Product designer Nadine Jarvis has recently come up with a fascinating idea.
In her piece Carbon Copies she explores using the deseased ashes to make pencils, “pencils made from the carbon of human remains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.”
So it appears that we may need to add an option to our funeral planning questionnaire. For those of you who feel that a traditional burial or cremation is simply not enough, Summum will mummify your remains for the bargain price of $67,000! According to this site “The finest must be permanent, enduring, and timeless“. So what better way to prove that you are the finest (perhaps right on par with a pharaoh?) than to be mummified and buried in a Mummiform cast inlaid with gold and jewels?
From vibrating urns to lost ashes, from strippers at funerals to rock stars snorting their father’s remains up their nose, we at MFF thought we’d seen it all.
But au contraire my friends. Nothing has stopped us in our tracks more than the website we unearthed this week…
People who are opting to NOT go through the fire escape, have an array of Funky Urns before them to choose from.
Gone are the days of the old Traditional Urn that would take pride of place upon your loved one’s mantel (or in the bottom draw depending on how much they liked you).
The Shropshire Star has written a piece on the new trend of Eco-Friendly Funerals. Addressing the increasing requests for cardboard coffins one funeral home has begun to offer wicker, bamboo, willow, and even papier mache coffins! This trend has gone even further and now includes environmentally friendly grave sites forsaking headstones in lieu of indigenous wildflowers. These biodegradable coffins and low impact arrangements are ideal for those who’d like to get back to the earth as quickly as possible after they’ve bitten the dust.
“What would you like in your casket with you?” Is a question in our Dead Good Funeral Plan that may seem somewhat strange to us in the West, but many cultures have been putting items in caskets, to accompany their loved ones journey to the other side, for many years.
However, the Jamaicans seem to have taken this age old ritual a tad too far. Not only are they known to place items such as knives, ganja, money, drinks, guns and jewelry in the coffin of the deceased, but according to The Jamaican Gleaner, cell phones are the number one item these days too.
The East London Guardian reports that Elton John’s music is the most popular in Redbridge funerals, followed by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.
Looks like strippers are beginning to replace the fine art of pole dancing with casket dancing in China!
According to the Shanghai Daily, it is common practice in Donghai (insert lame joke here) to have women perform stripteases at funerals. Locals believe that the greater the number of mourners at your final send off, the greater your worth.
To Snort or not to Snort?
So after spending months of researching the unique and at times mind blowing ways people are disposing of their ashes these days (see our Ashes section), we thought we’d cultivated a rather thick skin when it came to Ash Disposal.
However, jaws dropped to the floor when Keith Richards of Rolling Stones fame admitted to snorting a cocktail of coke and the ashes of his father Bert, up his nose.
