Who cares? Once I'm gone, I'm gone. There is no need for explanation. It is entirely up to the bereaved how they want to process my death.

Admittedly there's a romance to that science that I can appreciate, but it seems to fall into the same thought pattern as religion does: reassuring those living that their loved one still lives on somewhere. That's never cut it for me with the way too many people I've lost. Who they are as I loved them is no longer here - or anywhere. It's a definitive ending.

There's very little I care about after I've died, and I have always told my daughter that she is the only person who can make a decision as to my funeral arrangements and she can do or not do as she wants. She knows my preference is cremation as inexpensively as possible and as I raised atheists, it gives me some comfort while I'm alive to know there won't be any religious nonsense surrounding it. Once I'm dead? I suppose it doesn't matter.

I told my kids to just have a bonfire in my backyard and throw my body in it, have a keg party and just have fun! Life goes on, fuck it!!!

Where am I going to find a physicist to speak at my funeral? I'd like to have a jazz funeral, like they have in New Orleans, which begins at a bar and everybody's drunk, with music, loud!

As a funeral celebrant, I've been asked to recite lots of sciency things, not quite like this, but with other words and ideas. People who request a secular or humanistic funeral can rest assured there will be no religious words of worship, just loving memories shared and what they stood for to absorbed into the hearts and minds of those who loved them and wish to have a beautiful celebration of their life. The funerals are for the grieving, not the dead, but I believe we all should have the power to direct in advance how our life will be celebrated.

I don’t want a funeral. If you love me, come see me while I am alive.

Just get it over with, at that point it means Nothing to me!!!!

Why would an atheist have a funeral?