I can't believe I'm the only one who would like their body donated to science. As someone who has worked with a cadaver for school I can't think of much better than the very last thing I do is to provide someone the opportunity to learn something that I love.
Put me with the "doesn't give a shit/whatever is the cheapest disposal" crowd. I'd definitely have to be cremated, and I would want my son to throw my ashes into the water at the end of the jetties at South Padre Island. Or he could piss in them, then flush them down the toilet. I'd never know. As far as funeral services go, I think that funeral processions are one of the biggest wastes of time and resources imaginable. When my mom died, my dad specifically had the wake and the graveside ceremony held on different days to keep from inconveniencing people. I would invite my closest friends (well, my executor would), and there would be a full bar, about a 1/4 pound of hydroponic weed, an ounce of uncut blow, Oxycontin, Vicodin, Xanax, Valium, Whippets, etc. Everyone just has a great time. You're asking how I would want to go?
Take of me whatever organs still have use. Cremate the rest. A pinch of the ash in with a new tree (or several pinches and several trees to create a little grove), whatever's left to be forged into steel and/or stamped into diamond to make a good sword and some literal family jewels. Or just use my corpse as a puppet, I won't be around to give a shit. But that first thing above sounds like a cool way to go.
I'm already an organ donor, so they're going to cut away every piece of me that I haven't destroyed with my reckless ways and help some needy person with it. Seriously if all else fails, they can use my skin and help a burn victim. I'm all for that. It'd be really cool if they used my skin for new boobs for a self entitled trophy wife. Her husband would be happily playing with his newest purchase thinking what a fortunate man he is, while in reality he would be caressing the skin from my butt. I'm not sure if that's funny or just really fucking creepy.
Yeah, I know what happens with those bones. They are brought out as drinking companions on St. Patrick's Day. Man that would be awesome. One of the docs I work with has mentioned she wants to do fellowship in palliative care. I asked why. She replied, "so when I'm dying I know what to do". Seems an awful lot of training to know to slap on a fentanyl patch, but hey. I've seen way too many fucking people going through hospital wards and ICUs to want any of that to happen to me. If I don't die an awesome, headine-making death (I.e. "Dashingly handsome hero sacrifices own life, uses enormous penis to stop Hitler's zombie") then just start feeding me smack till I stop breathing / start making good art.
I'm with David Cross on the whole corpse-disposal issue. <a class="postlink" href="http://comedians.jokes.com/david-cross/videos/david-cross---dead-body" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://comedians.jokes.com/david-cross/ ... -dead-body</a> That is... if my death is lame. Ideally, investigators will puzzle and confound themselves over the state of my remains for many years after the fact.
Meh, I'm pretty sure you rot pretty fast; particularly when the brain is starved of oxygen a lot of the cells die and become irreparably fucked. That would be the main thing to preserve, the brain, right? The thing that contains your personality and more importantly, your memories. It would like be trying to extract data from a hard drive that was thrown in a vat of lava. Anyway, I'm surprised at the number of people who fear *dying* more than death. Death is a much bigger unknown than 'dying.' Hell if I can somehow prevent death, free-falling from a skyscraper or getting impaled by a sword, or crushed by a ton of bricks might not all that terrible if you knew you could wake up fine the next day. Plus you only get to die once, and it's the last thing you'll ever feel or experience, ever, until the end of time, so why not go out with a bang. Nonexistence is far scarier for most people. Complete lack of sensory experience, memory, thought, being --- not even the remote perception of time. A bacterium would have be having a hell of a sensory, living experience by comparison. The thought of non-existence for eternity frightens some people, well at least the atheists in the room. I get comforted most of the time of course, either Twain's quote about having not been alive for millions of years already, or the fact that a desire to live forever is mostly just one of our biological impulses; one of our constant insatiable urges that go with the rest of the chains of being a biological being spawned by millennia of evolution. Perhaps freedom --- freedom from desire and pain ---- again, by products of an arbitrary biology. Who are we to say that living forever is better than a brief life, and then back to the universe. Of course we think the former is better --- we are apes! But yeah those are my thoughts when taking a shit. I would prefer to go out in a blaze of glory, hopefully in one big giant "Fuck you" to some evil entity or conversely, performing some heroic deed. Like the guy at the end of Indepedence day or something along those lines.
Apparently I'm really hard to exterminate, since about a week ago an overloaded electrical socket knocked me on my ass with around 180v (though it's not the volts that'll kill you, it's the amps). Around every year and a half or so life throws something at me which under normal circumstances would kill another person but I somehow manage to survive -- tornadoes, drowning, almost suffocation, near-gunshot (still have the burn on my hand from that one), freak accidents, hazardous chemical inhalation, pharmacy tech overlooking a major drug interaction, falling from high places, three separate traffic accidents in one day which occurred within a matter of yards of my own car while I was traveling at high speeds... that kinda thing. I'm used to it at this point. Kinda funny now. So I don't really know how I would idealize my life ending (kinda a fucked up thing to idealize), but I imagine that when I do finally run out of luck it'll be in some really creative manner. Because I've found a way to survive all the big stuff. In regard to what I want to happen to me after I die, I want my wife and -- if I have any at the time -- children to decide what to do with my body. They want a funeral? Great. Just so long as that's what they want. I won't be grieving; they will. So in my opinion there's no point in "last wishes" and that crap because it's not like I'm gonna come back from the dead and haunt them and shit for not doing what I wanted them to do. Let your surviving family members do with you what they believe is best for them. Because if you live for them, well, I don't see why "you" shouldn't at least still try to comfort them after you're gone and don't care anyway.
Focus: I'm the youngest in my family and I came along very late in the mix, so by the time I was 12 I had been to way too many funerals. I don't want to be cremated and I definitely don't want to be in the ground. I dislike bugs a lot. A long time ago I decided I wanted to be in one of these: Spoiler preferably next to my wife after we both die at exactly the same time in our sleep when we are about 110. I'm a selfish control freak, so leave my fucking organs alone please. I like the idea of some archeologist finding me 1000 years from now and thinking I was a very important member of society.