  Mystery
This week: Edited by: Tehanu  
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They say that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well I think the gun helps. If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don't think you'd kill too many people. - Eddie Izzard, Dressed to Kill
Thank Heaven! the crisis --The danger, is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last -- and the fever called "Living" is conquered at last. - Edgar Allan Poe
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. - Isaac Asimov |
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Body Disposal
This week's topic may sound gruesome, but I'm not necessarily describing how to hide corpses. To me, what is almost as mysterious as life after death is how humans dispose of their dead.
The ways I am most familiar with are casket burial and cremation. Scattering cremated ashes is illegal in some areas, while in others it is legal and encouraged. In reading up on cremation, I found that there are some very different ways to handle the ashes. Some of these ideas are typical, while others are pretty unique - and apt for an eccentric character's disposal:
 keep inside a display urn or box
keep inside locket
scatter around special, typically outdoor, place
bury underground
ship via helium balloon
disperse via fireworks
place in shotgun shell and shot
drop from plane
send into space
turn into artificial diamond or artificial reef*
Cryonics is another way to store a dead person, but it is in the hopes that the deceased may be reanimated in the future. Halting a corpse's decay is a costly and possibly futile endeavor.
Sky burial, whole body donations, embalming, burning on a pyre, and burial at sea are other ways of permanently displacing human remains. I personally like the idea of a Viking King's send-off.
Decisions to settle bodily remains is sometimes planned in advance by the deceased, or decided after death by relatives.
Describing how a person's remains are treated after death may shed light on a mystery. For instance, a relative who keeps the victim's ashes in a cardboard box may care more about holding onto all the inherited money instead of building a marble tomb, as the deceased wished. A mother who keeps her daughter's ashes in a vial around her neck probably wasn't the one to off the victim.
Instead of describing the more typical wake and funeral in your stories, consider playing around with a more unique send-off!
* Suggestions are from Wikipedia page on death |
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Mystery: May 02, 2007 Issue [#1690]
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