Respect for the dead...

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I'm in the same camp as the 'DO NOT BURY' folks here.

I think stuffing an embalmed human body into a box and putting it permanently into the ground (until earthquake, flood, or development enters the picture and brings up the dead! ) is a waste of the earth and the resources used to do it and maintain it.

There's a guy locally who wants to start a business where he builds artificial reefs with cement pods, and places a container of ashes somewhere in them for burial. You're supposed to get some sort of GPS coordinate, I think, so you know where your loved one's ashes reside under the salt water
Of course, it's touted as being good for the fishes too.

I believe in cremation. Trust me, humans can find a way to safely dispose of ashes.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa6zWEaXxz4[/youtube]

Anyone not wishing to be buried can always leave their body to science.
Med school students will cut it up for practice.
You really should consider whether doing this will make things harder emotionally for your family, however.

I feel that all dead animals should be buried.

You are right...funerals and graveyards are for the living. I understand going to a funeral, to say your lasy goodbyes to the person who you once knew. But I don't understand all of the drama that goes into them. For example...spending lots of money just to make the corpse look ok to view in the casket on the day of the funeral is silly. In the end...they are going to end up under the ground or cremated anyway, so no one will see them anyway (except for the funeral attendents and morgue staff that day).

What was really amazing was getting together with my relatives once. I had found my father's cousin who was looking for relatives after her dad died. And she organized a get-together of a side of the family I'd never met many of before.

One thing we did was visit a graveyard where a lot of our family is buried. The older family members sat around talking about all the dead people almost like they were still alive, we went from grave to grave and it was almost like meeting them. They told all kinds of stories about them. It was really beautiful.

Where I run into trouble with my culture's definition of respect for the dead isn't so much about the bodies, as about the memories. In my mind it is the ultimate in disrespect to suddenly forget the way you really related to a person in favor of an idealized version that never existed. And I can't do it when people die. I just can't make people I had complex and difficult relationships into saints as soon as they die.

Yet that seems to be what I have to do in order to be considered respectful. I keep telling people -- if I die, if you didn't like me, please by all means keep on disliking me, because that's more honest than acting like you like me out of misplaced respect for me. If you agreed or disagreed with me on something, don't let my death be the thing that changes your mind, unless my death actually pertains in some strange way to the matter you agreed or disagreed with me on. Don't act like I am someone else, someone perfect that I never was and no person can be. That seems the ultimate in disrespect for the dead person because it is a kind of self-delusion and forgetting, and it ends in not knowing who the person really was, because we all have our faults and dying may change that in the afterlife but it doesn't change our deeds in the flesh and blood way we lived on earth, where the people who remember us are.

Unfortunately that viewpoint puts me at odds with enough of my culture that I have been considered almost monstrous for not distorting my memory of dead people at the moment of their death. :-/ I've had several people I know die before, and my memory of them is as clear as any memory. I remember getting along with them, I remember fighting with them, I remember all the little and big ways they annoyed me (if any), as well as all the traits I liked about them (if any). So where is the disrespect? It horrifies me when I read eulogies of people I've known and the eulogy doesn't even resemble them, sometimes is their complete opposite. How is that respect, to write a eulogy that has nothing to do with the person being eulogized?

And I just realized that one of the best things about going around the graveyard with my family was they did not idealize my dead relatives. They talked about them as real people and so I got to know them a little by association, as real people. If they only talked about how wonderful they were I would not have felt like I was getting to know them, or like I could trust what they reported.