Happy Birthday to Victor and Meeeee!!!!

AYankeeCat- Well, you could always donate your body to an outdoor forensic lab. They sort of toss you out into the elements to be able to monitor and record decomposition rates. Think of it as one big outdoor classroom for aspiring forensic wannabes. Helps students better determine how long a body in the field has been dead if they have a "hands on" lab. There was a program on Discovery I think about this. The whole lab looked like some slasher movie set although it was really one big ongoing experiment. There were people in trunks of abandoned cars, people in ditches with leaves settled in over them, people in a marsh area, and people buried in shallow graves. Seemed as if they based their lab set-up on where murderers are most likely to ditch their victims. Me personally, I'd be ok with this if my rotting remains would help solve a murder someday. My husband... he wasn't exactly sold on the idea of possibly ending up in cement boots swaying in the underwater currents of some man made pond for the sake of science.

Victor, I did weigh it against the space of cemeteries which is exactly what prompted us to originally chose cremation but then we decided to go green as opposed to a traditional burial requiring a casket and a vault. I found out you really don't need the vault but the cemeteries like them. Keeps everything neat and tidy so that landscapers don't have to deal with divets when mowing the grass. With a green burial, you get placed in a casket that is biodegradeable. No expense in grave stones or grave markers and I suppose it's about as close to being composted as you can get.

To play devil's advocate here, are cemeteries really that much of a wasted space? In some cities I've lived in, cemeteries were just about the only green, open space there was!

And if the cemeteries weren't there, I'm sure there would have been yet another (most likely abandoned) factory building.

It's not so much the wasted space because kids are encouraged to run around and play in cemeteries and you can find some truly beautiful specimen trees and shrubs in them... it's the wasted resources. Have you checked out the horrible chemicals they use to pickle us or looked at caskets and vaults lately? All so that if we are exhumed a couple hundred of years from now we'll look as good as the day we were buried? All those concrete vaults underground leaching lime into the surrounding soils can't be good either.

Most of the green burial sites look like prairies and woodland settings to me. Seems more natural. No head stones to obstruct one's stroll through the woods and no grave markers that proclaim who lies where.

No, Equilibrium, you misunderstood me. I'm all for green burials and against chemicals. I never could, even as a child, figure out why we pumped dead bodies full of chemicals and then paid thousands of dollars for a fancy box that would be buried in the ground.

I was just responding to Victor's description of cemeteries as "wasted space". I just am playing devil's advocate and pointing out that any land used for cemeteries would have most likely been developed in some other (probably less-environmentally-friendly) way anyway, and that in some areas, having a cemetery is actually like having a park or open space.

My uncle (who died when he was my age so that must have been at least 20 - 25 years ago) lived in what was then still a little bit rural Virginia. (Now it's almost all McMansions and shopping malls.) My cousin built him a coffin (unfinished pine boards) and they stuck him in it, lowered him into a grave with bailing twine. (He'd been saving it all his life, trying to think of a good use for it. They braided in into ropes so it would be strong enough.)

I'm sure he's now totally decomposed, returned to the earth he loved and was FURIOUS to be leaving so soon. They didn't mean it to be a "green" burial - I'm not sure how they were allowed to have his body. But any other way would have been so unlike them - they didn't waste anything, like bailing twine, or scraps of lumber, or nails, and now that other people are more aware of being "green", like me, they're the same. x, Carrie

That settles it. Too much work to figure this all out - I just refuse to die!

Why do we pump dead bodies full of chemicals??? For the same reason people like you and me want to go the other route. I think it's a really personal thing. I have a girlfriend who is afraid to be cremated. And I mean she is afraid to be cremated because she wants to have a body in heaven. I have another girlfriend who is afraid to be buried because she can't handle the thought of worms in her body. Irrational fears- can't say that they are and can't say that they aren't because there's nobody around who has lived through any of these processes to share their experiences. No choice is right or wrong, although some may be more environmentally friendly and I don't think any way is any better or worse than the other because we're choosing based on our belief systems and emotion comes into play. Does that make sense?

Hey Victor and Dawn - Happy un-Birthday! (deftly changing the subject) :)>

Oops, typing when AYankeeCat was typing.

The perfect solution, we can all refuse to die. Settles everything! No decisions to make.

HAS EVERYONE VOTED? THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE MESSAGE FROM YOUR SPONSOR. A SITEWIDE VOTE IS BEING HELD BUT IT'S ONLY SITEWIDE IF EVERYONE VOTES! thank you.

It's a waste of space compared to a real park, botanical garden or nature walk, etc. Aren't those better? That's where I want my kids playing - not in a cemetery!

I like old cemeteries and while in Ireland I visited an old church and the cemetery to the side of it. There I saw the headstone for a child named Fanny and the dates showed she was 2 or 3 when she died. The cemetery had no one to care for it so I knelt down and cleaned up Fanny's little grave. As I stepped across to clean the other side the earth gave way. Luckily it only went down a few inches but it was scary and yet I felt I had almost defiled her little plot, not meaning to, of course. I finished cleaning it up and left but I've never forgotten her little grave.

Ashes to ashes, that's my plan.

I want to be cremated, going out nice and warm as i've spent more than half my life cold!

Say Victor, I don't know if you are aware of this but I believe both cremation and green burials are considered "going green". So are you going to be sprinkled about so the grandchildren can run all over you or are you planning on hanging out on a shelf or in a closet?

There ya go pixie! I like heat myself!

I'm with pixie: warm is good!

I want to be sprinkled - on gardens.

We're being spread over the water. At least I won't have to worry about drowning.

I'm a whole-body donor. I suppose I'll end up on a forensic research farm or on some med student's dissection table.

The forensic research farm is a great idea.

I just want to evaporate - cause I don't like any other options!

Evaporation would lead to cloud riding, right?? I'm liking the sound of this...keep going Deb!

No spontaneous combustion for you, Debilu?

There is at least one part of Queens (on the BQE i think) where you go on an overpass, and in evey direction are cemetaries - headstones as far as the eye can see... That really got me to thinking about burial as "wasted space", because there must be a whole other city there, just about.

Yes! Elmhurst. That's where Grandma, Grandpa and my brother are among a million or so other people.

Hmmm..birthdays to funerals. I recently made my will. Elected the burn baby burn option. BTW, doing a will via the internet was so very easy!

Victor has to be thrilled with the way his (and Dawn's) birthday thread traveled the highway of life from birthdays to funerals.

Yes - what's left?!

The bill to pay for all of our dreams to come true, nyuk nyuk nyuk nyuk nyuk.

We can do a DG Kool Aid deal and go at the same time.

The dash. There was a great story about the dash, as in 1900 - 1989. It's the dash that makes up our lives and the point of the story was to make your dash worthwhile.

No Kool Aid. Bad for the teeth.

Say pirl, you're in luck. I received that dash poem accompanied by some beautiful photography. It doesn't take long at all to load. I watched it and was so impressed I asked me kids to watch it. Truly beautiful.

Just for you-
http://www.dashpoemmovie.com/

That is beautiful Lauren. Thank you. I bookmarked it and will email it to friends and family.

Show it to your kids. Mine really got a lot out of it. They're at ages where peer pressure is becoming increasingly more difficult to juggle. It's nice for tweens and teens to be challenged to think about the dashes in their lives.

George Carlin said cemeteries and golf courses are the biggest wastes of space. He feels they should, at least, be combined.

I just want a small monument built in my honor.

...as part of a mini-golf course.
hhhmmm... what theme would the course have?

Lovely, Lauren. Thank you. I will forward it to my adult kids.

The thing I took away from it was about treating others with respect. When people don't show respect for others it does bother me and I'm not afraid to speak up because it's a black mark on me if I don't.

...- I'm sure she thanked you pirl. ☺ (re: Ireland)

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At least the elephants still show respect, maybe they know something we don't. ☺