8 Ways to Not Get Buried in a Casket

CW for Death and talking about ways to not get buried in a casket… 

The end is coming. No, I don’t mean the apocalypse or global warming but your life will come to an end at some stage (sorry to bring you down). But it doesn’t have to be a terrifying experience if you plan ahead and take care of things in advance. Unfortunately, people often neglect planning for their death until there are only weeks or days left…

Planning your burial

Burial is a personal choice we make when someone dies. For many, it's a way to pay our respects and ensure that we do everything possible to honor the memory of loved ones who have passed away. Some people choose cremation instead of burial for various reasons: it can be cheaper or they want their remains scattered across a favorite park, mountain range, beach, or other touchstones from their life. While most funeral directors offer options such as cremation and embalming, there are also tons of less traditional ways you can get buried if you so choose. You don't have to get buried in a casket if you don't want to.

Disclaimer. Not every method is available in every country or municipality. Please be sure to get in touch with your local area officials to confirm the legality of what you want to do. Also, some of this is tongue and cheek. Proceed accordingly.

Here are 8 ways to Not Get Buried in a Casket

Some of these are fun and frivolous, but mostly these are serious suggestions to the traditional burial options. The death care industry is innovating every day and developing new ways of closing out your time here on earth. You can let your imagination run wild when it comes to how your body is cared for and handled after your death.

Don’t be a Vampire

Because yeah. If you were a vampire then you would have to be buried in a casket… Unless you got yourself cremated on accident 🔥

Get buried at sea

Burial at sea is a beautiful way to remember an individual. It can also be quite expensive, with costs exceeding $10,000 in some cases. If you're looking for more environmentally friendly options when it comes to your funeral arrangements, consider “green burials” and water burials as alternatives or additions to traditional burial methods like cremation. 

Green burial

Green burials are a relatively recent phenomenon in the funeral industry. Green burials involve using more environmentally-friendly materials, like biodegradable caskets and urns made of wood or terracotta. The most important feature of green burial is that it doesn't include embalming or other chemicals typically used during traditional funerals.

Biodegradable caskets

As more people are considering natural burials in lieu of traditional casketed funerals, there has been a lot of media buzz about the environmental impact that burying bodies can have on landfills. In response to this, some funeral companies have begun offering biodegradable caskets that will turn into soil after they’ve broken down. While these are certainly an improvement over standard wooden ones, it is important to note that even biodegradable caskets take hundreds of years to decompose completely.

Donate your body to science

Donating your body to science is extremely common and valuable. It's also something that people don't really think about until they need to make some choices regarding their own remains. When loved ones are faced with the loss of someone close, they often feel lost as well and aren't sure how best to honor them by making decisions for organ donation or other arrangements. If you know you want to donate your body to science, then you need to be making those arrangements now.

In or around or as a tree

You may be imagining a strange image of how this works, stop right where you are. This method works best when you opt to get cremated, especially if you get buried around a tree. Getting buried as a tree is also an option. The end result of this is that your remains help a tree grow so that you literally are part of the tree. They are called burial pods and you can find out more about them here. This method offers the option of getting cremated or not. 

Buried in the sand on the beach

Maybe the beach is more your speed. Fresh white sands, waves crashing over rocks, and tie pools filled with sea creatures evoke many different emotions and memories for people. Choosing a final resting place in the sand or in the ocean would be peaceful indeed. 

Atop your favorite mountain peak or in a canyon

If you love the idea of resting forever in your favorite outdoor place, you are not alone. Getting cremated offers a world of options to decide where your final resting place will be. The sky is literally the limit. Choosing this route will mean you may need to make unofficial arrangements in addition to what is in your will to ensure your wishes are carried out. Not all places do well with people spreading ashes. But what better place is there to be than finding your final resting place in the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon?

In outer space! 

You can be buried in a rocket that is launched into orbit where no one will ever find it unless they look really hard and have access to NASA's records of launches from Earth, which are not public information but could potentially be accessed by someone clever enough who knows how to hack their way through NASA's servers and break into their database that contains all of the launch data for every mission since 1958 (and even then there's still only about a 1% chance of finding out where your body was put). But if they do manage to find it, chances are good that by then we'll have colonized Mars so there will be plenty of room for more bodies.

Reality check

Ok so maybe the outer space thing isn’t real yet. But it probably will be someday. Someone somewhere is already dreaming up how they are going to commercialize it. The thing to remember is that all of these decisions are intimate and between you and your family. You get to decide what happens to your body after you die. If you are committed to the traditional casket and burial options, go for it. If you want to wildest option available, go for it. In the end, you really aren’t going to know the difference.