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Comment by meristohm | Hacker News Reader

For anyone disturbed by the thought of a body being turned with a hook, consider who that person is since they died. My perspective is that they’re a memory in whoever remembers. They have lasting impacts to varying degrees. Now they are a collection of elements, much of which supports many other living things. I care that the body is processed in a way towards most ecological reciprocity, whatever that may be for that region of the world.

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Treating our dead with respect is probably one of the oldest signs of human culture. People care a lot about the bodies of their deceased loved ones. See Antigone by Sophocles. You're welcome to your views, but most people have strong, deeply felt emotions and opinions on how dead bodies should be properly handled.

Things like this, though, show that those attitudes are changing. Not rapidly, and certainly not in a majority of people, but they are indeed changing.

If this seems disrespectful, then I encourage you to look into what the embalming process actually entails, as (IMO) it's worse: https://youtu.be/B5-NtLmKUDE?t=201

Mummification is even worse than that, but it had a perceived benefit for its proponents.

I respect the bodies, and the land, water, air, and other bodies that made them, which is why I prefer my remnants be digested by microbes with minimal resource-cost so long as it is safe enough for the land. We’re so spoiled with luxuries like embalming and fancy boxes. Abstraction layers may still feel like respect, but they distance us from the core of survival, which is the health of the other living things here. How can we shift our strong, deeply-felt emotions around dead bodies?

Your phrasing is very interesting: "consider who that person is since they died." It's interesting because you refer to the dead person in the present tense, "who it is," not "who it was". Yet, in the following sentence you say "they are a collection of elements." Even when attempting to state "cold hard facts," we cannot help but exhibit our humanity, and it's a reminder why we should treat the dead with respect. In my opinion, being alive is more than just a collection of atoms and the interactions between them. And in death, while the electrons stop moving in that particular way that made us alive, that "something special" still remains in the form of their memory.

That was intentional, nodding to the dead living on in living memory.

I’m okay with the spark of life being a result of a collection of stuff and the interactions amongst it all.

I treat the dead with respect because I’m my own panopticon.

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