By Khalifa Hemed
Published August 8, 2019
What would you like done with your body once you take your last breath, your heart stops pumping and you can no longer read and react to current affairs?
I. Ground Burial
Get the corpse embalmed in a morgue, hold a funeral and have the body buried six feet into the earth.
II. Flame Cremation
Get the cadaver turned to gases, ashes and mineral fragments ashes via combustion, vaporisation, and oxidation.Then have the ashes scattered, buried or retained by your family.
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III. Alkaline Hydrolysis
Have the cadaver placed in a pressurized stainless steel chamber along with water and an alkali solution of potassium hydroxide and then turned to ashes by extreme heat. Have the resultant ashes scattered, buried or retained by your family.This process is also known as Green cremation, Bio-cremation, Liquid cremation and Resomation.
IV. Dissolution
Turn the body into a liquid that can be emptied into the sewer system by dissolving it in acid or a solution of lye.
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V. Exposure
Let the elements and scavenger animals and birds feed on the body as you no longer need it. According to Wikipedia, the corpse is stripped of the flesh, leaving only the bones, which are then either buried or stored elsewhere.
VI. Compost the Body
Composting takes a body, places it in a temperature- and moisture-controlled vessel and rotated with wood chips, alfalfa, straw and a mixture of nitrogen and carbon.Washington, USA, became the first state in May 2019 to have legalised composting human bodies. The law will take effect in May 2020.
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VII. Donate the Body to Science
Let your full body be used in anatomy classes to educate the next generation of doctors, researchers or fitness instructors
VIII. Sky Burial
Have your body placed on a mountain top to be eaten by scavenging animals or to decompose naturally as happens in some parts of China, Tibet, Nepal, and northern India. This custom, reports sbs.com.au, is followed by Vajrayana Buddhists who believe the body has no use after death, so might as well be used for animal food.
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IX. Promession
Have the body turned into particles of organic material that can be returned to the earth.
According to huffpost.com, Promession is the process of freeze-dying human remains. “Whereas cremation incinerates a body resulting in ash,” reports huffpost.com, “promession produces .04 inch (1 millimeter) diameter particles of organic material.”
How does this work?
The corpse is frozen at -18 Celcius and then placed in a vat of liquid nitrogen where the temperature drops to -196 Celcius, huffpost.com says. “A mechanical device vibrates the body which disintegrates in minutes, then the material is freeze-dried in a vacuum chamber, removing the water and reducing the weight to thirty percent of the original mass. Metals such as fillings and artificial devices are picked-out then the dry powder is placed in an urn and returned to the family.”
X. Immurement
Have the corpse stored in an above-ground tomb or mausoleum.
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