If, as Kafka wrote, 'the meaning of life is that it ends', how do you want your body to be treated upon your death? Some advocate for a return to ritualism, while others offer themselves up as donations to science. Amanda Smith explores life's final decision: what to do about your body when you're dead.

When she was just 23 years old, Caitlin Doughty landed a job at Westwind Cremation and Burial in San Francisco. Her memoir, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematorium, is a bestseller. It's also a call not to shun death.

Doughty thinks we avoid facing death when we hide bodies away. She's an advocate for getting involved with preparing the corpse of a loved one.

You get to face the fact that you are going to die too, and as this dead body is, so too one day you will be. Caitlin Doughty, mortician and author

'When you never see death and you never see dead bodies, it's not real to you,' she says. She contends that when you sit with the body of someone you love, you are better able to accept their passing.

'You can see small changes, you can see the eyes sink a little bit and the skin grow colder, and you really get a sense, okay this person is gone,' she says. ‘The other—I would go as far as to say benefit—is that you get to face the fact that you are going to die too, and as this dead body is, so too one day you will be'.

As a former crematorium operator who now runs an alternative funeral service called Undertaking LA, Doughty has long lost her fear of corpses. Most of us, though, aren't going to take the same career path, and so the idea of being in the presence of a dead body is frightening.

'I was afraid when I started, most people are afraid,' Doughty says. 'But what I've found is that when you do that with people's family members, someone that they knew and loved very much, or even someone they had a really complicated relationship with, having that ability to sit around them doesn't carry the same fear, as with a strange dead body'.

Doughty believes that in most cases, the body should be prepared with as little intervention from a funeral professional as possible. 'For anybody who dies of any kind of heart disease, lung disease, cancer, stroke, the things that people typically die of, it is perfectly safe to have the family involved and wash the body and maybe dress the body, either with a funeral director or by themselves,' she says. 'In my opinion that's a much better way to grieve and to interact with death than to just hand the body off to someone else to take care of.'

In many cultures and religious practices the body is taken care of in the home. Over the past hundred years in the Western world, however, death has been professionalised. In the 1960s, Jessica Mitford wrote her scathing critique of the over-commercialisation of the funeral industry in The American Way of Death. Mitford argued for, and indeed chose for herself, a no-fuss, no-family, no-funeral cremation. For Caitlin Doughty, there is nevertheless still a denial of death in taking that course.

'It's kind of taboo to question Jessica Mitford if you're an alternative funeral person and it's absolutely true that the funeral industry needed a kick in the butt and things were too expensive and over-the-top and kitsch,' she says. 'But by saying you have to just do the less-than-$1,000 cremation with no frills, you have to donate your body to science; yes, you're absolutely saving people money but you're taking away ritual, and you're taking away the opportunity for the family to be with the body'.

Doughty says that, while she's not opposed to the practice of donating one's body to science, it won't be her preference. 'For me, being able to decompose naturally and set that example for other people, since it is still pretty rare at this point to be buried and allowed to decompose with no casket or embalming or anything, that's really important to me and brings me a lot of comfort,' she says. 'But if for you the idea of furthering medical research, if that's moving for you, that's exactly the road that you should be on.'

If you do want to donate your mortal remains to science, how do you go about it? Medical schools at universities around Australia are licensed to accept body donations, and they have a process in place where you can pledge yours. Professor Shane Maloney, head of the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, says that the bodies they accept into the program are used to train future generations of doctors, surgeons, dentists and medical researchers.

He says that having real bodies for anatomical study is still indispensible. 'There's nothing like the feel of a body,' he says. 'You can do what you like in the virtual world, computers and computer assisted learning is great to learn the bits and pieces, but if you physically have to go into a body to perform surgery, there's nothing like the training on the real thing'.

At medical schools around the country, you can pledge your body by signing a form that states this is your request. Vicki Wallis is UWA's Body Bequest Co-ordinator and says that, for many people, bequeathing their body to science is about making a contribution to the community. She's also sensed another reason. 'Some of them weren't able to get to university as a younger person, so this is another way to get there at the end of the day,' she says. 'The families have been so happy for that donor who has been able to get to university eventually, by donating their remains'.

Many people, however, fear that their body will be treated with disrespect. After all, there's a long history of mistreatment of human remains. Professor Maloney says that medical schools now place a great emphasis on showing respect to donors and their mortal remains. 'Every undergraduate student that is allowed access, or given the privilege we say, to access the material goes through an Act of Recognition and Gratitude at the start of a semester,' he says. 'We reinforce that this isn't just a body on a table, this is somebody who had a life and had a family'.

Depending on whether your body is frozen or embalmed, the university will hold your remains from two months to five years. After this, the remains are cremated at the expense of the university. Every three years, the University of Western Australia holds a memorial service for the family and friends of donors. 'An important part of that ceremony is that some of the students who have used material from the bequest program come back and speak, perform the Act of Recognition, and we read out the names of all of the donors,' says Professor Maloney. 'The feedback we get from the families and friends of bequest donors is that that memorial ceremony is very important to them.'

If you don't want to donate your body to science, what are the alternatives? While Caitlin Doughty is a rationalist, she admits to envying some of the world's religious beliefs and rituals.

'If you're secular you really have to create your own rituals,' she says. 'Or, even worse, you don't create any ritual and you just send the body off to be taken care of by someone else and think you're going to be fine ... for most people and the need to grieve and the need for community around us, they're not fine'.

Doughty especially admires Tibetan sky burial. 'They leave the bodies out to be consumed by vultures, and the idea isn't so much that the bodies go into the sky and into heaven, it's more that the body can now be useful beyond life in a very Buddhist way.'

Tibetan sky burial is, however, not available in Los Angeles, where Doughty lives. 'So realistically what I would probably want is my body laid out in my home and people just free to come and go as they please, spend time with my body,' she says. 'Then after that there's a really beautiful natural funeral ground just north of San Francisco and I would like a little caravan of my close friends and family to go up there and just dig the grave and bury me right in the ground.'

In death's embrace Saturday 12 September 2015 Listen this this episode of The Body Sphere. More This [series episode segment] has image, and transcript

Focusing on the physical, The Body Sphere is about the ways we use our bodies to create and compete, nurture and abuse, display and conceal.

