Death Explained

The term “natural causes” is an interesting one.

What, exactly, is Natural?  Maybe “usual causes” or “typical causes” would be a better choice.  Same with the term deceased.  Wouldn’t a better, more descriptive word be merely “ceased”?

That we need to describe a phenomenon by talking around it, by saying more about what it is not, rather than what it is, goes a long way in illustrating our attitude about death.

I once thought I would begin this discussion by describing what I know about a Tibetan practice of obsequy.  I saw it on a video.  It had to do with hacking up a corpse into bite-sized pieces  so that vultures could consume it and carry it away.

But in this google-informed world I also easily found a number of ways that humans have chosen to deal with bodies that have outlived, so to speak, their usefulness.

A quick online search shows that many have considered alternatives to body disposal besides, you know, exchanging body liquids with something that preserves, putting on a good suit, and getting into a box to be placed beneath the surface of the land.  One choice that immediately comes to mind is cremation, which has, I think, something to do with burning which, in turn, has something to do with drying out so that a body can, in fact, burn.

Then what?

If we were composed of 100% efficient material, cremation would be great, but, in fact we have a lot of non-burnable contents, so there is that left-over ash.  Cinders.  Klinkers.  What to do with that?  Some people like to save the ash, but then you become more of a nuisance than when you were actually alive, right?

There is freezing.  Which, I gather, is not actually dealing with death, but rather more like grasping at threads of life (like roasting a chicken that was once frozen) in the hope that, like roasting with fire, SCIENCE will come up with something that injects new life into the dead soul.

I kind of like the people who have booked flights on rocket ships for their copse to be put into orbit.  Kind of cool (ignoring, for the moment, the aspect of space debris), but I also read that those orbits are temporary and you will soon re-enter the atmosphere and flare up like a meteor with the same result as cremation, except now you are not in an urn in somebody’s closet but now contributing to smog and global warming.  Cremation is cheaper and doesn’t require rocket fuel.

Composting.  Sounds good, but somebody has to take care of you for 120 days while you do the decomposition thing, compared to 1 day for cremation.  But then, you get to be soil to grow carrots or cannabis.  And you can’t be composted if you have something like tuberculosis or mad cow disease.