🚪 Module 1 — What Are Your Death Options? | Death Options Course
Updated: Sep 24
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Death and Dying Series
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Module 1 — What Are Your Death Options?
Here is a quiet fact that changes things once it lands: what happens to a body after death is a choice. Not a formality, not a procedure that simply happens to people, but a genuine decision with more than twenty possible answers. Most people never make it. They inherit a default from their family, their town, or their faith, and the default gets carried out, and nobody ever mentions that there was a menu.
This course is that menu. Lesson by lesson, it walks through every real option for what can be done with a body, from the familiar ones to options most people have never heard named out loud. Some are ancient, some are brand new, some are sacred, some are playful, and every one of them is fascinating in its own right. By the end of this first lesson, the whole landscape will be laid out and easy to navigate, and the rest of the course will open each door one at a time.
Why Most People Think There Are Only Two Options
Ask almost anyone what can be done with a body and the answer comes back in two words: buried or cremated. A few people will add organ donation. That is usually the whole list, and it is worth understanding why, because the reasons say a lot about how death decisions actually get made.
The decision usually happens in the worst possible window. When someone dies without having chosen, the choice falls to a grieving family, and it typically has to be made within a day or two. A daughter named Carol, sitting in a funeral home office forty hours after her mother's death, exhausted and hollowed out, is not browsing possibilities. She is reaching for whatever is familiar, and familiar means burial or cremation. Most of the world's death decisions are made exactly this way, by people too tired and too heartbroken to invent.
Nobody in the room presents a menu. Funeral homes are built around the services they already provide, and most provide the conventional two. A family is shown caskets and urns, not the full landscape of what is possible. This is rarely malice. It is simply how the industry grew, and an option a provider does not offer is an option a family never hears about.
The defaults are barely 150 years old, but they feel eternal. The conventional American funeral, with its embalming and its sealed caskets and its manicured lawns, is a recent invention, largely a product of the Civil War era and the industry that grew up after it. Cremation as a mainstream choice is even younger. Yet because these are what everyone has seen, they feel like what death simply is, the way a fish feels about water.
The alternatives were, until recently, genuinely scarce. This is the part that has changed. Over the last two decades, quietly and steadily, the landscape has broadened. New processes have been developed and legalized, old practices have been revived, and small movements have grown into real industries. Many of the options in this course did not exist, or were not available, when today's older adults first thought about their own arrangements. The menu got longer, and almost nobody was told.
So the narrow view is not a failure of curiosity. It is the natural result of decisions made under grief, an industry organized around two products, and a wave of new options that arrived faster than the word spread. Knowing the full menu, calmly and ahead of time, is one of the kindest things a person can do for the people who will one day sit in that funeral home office.
The Two Layers of the Decision
Before the options can make sense as a set, one piece of orientation untangles nearly everything: the options live on two different layers, and they answer two different questions.
Layer one is body disposition. This is the question of what happens to the body itself, and every person gets exactly one answer to it. Burial in its many forms lives here, and so do flame cremation, water cremation, human composting, donation, sea burial, cryonics, plastination, and the sky burial traditions. One body, one path.
Layer two is what becomes of the ashes. Several layer-one paths, flame cremation chief among them, end with the family receiving ashes, and that is where a second round of choices begins. Scattering lives on this layer, along with biodegradable urns, memorial reefs, cremation diamonds, artistic memorials, and spaceflight. These are not alternatives to cremation. They are what can happen after it, and a family can choose more than one, because ashes can be divided.
Seeing the two layers dissolves the single most common tangle in this whole topic. People regularly use "sea burial," "scattering ashes at sea," and "reef memorial" as if they were one choice, and they are three: sea burial is a layer-one option in which the body itself is committed to deep water, scattering at sea is a layer-two release of ashes over the waves, and a reef memorial is a layer-two creation in which ashes become part of a structure placed on the seabed. Three different doors, two different layers, and each has its own lesson in this course.
The two layers also explain something that surprises many people: choosing one of the newer body options does not close the memorial options. Water cremation produces ashes too, so a person drawn to that gentler process still faces, and gets to enjoy, every ash decision afterward. The layers stack. That is not a complication. It is freedom.
What Shapes the Choice
The final lesson of this course is devoted entirely to how a person actually chooses, so the choosing is not taught here. But it helps, before walking the menu, to know the lenses people look through, because every option ahead will land differently depending on which lenses matter most to a given person.
Faith and tradition. Many religions hold positions on what should happen to a body, some firm and some flexible, and for many people this lens settles the question before the others are consulted.
Ecology. A growing number of people want their last act on earth to be gentle to it, and a whole family of options now exists for exactly that desire.
Place and visitation. Some families need somewhere to go, a spot with a name and coordinates. Others carry their dead in memory and need no address at all. Options differ enormously on this point.
Family. The people left behind are part of the decision, because they are the ones who will live with it, visit it, or carry it out.
Plain resonance. Sometimes an option simply feels like the person, the way a song or a coastline can, and that feeling is as legitimate a reason as any doctrine.
There is no ranking among these lenses, and people commonly weigh several at once. They are named here so that, walking through the lessons ahead, a reader can notice which ones light up.
A Map of What's Ahead
The rest of this course opens the doors one at a time, in four groups. Here is the whole landscape at a glance.
The familiar options come first, because even the doors people think they know hold surprises.
Traditional Burial is the full conventional sequence, from funeral home to headstone, and the truth about what each of its famous pieces actually does
Flame Cremation is the process behind the most chosen option in America, including what the family actually receives at the end.
Organ and Tissue Donation is the gift made on the way to any other option, and how it fits alongside whatever comes after.
Whole Body Donation to Science is the door through which a body teaches medicine, and what comes back to the family afterward.
The earth-returning options give the body or the ashes back to soil and root.
Green and Natural Burial is burial stripped back to shroud, soil, and time, the way nearly all of humanity once did it.
Conservation Burial and Memorial Forests is resting in land that is legally protected wilderness because people rest there.
Human Composting (Natural Organic Reduction) is the vessel-based transformation of a body into a cubic yard of living soil.
Tree Pod Burials and Living Memorials is the dream of becoming a tree, and what the real products actually do.
Mushroom Burial Suits and Mycelium Caskets is burial in vessels grown from fungal root fiber, including the famous suit a beloved actor was buried in.
The water-based options give the body or the ashes to water.
Alkaline Hydrolysis (Water Cremation) is the gentler, flameless sibling of cremation, done with warm water instead of fire.
Sea Burial is the committal of the body itself to deep water, including the quietly moving program the Navy runs for veterans.
Artificial Reef Memorials is ashes becoming part of a living reef that fish and coral call home, with coordinates a family can visit.
The less common and symbolic options are the rare, the technological, the sacred, and the deeply personal.
Biodegradable Urns is the family of vessels designed to disappear into earth or water, ceremony built into the object itself.
Cremation Diamonds and Memorial Jewelry is carbon from ashes grown into a real diamond, and the gentler keepsakes beside it.
Artistic Memorials is ashes becoming glass, paintings, vinyl records, tattoo ink, and even fireworks.
Space Burial is the surprising truth about memorial spaceflight, including who has already flown and where.
Cryonics and Long-Term Preservation is the practice of preserving the dead in hope of a future no one can promise, told honestly from both sides.
Plastination and Anatomical Donation is the door through which a body becomes a permanent, posable teacher of anatomy.
Sky Burial is the ancient Tibetan and Zoroastrian traditions of offering the body to the birds, and the worldview that makes them beautiful.
Spreading Ashes is the most chosen and least taught option of all: where, how, the ceremonies, and the wisdom nobody warns families about.
How to Choose What's Right for You,
Then one closing lesson walks the whole decision in order and offers the truth this course rests on: nobody owes the world a perfect exit.
Every option named here has its own lesson, where it is opened completely. Go in order, or go straight to the door that is already pulling at you.
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