Stop family from giving a religious funeral

The medical sciences places don't always take your corpse though. Depends on whether they need it or not.

That would annoy me!

You need to confide in a friend (a lot younger than you!) who hopefully will survive you and observe your wishes.

Put a letter of wishes with your will with a solicitor. I have done that already.

Make sure that the executors of your will are likeminded and you trust them to understand and observe your wishes. Tell them beforehand what you want, and put it in writing to them aswell. That way, they can show family members who would want the whole shebang, that this is actually what you wanted.

Surely a funeral is more about the people left behind and while you can talk to your family/next of kin as to your wishes surely once you are dead, you are dead, and what ever eases the pain of those left behind is the most important thing not stomping your foot and making it about the disposal of decaying tissue?

Couple of thoughts:

1. As others have said, both legally and practically final decisions about disposal of your remains will be taken by your next-of-kin, not by you. Ultimately there is nothing you (or anyone else) can do to compel them to make the decisions that you would want. This is their decision, not yours.

2. Leaving your body to the RCSI or similar defers the decision about final disposal for about three years, but does not make it go away. When the medics are finished with you, a decision about respectful disposal is made in consultation with your next-of-kin. And if they’re not minded to do what you would have wanted within a couple of weeks of your death, they’ll hardly do it three years later.

3. In any event, RCSI (and, I think, all the medical schools) organise an annual (or at least periodic) service of thanksgiving and memorial in honour of those who have donated their remains. So if your objective is not to be the subject of any kind of religious liturgy at all, donating your remains may be counter-productive.

4. You can (and should) put your funeral wishes in your will but, as already pointed out in this thread, in all likelihood your will won’t be read until after you have been burned, buried or wrapped in black plastic and left at a bus-stop, as the case may be. So putting it in your will is not an effective way of communicating your wishes in this regard. You need to talk to your family. Talking to your friends is not enough; they will not be your next-of-kin.

5. I think the way forward here is not to think about what you don’t want, but to think about what you do. Accept that your family and friends do care about you, and will grieve when you die. (If this is not so you have bigger things to worry about than funeral arrangements!) They will likely need, and will certainly want, some kind of ritual to help them do that. Think about what kind of ritual you would like for yourself, and talk to them about it. If you simply present your wishes as angry negativity, they are more likely to be disregarded than if you ask for something positive, that would appeal to you and also meet their need to remember and honour you and to grieve at your loss.

6. If you really want to assert your wishes aggressively, one amusing possibility is to write a will which leaves cash or assets to your next-of-kin, but only on condition that they honour your funeral wishes. Obviously, this only works if you have cash or assets to leave, and if your next-of-kin are not also your dependents, so that you are comfortable to leave them with nothing, or with less than you might. And, equally obviously, you need to tell them while you’re still alive that you have written your will in this way. But this would, of course, piss them off - they’ll resent the implication that they will only honour your wishes if paid to do so - and in fact they might be so pissed off that, just to spite you, they will forego their inheritance and, instead of scattering your ashes at the birthplace of Richard Dawkins as you instructed, have you creosoted and exhibited in a shrine for popular devotion and the occasional miracle. So this is a risky strategy.

This is ridiculous, you'll be dead! You will cease to exist. Why do you care?

Let those left behind grieve and celebrate your life.

Quite a selfish act in my view.

jon1981 wrote: »

This is ridiculous, you'll be dead! You will cease to exist. Why do you care?

Let those left behind grieve and celebrate your life.

Quite a selfish act in my view.

Would it be selfish to make a will dividing up one's estate? Or maybe just let the family fight over the spoils like animals? It happens.

If we respect a person's wishes in regard to their estate, why not their remains too?

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Surely what would be selfish would be for those you left behind to ignore something you felt very strongly about while alive while working out your funeral arrangements. I also fail to see how the living could be said to be truly celebrating the deceased life while disrespecting the deceased wishes.

Exactly, if I were in charge of the funeral of a religious relative it would be wrong of me to impose my personal preferences on them.

A funeral or similar service should above all be respectful of the deceased and their way of life and their expressed wishes (if any) as to their treatment after death. Its purpose is to remember and offer respect to the life that ended, not soothe the living, although if it does that's a bonus.

Ireland is a society which holds that belief is deserving of respect but non-belief is not.

Even if you give your body to the RCSI will they not eventually have to dispose of it?

Have you spoken to your family about that? A ceremony/mark of respect to the life of the deceased doesn't have to be religious, but eventually something will have to happen to your body be it cremation or burial.

I get that you don't want a religious burial, but your body isn't going to be chuck out with last weeks newspaper, so how about having a discussion about what you do want?

magicbastarder wrote: »

is there such a thing?
i would suspect that if the RCSI got the slightest whiff that the family were dead against it, they're respect the family's wishes.

Families can veto the wishes of the deceased to donate organs so vetoing a funeral would be very tricky.