Dying For Attention

Utne Blogs > Science and Technology

Dying For Attention

12/21/2007 9:27:15 AM

by Staff

Tags: Death, Burial, Green Death, alternative burials

The problem with dying these days is that everybody’s doing it. It is practically impossible to stand out from the crowd once you’ve breathed your final breath. In a delightfully macabre article for Live Science, Heather Whipps offers some suggestions on how your death, if celebrated in a sufficiently ridiculous fashion, can out-shine your soon-to-be-forgotten life. As an added benefit, some of the options are more eco-friendly than the traditional chemical-laden, bank vault-thick sarcophagus that so many choose for their final resting place (an idea covered by Utne.com in August of 2006). LiveScience also provides a handy top-ten list of the all-time weirdest ways of dealing with death to help with brainstorming. With this many alternatives, you might not even need your ashes shot out of a cannon.

—Morgan Winters

For a related article on virtual bereavement, read Grief Goes Online by Joe Hart from the March/April 2006 issue of Utne Reader.

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