Out of the way

Most of the people I know who have died have been cremated. A couple have been buried, in a sturdy box that is meant to mean they will still be there in a decade or two.

Now there is a "movement" for what I always thought would be better for the world than being cremated along with a viking ship and the whole ceremonial malarkey that goes with it (at least in Ibn Fadlan's description of a Rus funeral, a single source with some doubts, which has been used as if it were what all vikings did all the time). In other words, stick me in the garden, far enough under the compost that I don't come up in a day or two and a dog doesn't decide to bring in a bit of me, but unwrapped so I turn into worm food and do something useful like feed a plant.

Lots of people care about what happens to their body. Lots of people try to avoid the whole idea. Until Mikko's funeral, I had never seen a dead body for real - I grew up in a world where although I knew that people died, the fact of them dying was somehow removed from life, not a natural part of it, and it was something that happened in hospitals to old people, or occasionally in accidents.

When I was little, my grandfather was a big man. And when I was bigger and he was older, he had shrunk a bit, but lifting his coffin at his funeral I was shocked by how little he weighed. A decade later, when my granny died too, we scattered their ashes. A bit of dust poured into our hands, and scattered over the garden bed. We all end up, somehow, dead. There are things we think we would like.

I went to Mikko's grave, in a small cemetery in Finland. It isn't what he said he wanted, but there are worse places for the dust to end up as well as better places. In the end, we are just dust, and what happens to the lump of stuff that used to be a person is really a question for everyone else. If I had my way I would either be fertiliser, or go out with an amazing fire-and-funeral spectacle, if I thought for a minute I could justify it on any rational grounds.

But at the end of my life, when someone is left with the problem of what to do with a big lump of ex-person, I am grateful if they just figure out something sensible and it isn't too much of a hassle. After all, I won't be needing the body again...