Death of a blogsman

It's only natural that when a man reaches advanced age, he begins a more serious consideration of his own mortality.

In the case of XO, a person who basically has one foot in the grave already, that consideration made him reconsider his "end of life" plan. And it's a surprisingly good plan. For someone of XO's questionable mental state it shows some unexpected clarity of thought.. even something resembling logic, which is new for him.

But my BFF's mom started talking about how her sister was going to donate her body to science and how they would pay for the cremation and send your ashes back home...

... instead of paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to a funeral home to host a maudlin weep-fest, all my survivors need to do is make a phone call.

So yeah, donate you body to science so med school students can cut you up and learn about surgery by removing all of your internal bits. Finally, XO will be contributing to society!

But -- not to throw a monkey wrench into the plan -- I'm not sure if XO has looked at the option of promession.

From what I can tell it's a pretty new thing, patent pending and all. But for people like XO, it may be just the scratch for that end-of-life itch. It has the added bonus of being "environmentally friendly" -- and let's face it, incinerating a corpse isn't exactly kind to Mother Nature, what with all of the ashes and soot, not to mention the amount of carbon it takes to produce enough energy to burn a body completely, believe me I know.

Essentially the promession process consists of freezing your corpse in liquid nitrogen, then shattering your frozen body, T-1000-style, with a sudden vibration.

Your shattered mortal remains are freeze-dried to remove any residual moisture, then any metals are removed (including those two titanium hips that XO received a couple of years ago).

Now, XO is nothing but inert organic material -- which is pretty much what he is now -- but when he's buried, this material is readily biodegradable. The nutrients are returned to the earth to be used as worm food, plant food, or even marijuana fertilizer.

Now that's what I call dust-to-dust.

Anyway, just wanted to put this option out there. It still seems overly complicated compared to my own plan, which is to just have someone toss my bloated corpse out of moving pickup into a ditch along a lonely county road somewhere in Northwest Kansas.

tagged: death, burial, cremation, promession, corpse, body, environmentalist