The Great Inevitability is gonna get you one of these days. It’ll get me and it’ll get your boss and your next-door neighbor. Even Tom Brady will die one day. But who wants to think about such depressing things?

The times are depressing enough, right? There’s no need to get all morbid about things, correct? It goes without saying that members of the vast, billion-dollar death industry have profited mightily over the years from what seems like a genetic aversion to planning the ways and means of our demise.

There may be no avoiding the death industry, but there are ways of dealing with it that can benefit the living. Disposing of the dead, for example, has recently undergone some interesting and chat-worthy changes.

Cremation is becoming an increasingly popular disposal option. (It’s not necessarily a “burial” option, is it?) Here are some stats, as reported a year ago in USA Today — “ … 44 percent of Americans plan to be cremated, a 40 percent increase from the 1960s.”

What the paper called “traditional burials” came in second place at 35 percent followed by 6 percent who would leave their body to science and 4 percent who said they would opt for “being buried without a casket in the ground.”

The cremation vs. burial debate is endless. I’ve seen many websites proclaiming the alleged glories of each approach. I’m not here to recommend either — or any — approach. But in my meanderings along the Dead Beat, I’m seeing some intriguing variations on the “burial in the ground” option.

There’s a site called “Better Place Forests.” If you didn’t know its reason for being, you’d never guess what it was. It’s a sophisticated “end of life” website with as warm-and-fuzzy an approach to a “green” burial as I’ve yet seen.

The deal is pretty simple: you don’t just buy a burial plot or a hole in the ground for your (cremated) remains. You buy a tree at whose trunk your ashes are deposited, thus giving whatever nourishment ashes can provide. Prices increase with the age of the tree. (I found no support for the site’s unsourced comparative average prices of $15,000 for a traditional burial; several sites suggested a typical average cost as being closer to half that amount.)

The site features a panoply of soothing, smiling photos of people posed against tree trunks, pointedly looking up at the treetops, never down at the hole where those ashes are deposited and mixed with soil. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the site was created for Arbor Day.

Which, as far as I’m concerned, is all well and good. It’s long been a hallmark of old-style burial practices that whatever else a dead body is, it provides the soil in which it’s planted with some organic benefit. And there’s no waiting around for Mother Nature to find a way into a typical burial “vault,” let alone a mahogany casket.

What’s new about Better Place Forests is how it emphasizes the benefits of organic decomposition not only to the environment in general but to one specific tree of a customer’s choosing. Your cremated remains are deposited into a hole at the base of the tree, mixed with dirt, given both a plot ID number and a brief inscription of your choosing on a shiny metal disk.

Exploring this single site has, predictably, got me wondering about my own ways and means of physical disposal. I’ve long believed that a backyard burial was both practical, preferable and cheaper. I could meet most of the state’s not-very-demanding criteria (the need to be cremated, the need for the presence of a funeral director). Hey, maybe being buried in a winding sheet or an old coffee can beneath the crabapple tree that’s always getting in my face when I mow the back forty would demonstrate my generosity of spirit toward that bloody thing.

Or maybe I’ll simply bequeath my earthly remains to the wind, which, if there’s such thing as justice, it will blow my dusty self into the air ducts of my pesky neighbors’ rattletrap air conditioner, thus bringing peace to the nabe — and true vengeance from beyond the grave.

Weaponized earthly remains. Who says death planning has to be depressing?