organ donation

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I'm a donor. I told my husband to burn whatever science couldn't find a use for.

I really don't understand societies propensity towards sticking loved ones in what becomes an oven and letting them liquefy. Burial is just so... odd.

I'm completely with you. I in no way understand the need for burial let alone the need to follow some elaborate ritual for doing so. Its strange and to me seems archaic. I'm an anthropology student, but I can't seem to wrap my mind around the modern equivalent of funeral rights.

Modern funeral rights are so illogical that they qualify as insane.

I have no on my liscence, due to being undecided at the time it was printed.. thing is I have empathy for my organs like I do for inatimate objects, and I don't want my heart working hard beating for a killer. Of course there is a low % this will happen and likely I will change it to "donor" but I think in strange ways.

I plan to get my body burned anyway and I guess its a waste to burn the organs too if they are healthy, i'll likely change it when my liscence gets updated

No, they're not insane. Funerals aren't for the dead; they're for the living. People have to understand for themselves that their loved one is gone; they have to be able to talk about the fact, and face it, and get together with other people to support each other. When someone dies, everyone is reminded of their mortality; and the community is the thing that survives beyond the individual--so the funeral is a way of reasserting the identity of the community, and the survivors' membership in it.

They still feel social obligations to the deceased individual, even though they can no longer contact that person; and they fulfill those obligations the best way they can--by treating the body as a precious thing, burying it and placing a marker so that they can commemorate the person; or scattering the ashes somewhere symbolic. Social obligations are strong; and they don't automatically get cut off when someone dies. People feel like they themselves are not good community members if they don't fulfill their obligations to the dead--even though those people haven't got much to do with the bodies they left behind.

I think as time goes on we'll learn to use more memorial services and lose a little of our sentimental attachment to the bodies of loved ones; but I don't think we'll ever lose our need to congregate and assert community identity when someone dies. It may not be a very strong tendency among autistic people; but for an NT, the community is of deep importance.

I get that funerals are for the living. What I don't get are the irrational rituals involved in burials.

Last I heard, the Body Farm has more applications than they can handle, so a lot of bodies are being turned away. Granted, that was a couple of years ago, but I doubt much has changed.

Anyway, I'm listed as an organ donor. As exceptionally fussy I am about how my body is handled after death, organ donation doesn't bother me; go figure.

Like I said, they're trying to come to terms with the reality of death. That's what a viewing is for; a funeral; a grave marker. They spend their lives trying not to think too much about that reality; but when they're faced with it, they have to process it somehow. NTs process things by coming together in groups; and the rituals tend to have the function of helping them understand that the person is really gone, integrate that person's existence into their own identities and into the identity of their community, and strengthen their own connections to their communities. It helps them process death and resolve grief.

But the rituals are a social construct.

If so then I've already donated an organ.

I am one, and if they can't be used for some reason, I've also consented to donating my body to science.

They can have the lot as far as I am concerned. I worked in a hospital and did a lot of processing specimens for transplants so I know how desperate we are for organ donors, so, they can have whatever still works.

And then I want to be sent away on a viking boat with a lit funeral pyre to go out in style with Queens' "I want to break free" playing to the sending off of my burning boat.

Shame lit funeral pyres on viking ships is illegal in Australia.

Mics

Did you donate a kidney or part of your liver?

i registered:)

but they still cant have my eyes

I'm a donor for everything they want.

Yes, they are; they differ from society to society; but they have a function. Some places embalm their dead; in other places, the dead are eaten, left for scavengers, burned, or buried. The near-universals, though, are the presence of the community, the presence of some sort of ritual or custom, and the turning of the community's focus toward the deceased person. It's not the funeral rites themselves that matter; it's simply the fact that you're having funeral rites of some sort--whether it's a matter of saying a thirty-second prayer and throwing the body into the ocean, or whether it's an entire community going into deep mourning for a year. I haven't yet heard of a culture that doesn't have some sort of ritual or custom surrounding death.