Would you be comfortable with your body (after you die) truly returning to nature?

I would be too dead to care.

Sure, next to cremation that’s the best way to go.
I live in Mountain Lion territory, I always joke when out walking that my little old bod could feed a cougar for at least 3 or 4 days. Heh!

Yes, although I worry about things like embalming fluids. If I could choose not to have that crap added to my body before burial, only to leach out into the soil and water, I’d be happier. One of those things I should really get around to researching.

I really don’t care what happens to my body, provided my family are aware of my death. Don’t want to just disappear, you know.

Ideally, I want to donate as much organ material as they’ll take from me, or the whole of me to medical education, or whatever.

But if a bear wants me, that’s cool too.

The idea of being rent by wild beasts is a bit disconcerting, but I’d prefer to be buried in a compostable box and just decompose into the earth and I hope someone would plant flowers and vegetables.

I just don’t want to be alive for the meal. LOL!

I know my husband and kids would have a problem with it, so no.

I’d prefer it. Unless I died from some cross-species communicable disease, that seems like a waste.

Just think… birds nests lined with your hair, bones for gnawing down little rodent teeth, lots of meat for the predators, and a vulture picnic picking you clean.
Your skull could even be a nice little mouse house. lol

I know it’s odd, but no. Well, it’s really the thought of animals ripping me apart that gets me. I’ve thought of donating myself to one of those “body farms”. I know some nasty things happen there since it’s for forensic study. Still, not the same as being torn apart by a lion.

All matter is recycled in some way, so I’m totally on board with this. (Not that it matters, because it would happen anyway.) In millions of years, my atoms might be part of the soil, or new plants or animals. Even later, the sun will expand and envelop the earth, and billions of years from now the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy. So my atoms could become part of new stars, or at least a colossally destructive fireworks show.

I will no longer care, but I am happy that’s what it does, just as I am happy that the massive star that supernovaed some 6 billion years ago and spewed out the elements that formed our Solar system lived, and died, and in it’s death generated a fantastic array of new life.

I am being cremated and it’s already paid for and the grave is waiting. So I guess I do not like the idea of bugs chewing on me otherwise I would of just chose to be buried, that was the #1 reason why I decided to be cremated because I didn’t like the other options and I might as well make a choice now while I can.

But… surely those who are saying “no” realize that this is exactly what happens to a body… so, is it the size of the organism that matters? Because decomposition is really just some organism or other digesting us. Just sayin’.

I’m not ok with it. I’ve seen on tv and pictures the stages dead bodies go through after death and the breaking down and all of that stuff and it grosses me out. Your body bloats and then it leaks disgusting fluids and attracts maggots and everything. I know this is natural but it still bothers me and that’s one of the reasons I’m afraid of dying. I know it’s kinda dumb to care because you’ll be dead and you won’t know all that stuff is happening but still….I want to be cremated!

I live alone and my death would go without notice until the sheriff tried to evict me. Getting eaten by critters in the woods sounds a bit better than rotting in the heat on a shit and piss soaked mattress for weeks while my skin droops off.

It is all a matter of perspective. I look upon my life as a wonderful gift which I neither asked for nor deserved. While I live, I regularly recycle the atoms that constitute my physical being. When I die (I am planning on being cremated), I recycle my final physical self so the cycle of life can continue. How is that for atheistic spirituality?

It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll be dead, so I won’t know one way or the other, but I have a fear of being buried alive. So my hope is to be cremated and ashes to be scattered at sea.

Yes. I would like a natural burial when I go, though if my family wanted a Jewish burial I would not object because it is nearly the same thing – no embalming; no metal or non-biodegradable stuff in the casket. I just don’t want to pollute the environment, and traditional burial and cremation both do.

Tibetan Sky Burial would also be cool, but I don’t think my family would go for that.

My sister has often said that she loves the idea of having her corpse strapped to the branches of a tree and used as carrion. It is a tradition among some Native American tribes; I am too lazy to do the research now.

Similar to @wildpotato‘s Tibetan sky burial.

I gladly bequeath myself to the worms.

I say, take what you can use to help others, then burn the rest.

Is NPR getting story ideas from Fluther? A story on do it at home funerals

This is relevant, but wait to hear the last part to get the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-QzLIjL1u4

My initial response was “ick!” Then my logical side kicked in and said, “sure.”

Personally I love the idea of a sky burial, but I doubt you’ll find many places where that might actually be legal.

@Darth_Algar I’d just as soon be dumped at sea. I’d feed lots of hungry critters and it would be dead cheap.

@ETpro An equally sound solution, but personally speaking, as the band Flogging Molly once said, “I don’t want my final jig in the belly of a squid” (also “the sea is cold and grim, and I never did learn to swim”).

@Darth_Algar Even a dead Mark Spitz wouldn’t know how to swim. After I am dead, I’m not there to care what eats me or how cold the water is. But alive, I grew up around and in the Atlantic, and I greatly love the oceans.