The 6 Coolest Things You Can Do With Your Dead Body
Once you're dead - and you will be, before you know it - do you really want to spend the rest of eternity occupying a tiny plot of perfectly good land? Why? So your loved ones can lay flowers on it and dogs can come by and relieve themselves on your headstone later?
Screw that. These days, there are all sorts of cool things you can get done with your remains, if you know where to shop. You can...
#6.
Get Loaded Into Some Bullets
When the husband of South London's Joanna Booth died, she did what we hope our loved ones do for us: she loaded his ashes into shotgun shells and killed every non-human thing in sight.
Her husband, James, was an expert on vintage shotguns before he slipped into a food poison-induced coma for 18 months, subsequently passing away at the age of 50. "It was not his dying wish," said Joanna, "but I remembered that he had read somewhere that someone had had their ashes loaded into cartridges and he thought it was very funny."
See? Hilarious.
Taking the joke several thousand steps too far, she went to a shotgun cartridge maker and had a little bit of James crammed into 275 12-gauge shotgun shells. Joanna then had the bullets blessed by Rev. Alistair Donald (a local Church of Scotland minister who, in the process, proved the church is awesome).
With the newly minted, newly blessed James-filled bullets, Joanna and 20 close friends took to an estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland where they proceeded to shoot every animal they saw. By day's end, the bullets were spent and Mother Nature had finally learned not to fuck with the gun-totting tag team of James and Joanna Booth: 70 partridges, 23 pheasants, 7 ducks and a fox fell that day.
"James would've wanted me to do this."
Just Imagine...
You die at the hands of a brutal street gang. Your best friend/brother/father takes to the streets in the name of vigilante revenge. Finally he confronts the gang leader on a rooftop and says, "When you get to Hell, tell 'em Bobby sent you." Then he shoots him with a shotgun shell made from your ashes.
(Your name is Bobby).
#5.
Be a Fireworks Display
We've all had this same conversation at one point or another: If you can choose your death, what would it be? Most people would probably say quick and painless. The next most popular answer would most likely be, "In a blaze of explosive fucking glory!" And while most of us probably won't get to bite the big one action movie-style, we can now ensure that our already dead bodies will.
British company Heavens Above Fireworks and the cult sounding, California-based Angel's Flight give you the option of treating your death like a Chinese New Year by mixing your ashes with combustible powder -- giving you the spectacular send off you may or may not deserve.
There are various packages you can choose from, allowing you to tailor your display to best suit your personality. Heavens Above's "Simple Farewell" and "Gentle Farewell" packages offer a classy, solemn and subdued display of mortars launching rockets into the air and exploding gloriously, a fitting way to honor someone that lived their entire life in constant fear of being silently labeled as "Showy" and "A big-fat attention whore."
If that isn't befitting of the recently deceased, then customers can do a total 180 and go for an all out, balls to the wall, explosiapalooza with the "Grand Finale" and "Spectacular Goodbye" packages. With these you'll be able to show the world that you over-compensated in every aspect of your life as a cavalcade of star shells, aerial mines, rockets and roman candles blast your dusty ass in a five-minute cacophony that will make God himself hold his ears.
Just Imagine...
Included in the "Spectacular Goodbye" and "Grand Finale" packages are the options to include the music of your choosing and, as the Heavens Above website states, to spell out "a name or message in fireworks."
Got a final "fuck you" you want to deliver? You can spell that out in the sky and have a family member upload that shit to YouTube. All of which is, of course, will be set to a totally awesome Nickelback megamix.
#4.
Get Turned Into a Pencil
For those of you who prefer something less violent but more subtly creepy, Nadine Jarvis has a solution. She is an English product designer who designs things that never should be designed.
Like this.
But when it comes to thinking-up alternative ways to dispose of a dead body she makes mafiosos around the globe envious of her artistry. Jarvis has embarked on a project to dispose of ashes in a way that will "lengthen death ceremony [sic] to give more time to come to terms with loss." And by that, she means things like making pencils out of your ashes.
Using the cremated remains, or "Cremains," one dead body can produce 240 pencils -- all but guaranteeing that you'll be dead long before you and your grieving family gets the chance to break them all in the most morbidly epic pencil fight ever recorded.
The box of pencils comes with a built-in sharpener, so that the pencil shavings fall back into the box, leaving your family with an urn that has more in common with the floors near the trash bin of every elementary school classroom than a human body.
Just Imagine...
Make plans to have your corpse pencils donated to the local library. Or, even better, an elementary school. You know you'll wind up haunting that shit. You'll be poltergeisting books and desks all around the room, while one priest cowers in the corner and screams "THE PENCILS! WE HAVE TO DESTROY THE PENCILS! ITS HIS BODY! HIS BODYYYYY!!!"
Got another one for you, and again from the U.K, you could become an actor.
ReplyWhen David Tennant (yes him) played Hamlet at the R S C an ex musician called Tchaikovsky (no not him ) played the skull.....no kidding..he donated his skull to be used in the graveyard scene.
When I die.. I want my 8 day old rotten putrid corpse fed through a woodchipper and sprayed all over the audience at a MAYHEM concert..... \m/666\m/
Replymy name really is Bobby, im special
Replynot that anyone gives a s**t but the last paragraph I'm pretty sure its accept, not except
Replywhen i die i want my body to be set on fire and with the leftover ashes, i will recollect myself into a giant, red and gold bird that will use their tears to cure people.
ReplyAt first I wanted my body to be bronzed, but now I'm thinking maybe only half of it should be bronzed, and the rest should be turned into bling for my bronzed corpse.
ReplyI want a suit of armor, complete with sword and shield, made out of my ash-diamonds.
ReplyI've been to the human body exhibit from #1. I have a t-shirt with that first image, the skateboarder, with it :)
ReplyBut you should know, it's ridiculously easy to destroy a diamond. I buy gold and the diamonds have to come out in order to sell the metal to a refinery. Sometimes, if the diamond is s****y enough, we have to sacrifice it. Other times we just have to be extremely careful not to break it. Diamonds are hard, but the more the flaws and lower the quality, the more fragile it is. So if some of these far-from-flawless people chose to become diamonds...you see where I'm going here? :)
I want to be plastinated in a jerking off pose.
Replyyou can also be pressed into a vinyl record...
ReplyThe first thing that came to my mind at reading #3 was a diamond sword made of samurai ashes.
ReplyI want my body to be donated to a body farm, cause hell if the decomposition rate of my flesh in whatever outdoor scenario they put it in can help solve murder cases, I'm all for it!
ReplyHere's my idea. Surgically fill my skull and any other bones where it would work with air filled containers for flotation, and clamp a chain around my ankle attached to a heavy weight. Throw this setup into a good scuba-diving location near some coral reefs (I wanna have fish hiding in my rib cage for safety and eels going in and out of my eye sockets). With the flotation device in my skull I will remain upright with the chain pulled, drifting around in the waves.
ReplyIn my will I will have some wealth set aside in a dividend paying stock or something like that so that anyone wishing to visit my grave can go afford to go on a fun scuba diving trip :)
HOLY s**t I TOUCHED THOSE PLASTIC THINGS! YOU'RE TELLING ME THEY'RE REAL DEAD BODIES THE WHOLE TIME?
ReplyThere are a lot more cool, and extremely useful things you can do with your dead body, if this really interests you check out "Stiff" by Mary Roach.
ReplyDid anyone else notice the spelling error in that last entry? They won't accept, not except. Not to be nit-picky, but if you're gonna publish something you should take the time to have someone proofread it, not just spellcheck. Sorry. I guess it is kinda petty to point out but hey, I'm bored.
ReplyMy final wishes are henceforth to be made into a diamond encrusted pencil that is shaped like a bullet and packed with explosive fireworks.
Reply...then placed in the hand of a plastinated body, seemingly being used to write the biography of Chuck Norris.
When I die, they can harvest every viable thing from my corpse and then dump me in the ground in a shroud.
ReplyFor #5, I hear "Ride of the Valkyries." Too much "Apocalypse Now," I suppose.
ReplyBeen there, done that for #5. Back in the 80s my best friend, who was an engineer and SF fan wanted his ashes scattered over Mount Bonnell. So stuck them into a couple of model rockets and launched them over the hill. When the parachute came out, so did the ashes.
ReplyNumber 3 doesn't make much sense to me. A cremated body has had the carbon converted to CO2 in the incineration process. Most of what's left is Calcium and trace minerals and metals. Maybe there's some calcium carbonate in there, I guess.