How I Want to be Buried and other Fun Thoughts

“Death is for the birds.”

One day, we’re all going to die.  None of us are going to live forever on this mortal coil, despite what the robots might tell you.  No, someday we’re all going to croak and move on to whatever comes next.  But someone’s going to have to clean up your body, especially after you shit yourself one last time.  So that begs the question; what kind of funeral do you want?

Obviously, you aren’t going to attend your own funeral, unless you’re Tom Sawyer; it’ll be the last party you don’t attend.  Probably.  Though you may be there in spirit (*ba dum tss*), you won’t live to remember it.  So, really, funerals and burial rites are for the living, not the dead.  It offers a sort of closure, a way to remember a life well lived, and a way to finally dispose of the weird meatbag that is our body.  But while most funerals and burials are pretty straight-forward, there are some weird ways to change things up.

Some of you may be familiar with the New Orleans Jazz Funeral, where the deceased receives a parade accompanied by jazz musicians practicing their craft.  The coffin is escorted by blues and soul (wait a minute…) all the way to the graveyard, and these caravan events are usually followed by some sort of party or social gathering to celebrate the life of the dead.  It isn’t a sad event, but rather a celebration of life.  And that’s the kind of style that I want to go out with.  Sort of.

When I eventually die at a ripe old age of very old, I hope that my funeral isn’t the usual sad, nose-blowing rigamarole.  Not to say that funerals like that don’t have their place; unfortunately, they’re all too often sad for good reason.  But I don’t want the final memory of me after I lived a grand life to be some boring, depressing slog; I want it to be a party.  A huge party.

I’m talking a three-course meal with a dessert table and appetizers and an open bar for everybody old enough to drink.  I want a full band to play all my favorite songs and remove anyone who suggests Ed Sheeran.  I want a stage for dancing, clowns in full makeup, cotton candy machines, chocolate fountains, an ice cream bar, the absolute works.  And I want them to hook my body up to marionette strings and Weekend at Bernie’s me around the party.  Well, maybe not that last part.  But then, at the very end, I want to be eaten by vultures.

I took a class in freshman year of college that told me all about the different funerary rites of various cultures and peoples, and I think the one that resonated with me the most was the Tibetan Sky Burial.  A sky burial isn’t what they did to Hunter S. Thompson and shoot his ashes off in a cannon, but rather a Buddhist practice of leaving a body out to decompose in the elements and be scavenged by animals, especially vultures.  From a scientific perspective, it’s allowing the nutrients stored in your body to return to the ecosystem, and from a religious standpoint, in Buddhism, dead bodies have little spiritual value.  They’re just empty vessels, as I understand it.  And if you live in a vast mountainous region with little-to-no soil to bury the bodies in, might as well just feed them to birds.

I’m no Buddhist, but as an environmental science major with a love for birds, I am fascinated by this idea.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and bird to bird, I think it would be the most fitting way to dispose of my body, especially because the American funerary process is a major scam.

Funeral parlors are the biggest fraud this side of bottled water; they charge exorbitant amounts of money for boxes of wood, they exploit the emotionally vulnerable to get more money out of them with unnecessary features, and they’re downright predatory with hidden fees and charges.  Plus, the embalming process is an ecological nightmare; the chemicals used in the preservation process don’t decompose with you and eventually they leach into the soil and pollute groundwater.  If you drink water near a cemetery, you might be drinking some of Grandma.

Plus, there’s the whole issue of cemeteries in general; they take up a ton of space that could be used for far more productive means, and all those fancy coffins that are buried in tombs of concrete also leak chemicals into the soil; those wood varnishes aren’t eco-friendly.  And metal coffins aren’t any better. Heavy metals in the water supply are just one of many threats to groundwater.

We don’t need these massive plots of land, resource-heavy protective processes, and overly-expensive funerals.  Getting buried in a coffin isn’t a long-standing “tradition.”  That’s not how our ancestors were buried for thousands of years.  If you want to go true traditional, your family would wrap you in cloth andtoss you in a hole.  Which, interestingly, is what a lot of people are starting to do again, and would be my next choice after being eaten by birds.

Of course, cremation is an option, too, and while it’s a lot better than American burial, it still comes with its own hidden problems.  At least if you’re cremated you can still return your nutrients to the soil.  But don’t go spreading grandpa’s ashes at Disney World; Father Walt frowns upon that.

Going back to the sky burials, I’d like to elaborate that, much like natural scavenging, the bones are still left behind.  But that brings me to the next step in my death wish.  I want my bones to be turned into tasteful lamps and coat-hooks, like in Willy Wonka.  Of course, while letting vultures feast on my body will prevent me from having books bound in my skin so that my tattoos can be the cover art, my bones could still be used for something interesting. Like a chair.

It isn’t the most environmentally friendly, to be sure.  All that calcium in my bones and all those delicious, delicious proteins in my marrow won’t get returned to the soil.  But my kids will get a kick-ass chair out of my skeleton, and really, isn’t that what matters in the end?  It would make for such a cool (and practical) conversation piece.  “Hey, that’s a pretty spooky skeleton chair.  Is it from Spirit?  Where’d you get it from?” “Oh, it’s Grandpa.” “It was Grandpa’s?” “No, it is Grandpa.  Take a seat.”

I’m not the first person to come up with this, trust me.  The Czech have been doing it for hundreds of years now, and everyone who goes to Paris wants to see the Catacombs.  What’s the difference, anyway?  A church made of human skeletons is a tourist attraction, but one chair is “distasteful,” “unsettling,” and “fucking horrifying”?  Come on, people, let’s drop the double standards.  It’s not like I didn’t want to be made into a chair, and you can quote me on that.

Having my body become dinner for some carrion birds and then turned into a recliner isn’t the only brutal way to go out.  There are plenty of incredible ways to dispose of our earthly remains.  Everyone knows about Viking burials, where you toss the body on a big pile of logs and light it on fire with a burning arrow, but did you know that if you’re from Indonesia you can also be turned into a dinner guest?

The Toraja people from the island of Sulawesi have some of the most complex and elaborate funerals and also sometimes keep the bodies of the deceased in their home for years at a time.  It’s actually a pretty touching tradition, since it stems partly from the  belief that the dead aren’t really dead if they aren’t gone yet.  Kind of like that quote about dying twice.  You die first when you’re dead, and then when everyone forgets you.  The Toraja try to keep that second death at bay a little longer.

There’s also the metal-as-fuck act of funerary cannibalism.  It’s perhaps most commonly known as part of the Amazonian Mayoruna and Wari’ peoples, who eat their dead out of respect.  The idea is that burying a body in the ground traps the spirit of the dead, and that decomposing underground is cold and lonely.  To avoid this, and make sure that the dead aren’t lonely, the bodies are consumed so that they’ll be warm and with their family throughout the entire final journey.  It’s sometimes called compassionate cannibalism, and I think that’s a pretty accurate name.  Just don’t eat the brain.

If you still really want to be buried in a coffin but want to do it in the most impractical way possible, there’s also the Southeast Asian tradition of hanging coffins, where your body is put in a wooden box and suspended from the side of a cliff until the ropes break and it falls down.  Also, I swear that somewhere there’s a place where they bury people by putting them in cages and hanging them from trees to create what looks like some sort of deranged Christmas ornament, but I can’t find it.  Maybe it doesn’t exist.  I can’t tell you how many times I looked up some variation of “skeleton in cage” to no avail.  And now I suspect the emo kids are going to start monitoring my search history.

In all seriousness, though, I don’t think I’ll actually end up being disposed of by vultures.  That’s generally frowned upon in this country, as is turning people into chandeliers.  But I’m dead serious (HAH) about that funeral party.  And then you can either toss me in the river or turn me into a tree like some companies let you do.  And there’s always the classic John Biggs way of death. Let the sanitation workers bear me home. Charlton Heston would be proud.

You know, as a last note, this talk of sky burials has got me thinking about some of the lore from Bloodborne, that game that I love.  The Crowfeather Garb says that “Hunters of Hunters dress as crows to suggest sky burial.  The first Hunter of Hunters came from a foreign land, and gave the dead a virtuous native funeral ritual, rather than impose a blasphemous Yharnam burial service upon them, with the hope that former compatriots might be returned to the skies, and find rest in a hunter’s dream.”

Initially when I read that, I thought that the sky burial was some sort of metaphor, perhaps for floating them off on a great lake that resembled the cosmos.  But now, reading it again, I think it means the same kind of sky burial as the Buddhists practiced, except with crows instead of vultures.  This game is made by FromSoftware, the same people who made Sekiro, so I’m sure they knew exactly what a real sky burial was.

And this got me thinking; throughout the game, there’s all those fat crows that can’t fly, and they just hop around and peck at you.  And they give pebbles upon defeat, but those pebbles are actually eyes.  Meaning that the crows have been eating people.  Which means that Eileen has probably been feeding the hunters she kills to the crows.  Which is why she’s dressed like a crow.  So would that suggest that Eileen is eating the hunters?  I don’t know, man.

At the end of the day, everybody’s gonna die, and I want my funeral to be epic. Have a party, invite everyone, and then end it with something you won’t get anywhere else this side of the Atlantic. And I know for sure that a sky burial would be fucking awesome.  Deliver me upwards on the black wings of vultures and I shall ride my true chariot home.