Shopping Around

When you start talking a lot about how you wish to be disposed of, I guess you have hit one of those life phases.  

I talk fairly frequently with a woman where I work out.  If she is on one machine and I am on the one next to her we talk.  She had a friend, but 65 years of age, who died of cancer perhaps ten days ago.  He was not responding to any of the treatments, so it was best she thought that he had gone quickly.

He had a boat, so over the weekend, she, along with other friends, and members of his family went out in the boat and scattered his ashes.

I told Carol about it and she said firmly that she does not want to be scattered to the winds, but planted in the ground, though being cremated, and stuck in a bottle and stuck in the ground would be OK.  I mean she is not completely into the traditional corpse in the ground thing.

Carol has been looking for a place to put her mother who is at this very moment in the process of dying.  She had found a graveyard located near the ocean, and she got the literature from them.  1500 dollars for a little cremation plot with a view overlooking the ocean.  We started wondering: how do those cemeteries make money.  I mean this is prime ocean front property, and 1500 doesn’t seem like all that much, I mean not for a piece of property for all eternity.

I hazarded that maybe they get a lot of tax breaks for a graveyard.  I don’t know. But the upkeep really can’t be that great.  There’s not a whole lot of activity in a graveyard; it’s not like people are coming and going all that much. And I have to think having corpses planted on your property does not increase your property values.

I wonder if the smart investor is looking for an up tick in graveyard stocks.  Certainly over the next 20 years or so there’s going to be an increase in demand for graveyard property given that the supply of bodies will be rising.  

I read that the company—one of those evil companies associated with the family of Bushes— that did the clean up charged 12000 a body for bodies left behind by Katrina.  I remember reading about how the body collection had been farmed out to some company at the time.  I remember thinking now that is dirty work.  I wonder if the guy on Dirty Jobs has looked into body collection.

Anyhow I tried at the time to find out how much they were paying those guys out there in the sweltering sun to pick up the bodies.  I wrote a song about it.  But I forget the lyrics, something to do with picking up bodies at the minimum wage.  

If the capitalists could figure out a way to charge you for going to heaven, they surely would and make out like bandits too.

2 Replies to “Shopping Around”

  1. a person of my lack of age does not often think of disposing of bodies although im sure its crossed my mind.i know it has but damn when you think about it,well its just got to be the dirtiest job.i dont know about you but just watching a movie where the detectives have to look at the corpse for whatever the case,i dont know just some thing uneasy.dead people,what to do with them,how they look when you see them for real,i guess a part of being alive
    is being turned off by dead things,or humans,you know what i mean.when i think of my own remains i think, ashes well thats clean but theres this sick twisted fear(i guess from to many tales from the crypt episodes)that says what if your still alive in some way and you feel it when they stick you in the oven or your still alive and you wake up in a box 6ft under.i think i just have a problem with death.do you remember hearing about the bells that they would put in grave yards and if someone was buried alive they could pull a string and the bell would notify someone.??

  2. Back in 1962, I guess, I read this passage from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot–about what if the head lived…
    “Do you know, though,” cried the prince warmly, “you made that
    remark now, and everyone says the same thing, and the machine is
    designed with the purpose of avoiding pain, this guillotine I
    mean; but a thought came into my head then: what if it be a bad
    plan after all? You may laugh at my idea, perhaps–but I could
    not help its occurring to me all the same. Now with the rack and
    tortures and so on–you suffer terrible pain of course; but then
    your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have
    plenty of that) until you die. But HERE I should imagine the most
    terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at
    all–but the certain knowledge that in an hour,–then in ten
    minutes, then in half a minute, then now–this very INSTANT–your
    soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man–
    and that this is certain, CERTAIN! That’s the point–the
    certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on
    the block and hear the iron grate over your head–then–that
    quarter of a second is the most awful of all.

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