[0xEF]

Not really but sorta? I don't know that I'd call it contradiction so much as working with limited information.

When we are alive, we want to be acknowledged, at the very least. We might think about making arrangements for our stuff after we are gone, or trying to reconnect with someone to say goodbye before it's too late, etc. Knowing that we will die tends to inform some of our behavior when we're alive.

Now, we die, and that's that. Maybe we experience something after, maybe we don't. We don't know. There's lots of good guesses out there, some more coherent than others, but even if we lean toward oblivion, we cannot conceive of it, of non-existence.

So, we don't focus on that part. It's not a useful thing to examine and results in crisis for some. Instead, we focus on life, because that is knowable to a degree. Funerals are as much for the living as they are for the dead who were previously alive. We die knowing, or hoping maybe, that we will get acknowledgement that yes, we existed, after we pass, even if we do not directly experience it.

[card_zero]

It's valid to want things (for) after you're dead and no longer exist.

It's an awkward concept, probably because you have to draw a line somewhere or else we'd be faced with extrapolating the wishes of millennia of dead people into the future, and crippled by trying to be respectful to what it seems they would have wanted but what they shouldn't really have any say over. They shouldn't have any say over stuff they're not involved in and don't understand (because they're dead). But being involved in stuff and understanding stuff doesn't have to cease exactly when you die and cease to function, it can be extrapolated beyond that a bit, based on what the person said back when they existed. Hence, last wills. Which largely get ignored and revised, and mostly only serve to distribute property, but a dead person's last wishes still do get respected, a bit, sometimes, and should be, because people are basically a bunch of ideas and their last wishes after death are ideas too.

[lo_zamoyski]

> you're dead and no longer exist.

That's an assumption, not a fact, and there are very rigorous philosophical arguments for personal immortality. But even given personal survival of death, and given that the remains are not technically a body anymore as a body is part of a living person (a severed hand, as long as it remains severed, it not a bona fide hand), it is still a show of respect for each person and the memory of them, of the fact of their existence. It isn't a matter of what they would or would not have wanted, or do or do not want, but our own relationship toward people. How we treat remains has enormous importance and consequences for our sense of human dignity; it both reflects and shapes that sense of dignity. Treating a corpse like trash translates into a devaluation of human life and the life of the person who has died. The implication is entailed. But treating it with respect also entails a conclusion: this was a person, and that we treat their remains with respect must mean that respect is due, and it is due because they are the remains of a human person. We consider attacks on statues and other images of the dead hateful and disrespectful. How much worse is it to attack and disrespect someone's remains! Religious images, also clearly not remains, are likewise disposed of in a respectful manner according to religious law and custom because of what they depict.

[Projectiboga]

> you're dead and no longer exist.

The Greeks felt you pass twice, first when you die and then when no one who said your name is still alive. So this might extend that second phase a little for this cohort.