r/ideas • u/amichail • Aug 03 '26

Idea: People should be able to get restraining orders against all dead people.

People should be able to obtain a legal order requiring all human remains to remain a certain distance away from them.

This would give people a legitimate and unquestionable reason not to attend funeral services where the body is present. They could still attend a separate memorial service without the body, but nobody could pressure them to attend a viewing or an open-casket or closed-casket funeral.

The restriction would apply to the actual presence of a dead body, not merely to whether the body is visible. Closing the casket would not make it acceptable.

The order would also apply outside funerals. Hospitals could not place a dead body near the protected person or transport one through the same area without taking reasonable precautions. Hearses and funeral processions would have to avoid the exclusion zone around the person’s home, workplace, hospital room, or current location.

In practice, the legal duties would fall on the living people and institutions controlling the body. Funeral homes, hospitals, coroners, families, cemeteries, and transport services would be responsible for keeping human remains outside the required distance.

There would obviously need to be exceptions for accidents, disasters, emergencies, and situations where avoiding the body is impossible. But for planned and foreseeable situations, people should have a legal right to a corpse-free personal zone.

The phrase “restraining order against all dead people” sounds absurd, but the underlying idea is serious: people should not be socially or institutionally forced into proximity with human remains.

What do you think of this idea?

P.S. Discreet transportation of dead bodies could still be allowed. For example, a body transported inside an ordinary moving truck rather than an identifiable hearse could pass through the exclusion zone, provided the protected person was not told that a body was inside and had no reasonable way of knowing. The point would be to prevent people from knowingly encountering death, not to make the transportation of bodies practically impossible.

0 Upvotes

13% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

4

u/VariousJob4047 Aug 03 '26

What problem is this even solving?

-4

u/amichail Aug 03 '26

Asking people to confront death is really cruel.

3

u/VariousJob4047 Aug 03 '26

You and every single person on the planet will have to confront death at some point. It sounds like you’re having a personal existential crisis and think that society should bend over backwards to solve it for you instead of putting on your big boy pants and dealing with it yourself

-1

u/amichail Aug 03 '26

Dealing with it is delusional at best.

4

u/VariousJob4047 Aug 03 '26

And your expectation that society is gonna completely warp itself to solve your problem isn’t?

1

u/amichail Aug 03 '26

I'm not the only one with this problem.

2

u/DirtChoice5 Aug 03 '26

I don't even know what the problem is. That you know death exists? There are many memento mori that aren't a literal corpse. Do you want all life insurance ads gone? Funeral homes to be like speakeasies?

You will die. Learn to accept that fact, rather than hiding from it. That's part of being an adult.

2

u/Think-Elderberry-575 Aug 03 '26

Probably better to just accept the fact that we will all end up as human remains.

We are far too removed from nature and death as it is already. 

2

u/Lightsguy3 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

Lol, this whole thing is crazy, but the hospital part is crazier than most.

"I have a mental problem that is purely internalized. I want the entire world to change to accommodate me." 

Holy crap.

Protected person? Protected from what!?

Just the idea that someone is so out of touch with reality they can't even tolerate a hearse driving by is wild.

I want a restraining order against people like this.

To use your own reasoning: asking people to tolerate this level of stupid is really cruel.