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.

One option is the Body Farm, where the corpse is tossed in a field and left to decompose

I think that would also be cool, provided my skull went to Jilli first.

Scene: Sean's Wake

t general Buffista's, Michigan folk, and family milling about

t Jilli enters carrying what looks to be a bowling bag

t quiet crowd noise

Joe (to Troll) : "Oh yeah? Too bad our friend is dead. I'll bet you wouldn't say that to his face!"

t Jilli rushes over, pulls something from her bag

t shoves Sean's head in Troll's face

t Troll passes out

One option is the Body Farm, where the corpse is tossed in a field and left to decompose

I think that would also be cool, provided my skull went to Jilli first.

claps hands with glee

Seriously, the Body Farm is very cool. My best friend studied there when she was working on her forensic anthropology degree.

The only sad thing about that is that I would be able to watch it happen personally.

And now for something completely different (though I do like skulls):

That tres cool bottle of wine I got yesterday has a cork in it. Me, with my never-progressed-past-college wine tastes, am unfamiliar with cork procedures. I'm sure somewhere in this house is an adequate cork puller. But what if we don't finish it? We're not that big of drinkers, and I'm not sure I want to share it with anybody other than Hubby. Can we shove the cork back in it and expect it to still be of comparative quality when we get back to it?

I was taught by several forensic anthros, no, not a crime girl story, just a way for anthros to make money while school is not in session.