I got some junk mail today from the Neptune Society, trying to sell a “pre-need” package. It’s left me feeling weird.
Now, I fully accept that I will die one day and something will need to be done with my corpse. And I do not want to have to burden The Wife with that issue during a time of grief, and it seems like the right thing to do would be to make sure that things are paid for.
My general thoughts are that any useful organs should be harvested and used to help the living who need them. My eyes are astygmatic and myopic, but they are better than no eyes at all to a blind person. My kidneys, liver, spleen, heart, and pancreas all work fine (so far). After anything useful has been taken out and been transplanted to people who can use the organs, I guess burning up the rest is as good a way of disposing of the remains as anything else. The body is just going to be a hunk of dead meat, after all — I won’t be using it again.
Well, I wonder if the expenses can be addressed by way of an assignment of a portion of life insurance proceeds rather than being prepaid with cash. That would make the financial side of things easier to address and provide the cremation vendor with a guaranteed source of payment. And if the company goes away, then that give us some time to make adjustments.
Still, mature contemplation about life insurance and disposal methods aside, it is odd to be confronted with mail like this. I’m not exactly ready to kick it yet, and being confronted with a question about what to do with my corpse is a bit unnerving. Being confronted with the issue by way of unsolicited junk mail is even more off-putting.
Oh, and I also got a solicitation to join AARP. It’s about 14 years early. But I suppose I should take it as another harbinger of my apparenty imminent doom.
