I’m interested less in how you’d like to shuffle off this mortal coil than how you’d prefer your corpus preserved—or not. Because while we can imagine our meat and bone supine in pine six feet under, or flame-kissed to tragic granules not unlike kitty litter and scooped into a decorative receptacle, the previously imaginative among the dead (or their survivors) have taken to more amusing displays.

I read last week that some cremated remains of Fredric J. Baur of Cincinnati, who died May 4th at the age of 89, were interred in a Pringles can—a can design he patented as an organic chemist and “food storage technician” at Procter & Gamble. Did you ever try that trick where you squeeze an empty Pringles can until the lid springs off with a pop? I imagine the Baur family had to affix a label warning not to do that with Fred’s cylindrical crazy-crisp casket, lest one of his more rambunctious grandchildren got any ideas during the wake. As for the ultimate in going out with a pop, I still admire the extravaganza of Hunter S. Thompson’s last gleaming: mingled with fireworks, his cremated remains were shot from 34 mortar tubes during a party at his ranch.

On a larger scale, you may end up preserved whole, or nearly so, for the public eye. Lenin and his tomb bore me; instead recall nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. He sits in a glass-doored mahogany cabinet at University College, London, where underclassmen occasionally steal his head. Or consider this if you’re a Chinese prisoner: your final insult may not be your torture and execution but to remain educationally flayed as a popular American tourist attraction—“$27.50 on weekends and holidays, $21.50 for children 4 to 12, and a dollar less for each on weekdays.”