Your friendly neighborhood funeral home

[Dave W]

True, but it brings a lot of pain and distress to the survivors.

[Denis]

Definitely, and I wasn't trying to make light of that aspect of such horrors. If it happened to my parents I'd be pretty pissed and ready to wall up alive the funeral directors.

[uwe]

Why is that? That the living are so concerned about the remains of the deceased finding an appropriate place to rest. I'm not aware of any great form of religion - Shintoism perhaps excepted - that ties what happens to you in the afterlife to what happens to your remains here. They all view the body in some form or another as the discarded shell of the ever-living soul/spirit. Yet it seems that people aren't really comfortable with that concept at all.

[Denis]

I like what the Tibetan monks do with their dead: skillfully butcher the bodies and leave them on a mountain top for buzzards and vultures to eat.

[OldManC]

Why is that?

As I intimated before, I would certainly have enough anger in that situation to warrant my being very careful in how I reacted. Their spirit (or essence or whatever you want to call it) may be gone, but the body is still a part of what they were. My family's chosen method of dealing with their remains was burial. We made a monetary contract in arranging that burial, but we made an even greater moral contract with the company we trusted to take care of those remains, and they certainly understood the importance of that arrangement. Human dignity and honor demand that they respect that contract. For me, anger would come in knowing their earthly remains had been violated and suffered the indignity of such treatment. My parents (or other loved ones now gone) may be beyond such temporal cares, but I am not.

[Dave W]

Well said, George.

When you pay someone to handle the deceased with dignity and then find that your trust has been violated, it certainly causes anguish. Even more so because the deceased trusted you to take care of things.

[Highlander]

Most people on my home Island are buried in the sand dunes near the coast that make up the graveyards... plenty of room and descration is just a word in the dictionary...

[Rhythm N. Bliss]

Unbefokkenlievable. 

[Lightyear]

It will never happen but I like the idea of a massive funeral pyre on the beach - kind of a Viking thing

In all seriousness though, my soul is gone and I want to preserve what wealth I may have for my family - cremation seems right to me.  I asked them to toss my ashes into Clear Creek here - I spent most of my life around the creek and it's already polluted

[uwe]

I'm not arguing that what the garage ownesr did wasn't hurtful for the relatives and that those left behind don't need a place to convene, pray and remember. I like walking cemeteries because my mind then begins to wander/wonder about who those people might have been that are now slowly turning into earth and dust (a process I don't find gross).

But doesn't all that  mean that we, the surviving, are essentially doing it for ourselves?

There seems to be no culture that does not care about its dead. Yet if there is an afterlife, shouldn't it be a cause for relief and celebration? Somehow, there seems through all religion a nagging doubt that this world might after all be the best thing that we are leaving behind.

[Highlander]

It will never happen but I like the idea of a massive funeral pyre on the beach - kind of a Viking thing

It's the Vikings my (MacLeod and MacKenzie) ancestry stems from...

[Muzikman7]

Considering the lack of respect for the living and the dead I see no point of spending a large amount of money to bury the dead and not because of the money its the fact you can not trust certain people to leave the dead buried, small cemeteries are routinely abandoned or uprooted, bodies dug up and dumped in a pit with other remains or stacked in garages etc.  Besides cemeteries and golf courses are a wast of valuable real estate (Just kidding)