This is a pretty touchy subject, so I'll begin with the following: whatever you choose to do as a warm body with the cold corpse you'll turn into is your own business, and that's worth respecting. Burial, cremation, Viking funeral, whatever– it's the last request you can make of your surviving friends & kin, so they owe it to you to make sure you're laid down to rest in a way that represents you best.
With that in mind, we've got a pretty wild dispatch from the cemeteries of Moore. From KOCO:
MOORE, Okla. — Regina Johnson and Shawna Bray were ready to bury their mother Saturday at a Moore cemetery when they made a horrific discovery.
Their mother's grave was covered in a pool of water nearly 7 inches deep.
"We wanted to be there for our mom," Bray said. "This is the last thing we can do for our mom, and that was taken from us."
Johnson said she jumped out of a moving car to see what was going on when she and her sister arrived at the cemetery.
[RECORD SCREECH]
(Freeze frame at woman jumping from a moving car at a funeral)
VOICE OVER: So, I guess you're wondering how I got here...
"We were totally freaking out," Bray said. "We were, like, 'Oh my God. They're burying her in the wrong spot. What's going on? What's going on?' And then we look over here and see a swamp where we're going to put our mother."
"The city should have notified us ahead of time," Johnson said.
Cemetery officials told the sisters it was too wet to bury their mother the day of the funeral.
"We were devastated because I had every intention of staying here, watch my mother be laid to rest. And that was taken from me," Bray said.
Their mother, Teresa, was buried in a different plot, but they are fed up, saying drainage has been a problem for years.
"We used to call it pond-hopping when we'd go visit our grandparents' graves," Bray said. "They don't fill in the graves themselves and top them off, so they sit in water and headstones fall over."
Moore officials released a statement, saying they have finished an engineering review to address drainage issues at the cemetery and they will start working to fix the problems, weather permitting.
The inner goth kid in me thinks getting buried in a graveyard that is also a swamp sounds pretty cool, like some artwork from a Magic: The Gathering card:
But the reality of it is, your loved ones have to trudge through an exceptionally mucky and ill-maintained cemetery to watch you get unceremoniously dumped into a thick puddle of red mud. This is how horror movies whose titles include words like "The Living Dead" begin.
I'm comfortable with being stuffed into a black Hefty bag and being hurled into the city dump, but other people want more care toward their corpses, and that's fine. You'd just think that a city would have a better drainage plan than to dump all of the excess rainwater onto the soil where dead people reside.
We will keep you updated if this story develops into the dead walking the earth.
