You may not know this about me, but I have a fear of being buried alive. I think it started with two things: an Edgar Alllen Poe story, and the urban legend about Martha Washington.

I don't remember the name of the Poe story, but in it a man hired someone to build a special tomb that would have an alarm, so if he were buried while still alive, he could ring the alarm and be rescused. The guy building it decides to do it on the cheap and not actually hook up the alarm, because he figured, who would ever need it? and then, a ha, gets trapped inside and is unable to escape.

The Martha Washington myth is that they dug up her coffin and found fingernail scratch marks inside the coffin, where presumably she had tried to claw her way out.

Anyway, the whole thing kinda freaks me out so at first I decided, I'll just be cremated. But I've read more about it and it uses up a lot of energy and what's left but some useless ashes. Then I thought, ok, well, you can bury me, but you gotta chop off my head first. But I guess it's not very fair to ask anyone to do that.

But the idea of being buried in a cemetary bothers me for other reasons...I feel it's a waste of land to have a bunch of dead bodies lying around, with fancy headstones and all. I know it's a comfort for some people to be able to visit a grave, but my family has never been big on that stuff. I don't even know if I have any relatives in cemetaries.

On the TV show Myth Busters, they had an episode to debunk the buried alive myth. It seems you'd suffocate pretty quickly and would not be there until you starved to death. Also, a doctor on the show said that nowadays they're 100% sure that you're dead, whereas in the "old days" they might make a mistake.

So I think I'm back to being buried over cremated, but now I want to be buried somewhere outside of a cemetary. But I guess that's against the law or something. The other night I did some research on the web, and there does seem to be a movement towards "green" burials. These are designated park-like areas where a certain number of bodies can be buried in biodegradable materials. There is no grave marker.

Sounds perfect! Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of these places in the United States. Seems much more popular in the UK. But I hope by the time I die this will be an easy option.

I'm not trying to be morbid. I don't have any plans to die soon. But I should put a will together and I just want to get these kind of details worked out.