If you buy a funeral plan from a Jewish funeral home (or one that serves jews), your body won't be preserved with formaldehyde or what have you, and the coffin will have a halachically mandated amount of exposure to the soil to expedite decomposition.

I didn't know that. That's neat.

Lots and lots of ~ma, juliana! How exciting!

(eta: that's my understanding anyway, it might not be totally correct, but I'm pretty sure I got the gist)

Plastination!

We keep discussing the whole will/living will thing, and bogging down on the fact there's really no one in either family who's ideally suited to raise Annabel if both of us were gone.

FWIW, it doesn't have to be a relative if there's someone else you're close enough to that they'd make a better option. If my parents had gone, we would have gone to a couple (men, actually) who were very close friends.

Part of my parents' calculations in this was not just that they loved and trusted them to care to for us, but also that it be a) not a hardship to take us, and b)that we wouldn't be shoe-horned into an existing family with other kids. Your calculations will be your own of course, and we had less in the way of actual relations to worry about offending. But maybe your options are broader than you think they are. If I were doing something like that, I think I'd leave letters in care of the attorney to people who might be surprised or hurt by the decision, explaining how and why you made it.

I'd be in to getting plastinated, but then I don't think Jilli could have my skull, and that's just unacceptable.

Ooh, I've been meaning to go to that exhibit.

Maybe you can be plastinated from the neck down.

If you buy a funeral plan from a Jewish funeral home (or one that serves jews), your body won't be preserved with formaldehyde or what have you, and the coffin will have a halachically mandated amount of exposure to the soil to expedite decomposition.

State law in Utah requires all coffins to buried in vaults. I don't know how they justified it, maybe some weird groundwater thing. It's a major factor in my desire to be reduced to ash and/or fertilizer. Not that I plan to still be here when I go, but you never know.

My big squick in matters funereal is anything that would make me a *thing,* an object to be looked at and poked and pried apart without me having any say over it. I want to be cremated and tossed into whatever river is the most convenient. (What can I say, I grew up on the Ohio and live on the Potomac now. Rivers make sense to me in a way lakes and oceans don't, and I'd love to be a part of one.) Don't put me in a big box and stick me in the ground, and don't put me in a little box and keep me on the mantle.

My husband wants to donate his body; his grandmother did, and he just thought the whole process was neat. I respect that, and I'll do it when the time comes if he goes before me, but I can't handle the idea when it comes to myself.

And I have a living will that I made online a year ago. It's probably not terribly binding -- it's not witnessed -- but it'll at least be a guideline if something bad happens to me.

One option is the Body Farm, where the corpse is tossed in a field and left to decompose for the purposes of education and training in forensic anthropology and skeletal biology for students and law enforcement agencies.

Another cool thing is that, if you donate your body "to Science" (which really means to a medical school), you can still donate whatever organs/tissues/bone/etc. are donate-able first.