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Interesting topic. We just got back from Lebanon yesterday, and I had the opportunity to go along with ktspktsp's family to their family burial areas for a visit.
In the Christian areas, most families have their own vaults, and each vault is gated and locked. You walk inside (we're talking the size of a garden shed here), and you face a wall with 6 doors, each one holding a coffin behind it. Beneath your feet is an underground vault with more room for other coffins. There are no names or markers on any of it, just a family name on the outside, and that is how it's done there. Interesting, but I would not prefer it for myself.
In the Muslim graveyard (Sunni, to be exact, though I am not sure what the differences would be for Shi'a), the bodies are buried almost immediately after death, and without a coffin of any kind. The body is wrapped ceremonially with a white sheet and laid in the bare earth, then covered up with more earth. Then a smooth cement slab is poured over the top, with a small tombstone (written in Arabic) at the head. The cool part is that a round opening is made at the foot of the slab, opening directly into the earth, over the body. Each grave typically has at least one tree or large plant growing out of that hole, and it's obvious that it's being nourished by the decomposing matter below. The point, if I remember correctly, is the idea of "from dust we came, and to dust we will return," and that the body should become part of the earth again. I found it quite beautiful, actually.
As for myself, I go back and forth on this a lot. After witnessing my own grandmother's cremation (to the point of actually seeing the flames burning her body, through the crematory furnace window), I can see how it might creep people out... but there is something so efficient about it, too. Yes, it burns up fossil fuels, okay (I wish we could do things as they are still done in India, for example, where they burn funeral pyres on wood by the river Ganges, in the open air--talk about a way to go out!)... but still, I hate the idea of decomposing in a box. And since so many lands are part of who I am, I would love the idea of my ashes being spread over many places, by a trustworthy person (or people--like Lurkette did with her brother's ashes on TFP). So I lean towards cremation.
But the part of burial that I do like is that it gives a place for the living to come and grieve, and hopefully heal from their loss. Not that I think I'm some terribly important person, but I know the psychological comfort that a tangible gravesite provides for the living, and I know that ktspktsp or my parents or my friends and family (if they outlived me) would need something like that. My father's body was never found when he drowned suddenly, and I think the lack of a body really ripped the heart out of his family for many years... they had nowhere to go to mourn him. Eventually, his mother put up a tombstone in the family graveyard, and while there is no body beneath it, it gives a place for us to go and recognize his death.
So, after writing this dissertation on burial, I think I would like to donate my organs (still iffy on that one, but I know it's the ethical thing to do), be cremated, ashes spread in a few of my beloved places, and then a memorial placed somewhere in my name, for the living to have a place to go. Or something like that. But nothing is in writing yet... we need to get that done.
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And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran
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