved one seems to have taken on a new lease of life, and entered the digital era. There's a site you can join, called "My Send Off" where you can plan your own funeral. It doesn't say so, but I suspect that it is sponsored by the funeral industry (hat-tip to a tweet from BBC_WHYS).

Why do you need a funeral for a proper send-off? Read all about it here mysendoff.com | Blog | Mourning-Avoidance: Why Everyone Deserves a Funeral Sendoff.

As befits our secular age, it's an entirely secular plug for an entirely secular funeral: a secular humanist funeral to be exact, because the attitudes it argues against are just as secular, but not really humanist.

The site gives a lot of information about the various kinds of funerals that people can have. Apparently Star- Trek-themed funerals are quite popular. Oh, and if you register on the site, you get the opportunity win a pre-paid funeral. I wonder if it's valid in South Africa?

If you register on the site you can also create your own "bucket list". I clicked on that one to see what a bucket list is, and why I would need one, but it seems you have to register just to find out that. I assume it relates to the bucket that you kick when you die, but I didn't see a section for "My Clogs List", for the clogs that you pop.

Anyway, for my sendoff plans I want a proper Orthodox funeral with all the trimmings, but no kitsch supulchral haverdashery from the undertakers -- no plastic grass, no fancy gadgets for lowering into the grave, just ropes from the same rural general dealer where I hope the coffin can be bought. Oh, and the Russian, not the Greek melody to "Blessed art Thou O God, teach me Thy statutes", and not omitting "Thou only art immmortal".

Exraordinary Rendition

With shrinking space for burials, and cremations being environmentally unfriendly, there's a new proposal for getting rid of corpses by rendering.

In ordinary rendering a body is boiled until the various parts separate, but in a new process, which could be described as "extraordinary rendition", chemicals are added to speed up the process.

It's not clear whether it uses less energy than cremation.

clipped from www.independent.co.uk Traditional methods of laying the dead to rest can no longer cope with the disposal of the 500,000 people who die in England and Wales each year. Led by Harriet Harman, ministers have launched a concerted effort to find a solution. With options shrinking, the Government has turned its attention to the possibility of "boiling" bodies down to a handful of dust. While it is hardly what is traditionally described as "a good send-off", "resomation" can at least claim to be kinder to the planet than some traditional ways of disposing of the dead. The process, developed in the United States, speeds up decomposition by immersing bodies in a solution of water and potassium hydroxide and heating to 150C (302F). More than 1,100 people in the US have already opted for resomation.

The proposed name for the process, "resomation", is a misnomer if ever there was one. Resomation means rebodying, and this process is more like debodying, for which the correct English word is "rendering".

Of course they could always try the Greek custom -- bury the bodies until they decompose, then dig up the bones and put them in an ossuary, and reuse the graves.

Hat-tip to Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job...): Three Bodies Boiled for the Price of Two