Although shortly after death you appear fresh from the outside, the bacteria that before death were feeding on the contents of your intestine begin to digest the intestine itself.   They eventually break out of the intestine and start digesting your surrounding internal organs.   Your own digestive enzymes (normally in the intestine) also spread throughout your body, contributing to your decomposition.

Of courses your insides may be outside.

Blowflies and house flies lay eggs in your natural body openings (mouth, nose, eyes, anus, genitalia).   Fancy worms crawling from your most personal area girls?   At least you'll be nice and wet down there.   These eggs hatch and move into your body, often within 24 hours.

Decay produces large blisters; bloody froth trickles from your mouth and nose.   What a fun date you are.

Bacteria break down your tissues and cells, releasing fluids into your body cavities.   They produce various gases including hydrogen sulphide and methane.   You never farted this bad when you were alive babe.

The build up of gas resulting from the intense activity of the multiplying bacteria, creates pressure within your body.   This pressure inflates you and forces fluids out of your cells and blood vessels and into your body cavity.   The fatty tissue beneath your skin fills with gas.   The gases make your belly swell and your tongue stick out.   Do you want a snog?

You turn from green to red as your blood decomposes.

Young maggots move throughout your body, spreading bacteria, secreting digestive enzymes and tearing tissues with their mouth hooks.   Yum, yum you are tastey.   They move as a maggot mass benefiting from communal heat and shared digestive secretions.   The heat is a bonus, because it increases the rate of putrefaction, and the rate of digestion.   (Putrefaction is the decomposition your proteins, especially by microorganisms that don't need oxygen).

As the rate of decay increases, the smells and body fluids that begin to eminate from you attract more blowflies, flesh flies, beetles and mites.   Looks like the boys brought their mates to feed on you babe.

Your organs and cavities burst from gas pressure and so your bloated body eventually collapses, leaving a flattened body whose flesh has a creamy consistency.   Your exposed parts are black in colour and there is a very strong smell of decay.

A large volume of fluid drains from your body at this stage and seeps into the surrounding soil.   Other insects and mites feed on this material.

The insects consume the bulk of your flesh and your body temperature increases with their activity.   You are getting nice and warm.

By this stage, several generations of maggots are present on your body and some have become fully grown.   They migrate from you and bury themselves in the soil where they become pupae.

Now's a good time for a makeover, as hair, nails, and teeth detach easily. Your skin actually begins to liquefy.   Anyone ready for a smoothie?

Your remaining flesh is removed over this period and your body dries out. You are a really cheesy git and your cheesy smell is caused by butyric acid.

After about 50 days you are reduced to hair and bone. Eventually all the hair disappears leaving the bones only. After one year the carrion eaters have picked your bones clean.

If you still plan to be buried after reading all that, spare a thought for the grave digger. Albie says: "I've been a grave digger for 7 years.   Now you can say 'Why work in a shitty job like that?'   But it gets worse, it's a Jewish Cemetery so often it isn't their final resting place.

Many Jewish families want their late relatives exhumed and sent to Israel.   It's hard digging up an old person - he's got no clothes, got no skin, it don't matter if he's been there 10, 20 years, you rot at your own rate....

The one I dug up yesterday was fucking rotten. ...   But I couldn't find the toes and the, er, minor parts. ...     Try to lift up a skeleton with a shovel when the head falls off.   Oh, and the leeches - they live in the water that collects down there - they get on you and you're trying to fight them off. They're not that big but they're ugly.   But the smell!   You might think you know putridity and vile smells but I tell you, you know nothing.   You do not know the hideous smell of death."   From "The Idler Book of Crap Jobs"

OK, maybe you won't need to be dug up.   Still digging your hole is hard, cold, back-breaking work.   So get incinerated and save Albie the effort. (And of course, you won't lie with the leeches).   You still want to rot in the ground?   Some people are so selfish...

In contrast to the horror of working in the graveyard, crematorium technicians get real satisfaction out of their work.   Here is what one visitor to a crematoirum said: "The technicians I spoke to on my visit really were passionate for what they do. The cremators were their cremators, they ran the place and to listen to them talking me through the process it was clear they had a deep seated interest themselves. One technician announced proudly and loudly that he had had the honour of cremating his own father."

If I worked in a crematorium, I'd find it kind of spooky to cremate my own dad.   But my toes would curl with delight if I could push the button to send Sandra to her firey fate, knowing that inside her cardboard casket she was wearing her sex-kitten fishnets

So you don't want your body to endure the horrors of decay, perhaps a concrete vault and a nice sealed casket can protect you?  

Protective seal caskets won't protect you.   Anaerobic bacteria in your body - which thrive in the airless atmosphere of a sealed casket - cause you to rapidly bloat and liquefy inside your container. As you petrify you turn into foul-smelling compounds (hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen phosphide and gaseous ammonia).   Your casket will be more stinky than your bed after a night of curry and beans.  

The sealed casket "bottles up" the evaporating fluids from your body, causing tremendous pressure to build up.   If the seal gives, your liquified form comes out in a big gush.   They seal you up and let you rip.   You liquefy in your casket then your body fluids and organs leak out.   Lovely.

How horrible to think of your tits squirting out of your casket.   Better to go head first into the cremation retort and with your fuel laden tits ablaze like fiery volcanos.  (Your lingerie will only last a few seconds and your stockings will combust immediately, but its not as though you'll be around to wear it again).

Does it work? One source claims that modern embalming practices are meant to be extremely temporary, and when actual breakdown occurs, you turn into some form of bubbling, alien sludge.

But a funeral director says: "We exhumed a body 2 years ago from a man who died over 50 years ago (our funeral home handled the services back then, and we haven't really changed our techniques too much) ...and although the wood casket had rotted away, the man looked as if he was just buried yesterday, other than the natural discolor of the skin."

Of course if you are cremated you won't have to worry about whether embalming works or not, and you won't have the indignity of being filled up, sucked out and sewn up.

With apologies to the late great Ian Dury.   (Who himself ended his existance at Golders Green Crematorium).   For those of you who still want to be buried here are three reasons to follow his example:

ONE.   You'll look gross after burial Spend a few months in the ground, you'll be green and gooey.   Spend 75 minutes in the retort you'll be nice white ashes.

TWO.   Think about the worms...
Sandra hates the thought of maggots in her eyes, but I'm going to save her eyes from the worms by getting them incinerated at the crematorium. Where do you want your worms?

THREE.   Burial is so slow
If you are buried you just hang around getting more and more gross.   I can't put it better than Mary Roach:

"Cremation appeals to me because it's cleaner and quicker.   The thing about decomposition is that it's so drawn out and each week it's a new set of ghastly things that are happening to you [laughs].   So personally I'd rather have it over with quickly.   Even though burning up for the 10 minutes or so that it takes is horrific, at least it's over with quickly and there's no mess."

(Interview with Failure magazine).

Stiff by Mary Roach, 2003, Penguin ISBN 0-670-91217-4.   Great fun about all the things you can do when you are dead.

What happens When You Die   From Your Last Breath to the First Spadeful by Robert T. Hatch, 1981, Citadel Press ISBN 0-8065-1667-4.   How you die.   How your body decays.   What they do with you after death.   Well set out brief guide.

Death to Dust   What happens to Dead Bodies by Kenneth V. Iverson, 2001, Galen Press ISBN 1-883620-22-8.   Encyclopedic guide.   Organ Donation,   Autopsies, Cremation, Crycronics, Cannibalism...   Just right for a little light lunch time reading.

Maxim magazine April 2003.   Suitably tongue in (rotting) cheek.

Decomposition What happens after death From the Australian National Museum.   Everything this page isn't: scientific, accurate, restrained.

Funerals and Ripoffs: How to Plan a Funeral Without Being Ripped Off. Protective seal caskets, embalming and cremation.

Arts and Opinions: Confessions of an Embalmer About Sebastien's work as an embalmer, and no he is not a necrophiliac.

Failure Magazine: Book of the Dead Mary Roach (author of stiff) talks to Failure.

Rob's Necrophilia Fantasy The coolest website ever.   The kind of website this one wants to become when it grows up.   I have used Rob's site as the major source about embalming, rigor mortis and the possibility of a post-mortem stiffy.

My Necrophilia Fantasy?   Sandra is lying in her black opaque tights.   I stroke her dead nyloned soles.   I run my tongue over her toes.   Do I cremate her or keep her on ice for a little longer?   All good things must come to an end.   I press the button to load her into the retort.   I feel pleasure at her destruction and sadness that she will soon be no more.