Assuming LW is writing recently, 50 years ago would put us into the mid-70s. That’s modern enough that not having a death certificate would make a whole lot of things (like transferring title of the property, inheritance, etc.) impossible.
Getting a death certificate after the body was well-decomposed would have likely invited a lot more suspicion, because unless the story was that Great-Gramps went missing and then was found weeks later, there’d be natural questions about why the death hadn’t been called in promptly and why the body had left or put outdoors.
Based on the fact that a lawyer was consulted and didn’t see anything dodgy, I’m inclined to think the death was just a death. It would have been simple for him to pass at home, the doctor or nurse signs the certificate, and Grampa says he’ll call the funeral home. Everyone leaves and Grandpa puts Great-Gramps in the woods instead.
I don’t necessarily agree with the letter response that doing so is automatically disrespectful, as I know people (including myself) who genuinely feel like a green decomposition in nature is the best way to go. Embalming and cremation and so forth just isn’t for everyone. (If I wasn’t donating my body to my old anatomy lab, I’d donate it to a body farm.) Whether it’s disrespectful or not depends entirely on what GG wanted. If he was saying stuff like, “When I go I want to stay on the farm,” as some people do when they have deep ties to a place, then Grandpa might have just been following his dad’s wishes (albeit in an unusual way).
That being said, I wouldn’t have been able to watch my own parents or other loved ones decompose, even though I’m a medical researcher who cuts up dead critters regularly and loved working in an anatomy lab. But others may not have the same sentimentality, and it could even have been part of the grieving process to document the body’s return to the earth. In many cultures (including mine until about 1900) it was traditional for family to tend to the deceased’s body. Squeamishness about the bodies of deceased loved ones is a modern phenomenon and isn’t universal even nowadays, so maybe this guy was just psychologically closer to the old ways than many of us are now.
no subject
Getting a death certificate after the body was well-decomposed would have likely invited a lot more suspicion, because unless the story was that Great-Gramps went missing and then was found weeks later, there’d be natural questions about why the death hadn’t been called in promptly and why the body had left or put outdoors.
Based on the fact that a lawyer was consulted and didn’t see anything dodgy, I’m inclined to think the death was just a death. It would have been simple for him to pass at home, the doctor or nurse signs the certificate, and Grampa says he’ll call the funeral home. Everyone leaves and Grandpa puts Great-Gramps in the woods instead.
I don’t necessarily agree with the letter response that doing so is automatically disrespectful, as I know people (including myself) who genuinely feel like a green decomposition in nature is the best way to go. Embalming and cremation and so forth just isn’t for everyone. (If I wasn’t donating my body to my old anatomy lab, I’d donate it to a body farm.) Whether it’s disrespectful or not depends entirely on what GG wanted. If he was saying stuff like, “When I go I want to stay on the farm,” as some people do when they have deep ties to a place, then Grandpa might have just been following his dad’s wishes (albeit in an unusual way).
That being said, I wouldn’t have been able to watch my own parents or other loved ones decompose, even though I’m a medical researcher who cuts up dead critters regularly and loved working in an anatomy lab. But others may not have the same sentimentality, and it could even have been part of the grieving process to document the body’s return to the earth. In many cultures (including mine until about 1900) it was traditional for family to tend to the deceased’s body. Squeamishness about the bodies of deceased loved ones is a modern phenomenon and isn’t universal even nowadays, so maybe this guy was just psychologically closer to the old ways than many of us are now.