Having our dead bodies sold back to us

While numbers vary state by state, whether you’re insured or not, and on how complicated the delivery itself is, the average cost of having a baby in America ranges into the multiple thousands of dollars if not into the tens of thousands of dollars.

The cost of the other main thing besides being born we’re put here on earth to do — die — isn’t much different.

Setting aside the ridiculous costs of healthcare before we even get to the dying part, what happens after we pass ends up costing the people we leave behind exorbitant amounts as well. Again, depending on the state, the cost of a funeral averages somewhere in the vicinity of $7-$12,000. Swipe the fucking credit card on the way in and on the way out. Toss in the other typical major milestones in a fortunate human’s life — buying a home, getting married and going to school — and the moment of conception starts to look like nothing but a decades long process of accumulating debt merely to exist and function in society.

As Harvey Day writes below “We die as we live, buried in debt.”

And we’re buried in that debt even as we’re literally being buried in dirt.

What if it wasn’t like that Day — who suspended a mortuary school education just as the pandemic began — asks in this piece laying out a vision of a death untouched by the profit motive.