Ash Cash

Last week we had a Palliative Care lecture that was touchingly entitled "And Now the Patient is Dead". Although I won't be making an extra special effort to create corpses in my professional career, I suppose it will still be necessary to know a few things about them. I'll pass on my new wisdom to you.
Firstly, it isn't legally possible to own a dead body. You can be the guardian of the body and be responsible for disposing of it, but you can't actually own one. Obvious, you might say, but it stops the occasional crackpot from going into total denial and still dressing their dead great grandmother in the morning for 4 months. It's happened....
Secondly, if you get permission from the proper authorities, you can bury the stiff in the back garden. Our lecturer says you have to get confirmation from the water board about pipe lines, and from the council about changing the specs of the house, but basically it's fine. It might drop the asking price when you come to move out though.
Next, you could donate your birthday suit and it's contents to medical science. I'm not talking about that weird German bloke who splays organs all over a box and calls it art either, I'm talking about education. This is composed of me, and other assorted halfwits cramming themsleves around your severed limbs and torso and saying things like "why can't your nerves be like in the textbook?". The maximum time you can spend doing this as a dead peron is 3 years, about the same time I could spend doing it as a living person. Then they box you up for a proper send off.
Getting "repatriated" is also a choice. If you choke on your crepe or get poisoned by your San Gria, you can get flown back to the UK. Careful though, get good insurance, because you have to get certified, embalmed, shut in a double metal coffin (less leakage), and crammed into a cargo hold. Not the cheapest thing in the world, especially as airlines are lovely people and wouldn't ever dream of putting any other bags on top of the coffin. They put the coffin on the floor of the hold and make you pay for the airspace above it too.
Also, you can get buried at sea. It's dead expensive (hilarious pun), because you have to get a insanely heavy coffin with holes bored into both ends, but again, if you're a bit eccentric, go for it.
Lastly, it might interest you to know that when the doctor completes and signs the Death Certificate and the Cremation Form, which takes at most 20 minutes, he gets paid. And not a negligible sum either, it's actually around £70. We lovingly refer to it as ash cash. You wonder why Shipman got addicted to doing away with old dears don't you?
When I found out, a part of me was horrified and I promised myself that I'd donate the money to charity, in some wonderful gesture of applied karma. But, given the time to think, for the amount of responsibility you subject yourself to when you sign the bloody things (if things suddenly go tits up in a criminal way, it's your name on the summons), it's actually worth keeping the cash. Doctors. A selfless bunch.