Burial/funerary practices are really fascinating, as it's so intertwined with our ideas of morals and aesthetics (which have always themselves been part of the

Burial/funerary practices are really fascinating, as it's so intertwined with our ideas of morals and aesthetics (which have always themselves been part of the same thing). Ceremonial/ritualistic treatment of the dead is something that's been part of humanity for so long, and it's made us what we are. For this reason, it's good to examine what sorts of funerary practices one finds aesthetically pleasing or off-putting, and to see if there are any trends. For example, I personally am less enamored of pure utilitarian/altruistic methods like donating one's body to science, or where you get your remains put into a package to grow a tree. Can't deny the usefulness and rationality of such things, of course. But the thought process of that I can't shake is "Well, at least I'll be of some use when I'm dead" or "I don't want to be a bother." My thought is that there's something good in the notion, not just of the dead not being forgotten, but of having the dead impart some sort of cost or burden on the living. I actually love the idea of pyramids and ancient mausoleums, and the idea of people having been buried with personal or costly items -- not because I myself am interested in having a lavish tomb or "thinking I can take it with me," but because I think there's something primal in us that wants to find some way of making the sense of loss more concrete and material. (At the same time, that can be driven to excess in our modern funeral-director economic system, which itself tries to piggyback on that desire to throw wealth at the dead by instead throwing wealth at the living.) When it comes to burial, I've always liked large standing headstones far more than just flat markers, partially for historical/design purposes, but also just because I'm not a fan of making such gravestones less prominent just to make the job of a lawn-mower easier. I can't help but want graves to be obnoxious obstacles enough that someone has to deal with them individually. When it comes to cremation or the article's "liquifaction," I find it curious that either method sits well with me except for the last step of cremulation. It's not something that we generally think about, but when you cremate a body, the fires aren't enough to get the job done -- you end up with many fragments of fragile bone rather than some uniform powder. At that point, the fragments go into a cremulator, which is essentially an industrial blender, to be pulverized into powder. Maybe I'm just a romantic for older methods, but the more modern industrial "grind grandma's bones in a blender" approach strikes me as much more violent than immolating a corpse. I'd much rather cremation was practiced as in Japan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_funeral#Cremation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_funeral#Cremation ) where the fragments themselves are hand-picked out of the ashes (or rather chopstick-picked) by relatives to be placed in the urn. I'd also be a fan of bringing back the practice of ossuaries to balance the desire for burial with the limitations of physical space. Of course, this is all 'irrational' or 'illogical', but it's good to think about what we actually favor when it comes to funerary practices, and what it says about ourselves. I think that aesthetics, our sense of beauty/ugliness in this situation, is connected with our worldview, our personal history, and our morals/ethics in interesting ways. Looking through the thousands of years of human civilization and seeing how various people dealt with the trauma of death and loss is enlightening.