Death Transcendence

The "death" industry used to be the exclusive domain of religion -- priests, churches, temples, and so forth handled everything (or at least everything not handled by the family). Later funeral homes came into the picture, but the business of death remained generally religious in nature.

Today, though, things are changing and they seem to be changing fast. It's not simply that death is being secularized, but it's also being commercialized -- and the more market-based it is, the more it must respond to the demands or interests of the market. And what are people in the market demanding?

In A Brief History of Death, Douglas J. Davies writes:

Consumerist death-style has, as might be expected, only burgeoned with a market economy in which entrepreneurs set their creativity to offer new forms of death service for the removal of the dead. This has, for example, witnessed companies prepared to send cremated remains into outer space, to freeze bodies that have died through untreatable illness, and to set up memorial websites. Each of these provides an example of human adaptation in the quest for death-conquest.

To have one's cremated remains sent into orbit around the earth or into outer space is to share in the scientific and technological endeavours that, during the second half of the twentieth century, enshrined a wider sense of human conquest and hope for the future. It is likely that those very few individuals able to afford such post-mortem provision have desires that bring a sense of added hope to their grasp of the meaning of life. Perhaps this cluster includes the symbolic load previously carried by 'the heavens' as a place of divine dwelling.

Is having your ashes shot up into space really a replacement for past desires to go to "heaven" in a spiritual sense? I guess it makes some intuitive sense, but I wonder if it's a bit of a stretch. Though, to be fair, I'm sure that a lot of unconscious emotions are involved here to analyzing it rationally may not be very productive.

Would you want to have your ashes shot into space, assuming that the cost wasn't more than the alternatives?

I suppose if I wanted to be "rational," I'd want my body to be used for something productive, either medical research or even just as fertilizer for a tree (you can get urns now that are biodegradable and which will grow into a tree). But while that sounds "rational" on one level, there's still another more emotional level that involves becoming part of something greater (though I suppose this is stronger in the latter options than in donating your body to medical research).

Perhaps it's impossible to completely eliminate all emotional, hopeful elements from death. If so, it's a sign that it's impossible to be completely reconciled with death and the end of one's existence. Even when contemplating options that clearly entail the end of personal existence, there is still hope that whatever is left will have "meaning," be "productive," or continue on while incorporated into some other form or living thing.