Send me to glory in a GLAD bag...

...don't waste no fancy coffin on my bones,
just put me out on the curb next Tuesday,
'an let the sanitation local bear me home.

Here's the whole song, performed in Concordia, Kansas (bonus!) by "Scenic Roots":


Okay, here's the thing. I've long held that it was an odd idea to be hermetically sealed in a vault, to even pay the funeral industry such coin for embalming and all the horrors associated with that. (Read "The American Way of Death" like I did in college, if you want an eye-opener!) What's the point of preserving my corpse in such an air-tight, sanitary way, when my life was lived at large in the elements?


Amy Eckert/Getty Images

Today's rant was inspired by today's news, about a beetle that is quick on the site to process the dead, as heard on NPR... Go here for the full coverage on NPR, including some intriguing links, songs, images, etc... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112894124 (In case the links "die," the story was titled "To Casket or Not to Casket," airing 10/9/09.)

I am something of a mortuary science aficionado. One of my biggest garage sale scores was the purchase of the training materials/notebook of a mortician from the 1940's. That documentation discussed uses of auto-body putty and paint, sewing shut some orifices and breaking bones to make for better a better fit into the box, etc...and that, my friends, is primary research, not some rumor or article, but the genuine article. I do not believe much has changed in the carnage of that "industry."

So, this is my living will, until I get a more official one: just pitch me out into the compost pile. Spare me the indignity. Let my body become again a part of the world around me...or I guess you could dice me up for organ donation first, then toss the rest in the compost pile.