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Thanks very much. Hello. Do you care what happens to your body after death?

Whether you're buried or cremated, whether there's a ceremony or a ritual or a final sending off?

And even though very few of us would aspire to an elaborate state funeral,

even a basic funeral these days can

price a lot of people out of the market. Whether you call it a grief tax or a form of funeral

inflation, the rising cost of living has produced a cost of dying crisis for families across the

country. Since 2019, we've seen a threefold increase in what is sometimes

described as a direct cremation or a direct burial. What does that mean? The body is not embalmed,

no mourners are present, no rituals are carried out, no words are said. It's cheaper, it's faster.

It requires little or none of the preparations

associated with a traditional funeral, from awake to the final committal. And for some people,

the attraction of a no-frills exit isn't just financial. Perhaps they've abandoned religion,

if they ever had any. Or maybe they have no interest in rituals.

They might even try to elude death itself with an AI-generated avatar that continues to speak

after death itself. Grief tech, it's called, by the way, and it is already a thing.

Just think, instead of the finality of a funeral, you could be conversing forever with the deceased.

But when it comes right down to it, who is a funeral really for?

Do our changing choices suggest that we are becoming a society that no longer values a proper send-off?

And what does it say about us if we stop saying goodbye?

Tonight's Moral Mays, our panel, James Orr, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge,

the feminist commentator Ellen Weillan, Anne McElvoy, journalist with the news and commentary

...