Memes

I've always wanted to have a fully natural burial.

Just take my body into the woods and dig a hole and put me in the middle of a nice stand of trees.

My good friend who is a funeral director said that this would, in fact, be illegal, running afoul of several corpse desecration laws at both state and federal levels.

The laws are in place obviously to prevent from hiding bodies (or adding another charge to their crimes when they do) as well as other reasons like missing persons, etc. (like...if you're a hiker or something and you come across a body, you can't just bury it and move on, you have to notify the authorities).

I get all that, but I still didn't see why someone couldn't have this wish in writing and have it all overseen by some official.

He also added that burial sites are required to basically have secure funding for their upkeep into perpetuity, which is obviously not going the be the case for some random patch of woods.

Since we had that conversation I have seen that there are a few businesses for "green burials" if not natural ones (you're first cremated then your ashes are buried in a grove they maintain). I'm hoping that before my number gets pulled that there's an even more natural option where it's literally a healthy, diverse woodland and your body is allowed to be buried, to decompose and give its nutrients back to the earth.

I wouldn't want to train the vultures in my neighborhood to think any human lying down is fair game to get pecked or worse.