Exactly. Someone I know recently passed away in the UK and they held the funeral service almost two weeks later. This was a surprise to me because where I come from (Korea), everything is over in 2-3 days. That's long enough for relatives to gather even if they're halfway around the world, but short enough for basic cleaning and a refrigerator to keep the body in relatively good shape.

We call it a three-day funeral, but the process can sometimes take as little as 36 hours (death in the evening of first day, burial/cremation in the morning of third day). I think the short funeral also helps the bereaved return to normalcy sooner. There's no time to get used to the funerary mood. You're expected back at work/school/etc. by the fourth day.

To support your point - the Grand Duke of Luxembourg just died (April 23) and was buried May 4.

That's so weird. Consider what is really going on there.

1. They are removing all of this guys body fluids and injecting him with weird preservatives. He's been drained like a hunted animal and is puffed up with fake juices.

2. This person died and they are extending the time between death and burial for the convenience of those attending the funeral, because the death of a human being is somehow a thing we should "work into our schedule" and not expect to be TOO inconvenienced by. Like seriously? What better way to honor this guy than to be like "yeah, I know you died, but can you just hold on a sec because I really need to let my work know I won't be there for that meeting." It's so detached from the reality of what has happened.

I can understand that an exception may be made for monarchs and other prominent individuals. It takes time to organize a funeral on a national scale.

For ordinary people, though, the immediate family is all who matters. To continue to Korean example I mentioned above, it is culturally accepted that you can just drop everything and leave if a family member has died. You don't work the funeral into your schedule; the funeral forces itself into your schedule whether you think you can afford to or not. I think this is a result both of the Confucian tradition (filial duty above everything else) and of the practical necessities of public health (you don't want to keep dead bodies around for too long in a hot and humid country). The flip side of being able to drop everything immediately, of course, is that you're expected back at work as soon as it's over. Either way, social norms need to support this kind of prioritizing in order for most people to adopt quick funerals.

Jews don't embalm. Embalming is only really necessary if you are doing open-casket, which we don't do.

Muslims don't embalm either. Unless the family insists of flying the body to some other location.

We don't embalm, but we also do open casket sometimes (if the body is in good shape), so one strategy that is used is dry ice around the body to keep the temperature as low as possible.

Isn't cremation environmentally-friendly in the sense that it doesn't require additional otherwise-useful land be used for a cemetery? And then it prevents future plane flights/car trips to visit the grave site?

If you don't want people to fly or drive to a funeral, just have a small, local funeral or no funeral at all. That has nothing to do with the way the body is dealt with.

And land shortage is not really an issue in any real sense. Even in a place like China or India you could find enough land to support natural burial practices like I described above. If you begin with the assumption that most people want to be buried, there are plenty of options that can maximize the use of existing land. You can bury more than one person in a single plot over time (as one decomposes, put another in) or you can go deeper and do things like bury people in tunnels. If people want a solution, they can come up with one pretty easily, it's just a matter of actually trying.

I never saw cremation as environmentally friendly. I won't to feed worms and trees when I die, not turn to CO2 and heat up the atmosphere.

My plan for years now has been to get buried in a wicker coffin in a forest. Not an enclosed coffin, no embalming, no neat graveyard, just as natural as possible underground with a tree on top.

> I won't to feed worms and trees when I die, not turn to CO2 and heat up the atmosphere.

If you're buried won't you turn into methane and then CO2 anyway?

I don't know that much about decay processes, I'm afraid. I'm kinda hoping to turn to worm food, whatever that is.

Still, animals die and decay in the wild, they don't get cremated in the wild[0]. That suggests to me it's the more natural and sustainable way to end.

[0] Except in forest fires, I suppose.

Bodies could be put into cold storage if a delay for burial were needed.

Sure, that is definitely an option. But people need to be willing to discuss those options and demand them from funeral services. The problem we have with this entire subject is that most people are not willing to engage with it too seriously because they are disquieted by the idea of mortality itself.