What happens after you die? (2016) (opens in new tab)

One crazy thing is, by being a descendant of the original life form, in a huge chain of reproduction relationships, all the information we have in our DNA about death in the form of autonomous fear responses come from beings that essentially never experienced death themselves.

Hopefully, clearing of my browser cache. :-)

When I felt my conscious fading away from a heart attack two years ago, I thought "Ah, I guess I die now. Too bad I can't tell my friend to clear the cache as a last joke."

It confirmed I'm not actually afraid to die, just regretting for a moment before the void that I can't witness what'll happen to the world in the future.

They grind up your skeleton, remove the dental gold, then re-name it "ashes?" That's not very "green."

Why not add this to your will:

1. place my body on a pile of dynamite on an Oregon beach, and blow it up (first issue umbrellas to the funeral party.) Or, failing that...

2. Freeze my body in liquid nitrogen, sharpen my head in a giant pencil-sharpener, then drive me into the ground as a fertilizer-spike.

3. Do #2 above, but throw my sharpened body from a plane flying over farmland. Add fletching to my legs to guarantee pointy-end-downwards.

4. Cast my body in a block of solidified transparent polyester resin, then use it as a large tombstone. People visiting can watch the slow decay, until years later it's a me-shaped bubble. (Leave a little drain-channel to prevent explosion from gas pressure.)

5. Once I saw a button-mushroom entirely take over a live eggplant. Do that to my body, but with psilocybe species. Then dry, grind, and smoke me up.

6. "Resomation," but that's too too conventional.

Out of all this, its weird to see 2016 is 10 years ago. Kids born that year already in 4 or 5th grade

* sorry to make it we're all feel old lol

Some people are so afraid to live or go out that they may as well be dead. Particularly when their entire life consists of taking orders from someone else and making none of their own decisions.

One of my jobs is taking funerals in the UK. (It's always useful for a project manager to have access to a number of deep holes). As the article says, things are different in Europe, and even between the constituent countries of the UK. In England, where I am, probably 90% of funerals lead to a cremation rather than a burial. There was a revolutionary change from "illegal and heretical" to "absolutely fine and normal" in a short period of the 19C. I've taken a service at the original crematorium in Woking, which has plaques for a few notable people including Eleanor Marx and Alan Turing. That made the London Necropolis obsolete - a huge graveyard in the same town, with its own dedicated railway leading out of Waterloo station, built when London was running out of room.

I said I took a service at the crematorium: most crems are run by local councils, have one or two chapels as part of the complex, and are set in a cemetery. Stand-alone crematoria for direct cremation do exist, and I think that this will be the way of the future, with funerals taken with a box of pre-cremated ashes rather a coffin, mainly to reduce cost. Cost is high, though far from as high as in the USA: no embalming, hence no need for vaults for pollution control, simple coffin which is cheaper and only needs four bearers, crematoria run more as a public service than as a profit centre, ashes often scattered rather than needing a grave. But it still ends up costing a lot because so many people are needed to run the service.

We do have the equivalent of body disposal by the county. A basic funeral is funded by the local authority, and it is a funeral, not just body disposal. I've done a small number where someone has died with little money, and without known friends or family. I have spent some time contacting pubs, churches and clubs to find anyone who might want to come or be able to tell me anything for the eulogy.

It's a fascinating job - I can't think of anyone other than midwives who can visit homes from such a wide section of society and hear life stories. Today I took a huge funeral for a matriarch from a very clannish area of the town - you often get four generations of a family living within a few hundred yards of each other. It's a very different culture to my own middle-class background.

It's also fun to go to the biennial National Funeral Exhibition - several thousand people who are habitually kind and empathetic, descending on an exhibition hall in the middle of an agricultural showground, to see the latest advances in high-altitude disposal of ashes and demonstrations of the manufacture of wicker coffins (personally I would go for the felt coffin). My wife is looking forward to it, though she has advised me that if I continue to call her Morticia she's going to be picking up some business cards for her own use.

The algorithms are limiting my reach so bad right now that when my time comes, the Grim Reaper probably won't even receive the notification.