After An Atheist Dies

[Astonished]

Yeah, I was lucky that someone locally had gotten a funeral director's license and chose to implement it entirely online. I never even physically met anyone, I just filled out an online form, downloaded some PDFs which I filled out and signed and scanned and emailed back to them, and that was it. The only investment they had was in picking up the body from the coroner and delivering it to the crematorium, which in turn mailed the ashes to me. It would have been more if there had been a formal memorial service to arrange or anything like that. I don't know how widespread this kind of funeral director service is, but suspect it is not unique. Honestly $800 is a bit high IMO for the probably two hours of labor that was involved on their part, but I figured I was paying for them knowing what to do, understanding the legalities, assuming liability, etc.

Naturally some people would be aghast at the spartan nature of this but my son was basically a recluse, his birth mother showed literally zero interest in him for the past 20 years, his sister frankly not much more, so there was no one else to either consult or console other than my present wife, who had adopted him (metaphorically) as her own. He was a sweet kid, a good and loyal son, kind and gentle to one and all, and if he'd given more people a chance to know him there would have been a reason for a full-blown grief-fest. As it was, there was a couple of friends from back in high school that we notified on FB, his sister, my brothers, and none of them knew him well enough and cared enough to want to travel here for a memorial service. So my wife and I did what we needed to do for ourselves. My guess is it was sort of the "atomic" funeral, not reducible to anything simpler or less pricey.

My prior / late wife was another story, there was a funeral with probably 150 people in attendance and it cost a small fortune because there were that many people that needed to deal with her passing. Even there, she was cremated (she demanded it; "my body betrayed me in life, just burn the damed thing when I'm gone" is the way she put it) and there was no casket purchased or rented, no embalming services, etc. The actual funeral was most of it. Like I say, it's all about the survivors, not the dead person.

If you don't actually see the corpse go in the oven a scammer can part a corpse out and make around $300,000 of of it.

Wow, I'm in the wrong business. What do they value about it, the black market value of the organs or are there just a lot of rich necrophiliacs out there?