After An Atheist Dies

[mordant]

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.

It's fairly unusual for the family to view the body going into the oven and even then there's generally a requirement that it go in some sort of container. In my wife's case it was a wooden pallet with a cardboard box stapled on top of it, which apparently met the legal definition of a "casket" that the deceased is supposed to be cremated in. So even if I'd been there I don't know what I would have actually "seen".

It's true, in my son's case especially it's theoretically possible that what I got back was a box of cat cremains or potash or something. But that's why funeral directors are licensed and bonded; beyond a certain point I don't know how to be absolutely certain there's nothing nefarious going on. I am forced to trust the system. And really, as an atheist, all I cared about is that the body was handled to the satisfaction of what the law requires, at which point they lose interest in it.

In my son's case the coroner (claimed they) harvested his organs / tissues so the funeral director and crematorium were out of luck there.

I think the $300K potential is probably apocryphal because no reputable organ bank will take chain of possession on such things without knowing their provenance and the cause of death. For example if the cause of death is drug overdose I think they generally take a pass. Maybe there's a black market internationally or something but even that would have to meet some kind of standard to maintain product value.