Funerals

This week Dr. Debakey, one of the pioneers of heart surgery died. To honor him Houston is having an open viewing of his body. I know this is supposed to be an honor and all, but does anyone else find it a bit creepy? I mean we’re putting some guys dead body out on display to look at. Morbid anyone?
Funerals as a whole are weird to me. Its not the honoring the dead, or the grieving process, though those are hard. Its the whole funeral industry. People who make tons of money sometimes preying off of families at their worst time. In college I had to write a paper about this for an English class. Don’t ask me why the professor chose this subject, but he did. Anyways, in my studying I found a lot of horrifying stuff. Families would be charged large amounts of money for everything. The funeral homes would charge for the pillow that goes under the deceased’s head during the viewing, like it was necessary. Then, to make it shadier, after the viewing they would take it out and sell it to the next family. Of course there’s lots of tales of jewelry and other more morbid items like gold tooth caps being stolen.
The whole thing just seems like something to be avoided. I would rather avoid the whole thing and save my family the trouble. I don’t want to help any industry with bad people like that profit off of my family. I’ll stick with cremation and spreading my ashes somewhere cool like on the UT campus. If for some creepy reason someone wants to keep my ashes tupperware containers are pretty cheap.