I took up enough precious space on this bitch of an Earth in life, so my only wish is to take up as little of it as possible in death.
No giant overpriced wooden box in a concrete case on a dedicated plot of land, filled with fanciful linens to wrap my lifeless husk specifically treated to rot away as slowly as possible. Not if I get a say. Burn my dead ass to ashes and preferably scatter them to the wind, I don’t care where. Or, as a wise Danny DeVito said, throw me in the trash. Nature will have its way with what’s left. I’m crumbling to entropy anyway, might as well get it over with as efficiently as I can.
I will not ““become”” a tree, or ““return to”” anyplace. I want to be gone. My lease on this world is over. I explicitly want that lease returned, to the fullest extent it matters.
Not like I’d necessarily get a say, though. Funerals and their rituals are for the living. The ultimate conclusion of my wish to command nothing of the world after I’m gone is that I also can’t command what happens to my remains after I’m gone. I can express my wishes, but if no one agrees to honor them, so be it.
If my loved ones want to stuff my corpse in a monkey suit and bury it in an expensive box on a dedicated plot of land for 100 years because that’s how they want to greive my passing, who am I to stop them? I’m dead.
It’s not like this superficially either. That’s literally what the word is.
finite - to have a limit, be bounded
The de- part is acting like it does in words like defraud. It’s not a negative, like you might see in detox, where it means to remove something or undo something. Instead, it simply insists something has been done, not unlike the suffix -ify. You’ve been defrauded. In a manner of speaking, you could say you’ve been “fraud-ified”.
You could say something that has been defined has been “finite-ified”. The possibilities of what it could be were limitless, but you restricted them to something specific. You’ve made it finite. You’ve defined it. It is definite.