Funeral or body disposal ideas please

[Filthycop]

hello

help please

My dad is dying - it's cool, it happens he's 73 and at peace with it, breaking my heart but that is not what I need advice on.

The issue we have is that there is going to be no funeral - at my Dad and Mum's request (my brother and I would have preferred some kind of memorial but our Mum comes first and that is that)..... Our actual issue is that they want the cheapest, but greenest body disposal that they can get.

When my Grandfather died and wanted no fuss, they still had to pay for funeral cars and a cremation no one went to. My Dad doesn't want that.

In an ideal world he'd have left his body to medical science but they won't have him because he is to tall.

Can anyone help? what can we do? he'd rather not cremation because that isn't very green and is bad for the environment. My Mum found a woodland burial thing that was horrendously expensive.

Has anyone come across a cheap green body disposal thing?

Sounds harsh and un caring - but it really isn't we're trying to honour his wishes

@JuneOsborne

£2k seems reasonable to me. What's your budget?

ideally - nothing - literally my parents want no kind of funeral or anything but we have to dispose of the body so she wants to do the greenest thing she can but with minimal expense and no one will be attending, no flowers, no memorial etc - they very much see the dead body as a vessel not a person.

Leaving to medical science would have been his ideal but they will reject his body based on his height and his very low BMI.

Thank all for the suggestions - we will go through everything with my Dad

Any possibility of leaving to forensic science? Search on "body farm" or "Human Taphonomy Facility" One was reported to be opening in the UK in 2018:

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01436-8

There may be one at Wrexham
www.chemistryworld.com/culture/down-on-the-body-farm/3009202.article

I know this might be a bit too extreme, but how about just not claiming his body?

There is a house very close to where I grew up where the wife was buried in the garden. Forty years on it doesn't seem to have affected the value.

I was going to suggest cadaver donation to a med school, but you’d need specific consent forms completing prior to death.

www.rcseng.ac.uk/about-the-rcs/support-our-work/donate/donate-your-body-to-medical-science/

If you have his written consent, the details of the medical schools who use cadavers are here, they all have different criteria.

www.hta.gov.uk/medical-schools

I work in a funeral directors. You'd be very lucky to get anything cheaper than £2K for a woodland burial. You're paying for a plot of land and then the venue will charge an interment fee too. You also need a coffin and a lot of woodland venues demand 'eco' natural willow coffins which are more expensive than the wood veneer cheapies. You also have to get the body to the burial so may need a funeral director to do all the form filling/caring for the body until the date of burial. They will charge fees for their services.

Woodland burials are cheaper than graveyard burials because there's no masonry, but still a lot of other costs incurred.

Do you actually need a coffin? My relative, the one buried on his own farm, was wrapped in a blanket.

Ah, well on that case, you need something like donating to science but not that.

Mary roaches book Stiff is all about these 'farms' where bodies are subject to certain conditions to enable forensic scientists to date remains. Like what @MereDintofPandiculation has suggested.

Not sure of the green credentials if they burn the body, and I assume you don't get to choose.