Homework #55: Culminating Project

For this project, I investigated how I want my body to be taken care of after my death. After reading Grave Matters, I found a lot of interesting ways to be taken care of and my favorite was the Memorial Reefs. These are large artificial cement balls with large holes in them for coral and other sea life to grow on and live off of. The way it works is that the ashes are mixed into the cement and the family has the option of writing an engraved message on the reef ball. When looking into this, I found the organization that was mentioned in Grave Matters. Their name is Eternal Reefs. It was started by two grad students who used to go diving and saw how badly the reefs were being taken care of. When I looked into how I wanted my own remains to be cared for, I started with their website. It was actually a very informative site that had a lot of useful information about how my body. My first question was the pricing. I wanted it to be as cheap as possible but still be able to have what I want. The cheapest reef ball is a communal one where there are lots of different ashes mixed together. However, I am quite selfish and want to be alone (to have one all to myself) so the next cheapest is at $3,995 which includes the handling of the cremated remains once they receive them, the incorporation of the remains into the concrete, the casting of the Memorial Reef, the transportation of the Memorial Reef to the project site, the final placement and dedication, a GPS survey to record the specific longitude and latitude of the Memorial Reef, a bronze Plaque with inscription, and two Memorial Certificates. It might seem like a lot of money, but it includes a whole lot of work by the group. The next thing I did was look into the process. I looked into the different locations my reef ball could be located. The different locations also came with different deadline dates so I had to pretend I was already dead which was a little creepy. All of the drop-off points were in Florida so I chose Miami as the place for me. There was a table full of lots of different towns/cities in Florida with a bunch of different dates so I went with the soonest one in Miami. This experience was wierd for me since I had to pretend that I was already dead.