Skaldirimus trapped in a six-hour meeting that has not God! Damn! Thing! to do with his God! Damn! job, but which includes a LOT of PowerPoints presentations BEING READ ALOUD AND ALSO PRINTED OUT = a hypothetical thread several days early. Also a possible stroke.
Today’s tale is about Hannah, the widow of the thread title. Hannah’s in her mid-thirties with two pre-teen children; her husband, Jack died after a long illness. Given plenty of warning of Billy’s fate, the couple discussed in detail what he wanted done with his body after his death. Jack was unequivocal in wanting to be cremated–partly because he felt burial to be a waste of resources, partly because, unlike his parents and siblings, he was a confirmed atheist and does not wish to pretend that he thinks that one day he’ll be physically resurrected. Georgia was ambivalent about this. She doesn’t believe in God either (though she’s more agnostic than atheist) she doesn’t think burial is unethical in the way Jack believed it to be. To Hannah’s way of thinking, what happens to a person’s body after death simply doesn’t matter. Ultimately, though, she promised to do what Jack asked: cremation followed by a scattering of his ashes over the Mississippi.
But there’s a third person involved here: Jack’s 76-year-old mother. Grace is far from the stereotypical mother-in-law. In fact, Hannah unreservedly adores her. Hannah’s childhood was a nightmare, you see: her father drunken and abusive in one way, her mother angry and abusive in a complementary way. Before meeting Jack, Hannah never believed there were people who actually loved their parents; meeting him and his warm, loving family was a revelation. Over the last few years Grace has become Hannah’s best friend. When Jack became terminally ill, Grace became a super-hero. She baby-sat, she cooked, she gave money and time and effort and comfort – whatever it took to make it possible for Hannah and the kids to spend as much time with Jack as possible. Hannah cannot imagine how they would have made through this time without her.
Hours after Jack’s death, Grace is comforting Hannah when she herself breaks down in tears. As it turns out, she cannot bear the thought of Jack being cremated and his ashes being scattered per his request. She wants him interred in the family crypt, beside his father and near to where Grace herself will be placed on day. “I know it’s your decision,” Grace says to Hannah, “and I swear I won’t make it hard for you – but please, please reconsider the cremation. I want my baby to spend eternity with me.”
I was really hoping this was going to be about Ruth the Moabite and involve her mother-in-law urging her to get knocked up by a relative. Ah well.
Jack is dead and doesn’t believe he’s coming back. He’s not there to be hurt by a promise not being kept. Funerals are for the living and not the dead, so if I was Hannah I’d probably cave to Grace’s wishes.
Ultimately, though, there’s no real right or wrong answer here. The only one whose opinion really matters is, y’know, dead. It doesn’t matter to him anymore.
The body disintegrates when buried: the process is just faster with cremation. If the dead are physically resurrected, it would be just as easy for a deity to resurrect from the ashes as from some bones buried in the ground. Does Hannah believe that Saint Joan of Arc is not going to be physically resurrected because her body was burnt up? I can understand her fears, but she ought to know that they are both irrational and in conflict with Christian doctrine.
Nevertheless, it really is not going to hurt Jack – whether his soul lives on or not. If his soul did live on, he probably wouldn’t want to hurt his mother, so he would probably accept a decision for burial.
In this case, there’s no reason not to acquiesce to the mother-in-law’s wishes. Jack’s dead, after all, and cannot be harmed though his body’s cremation, interment, or use as an exceptionally macabre beer pong table.
With respect to Skald, I think a more interesting hypo might be: What if Jack had wanted his body used for organ donation (assume he had organs in suitable shape), and MIL was horrified by the idea?
In that case, I’d say the correct thing to do is donate any useable organs, MIL’s wishes be damned. Not because of Jack’s wishes as such - like I said, dead man can’t be injured by people ignoring their wishes - but because it does the least possible harm in this situation. Organ donation can save lives, or massively improve them (as in the case of cornea transplants). Jack’s death is bad enough - selfishly refusing to release useable Jack-bits simply ensures that others suffer additional grief and misery. Unacceptable, and a relatively modest bit of emotional discomfort for MIL is a reasonable price to pay for the gains organ donation would provide here.
Hannah’s not a Christian. She doesn’t care about Christian doctrine.
I know people who say that cremation is immoral for reasons of Christian theology.
IV Peter 19:12 specifically prohibits embalming dead bodies for any recreational purposes, dude. Read your Bible.
The problem with that hypothetical is that it muddies the issue, which is the conflict between Hannah’s word to a dead man and her love for a live woman.
I think Hannah should go ahead with the cremation, but offer Grace the option of entombing his ashes in the family crypt. Since Jack specified what he wanted done with his ashes (scattered over the Mississippi) then it get’s trickier. Hannah has to chose between violating (perfectly reasonable) promises she made to her husband on his deathbead or angering her beloved mother-in-law. There is a third choice, but it involves getting ahold of unclaimed cremains and pretending they’re Jack’s. Ultimatedly Jack has as much a right to direct how his body is disposed of after his death as he does how his property his disposed off.
For the record I’m an atheist and my prefered option would be harvested for organs, whatever’s left get’s cremated & tossed in the nearest ocean. Barring that med school cadaver, cremated, ocean.
I asked to be cremated for a reason and you said you would do it. Is that really so hard? Honestly, I want to be cremated and fear that this exact scenario will be what actually plays out.
If Grace is really such a nice person she wouldn’t try to kick Jack in the balls one last time and upset Hannah at the same time. And why would the fact that Jack is an atheist mean that others get to decide what happens to his remains?
It sounds harsh but - so? Dead men can’t be harmed by betrayal. So long as Jack believed his wishes would be honored, his interest (in not being freaked out while dying) was protected as well as necessary.
With Jack dead, the important thing is to mitigate the harm to living people as much as possible. If his organs aren’t useable for donation, then honoring the MIL’s wishes best mitigates that harm. If his organs are useable, then using them to prevent death or debilitating injury mitigates the situation far more than providing the MIL a bit of emotional comfort - so donation becomes the appropriate action.
Indeed, I would donate Jack’s useable organs even if he had expressed a vehement opposition to the practice. And I’d lie to his face about it, if necessary. Jack doesn’t have the right to insist that others die because of his squeamishness.
I’ll come down off the fence. I’m an atheist. If I had a religious mother like Grace (I don’t – my mother is dead, and my father is atheist or agnostic), then even though Hannah promised me cremation, I’d be content with keeping my mother happy. There’s one caveat, however: I don’t think that works if I had specifically asked Hannah to ignore my mother’s wishes. But really, if I’d done that, the honest thing would have been to involve my mother in the discussion of the disposal of my body. So Hannah should:
(1) try to get Grace to accept cremation, and
(2) inter the body if she won’t accept it.
It’s a question of Hannah’s motives. Some people may feel that the issue is Hannah’s honor; others, Jack’s wishes.
Dead men are difficult to betray.
Well, that’s not true. They’re actually very easy to betray, on account of being incapable of protesting or acting to enforce agreements. It’s just that they don’t complain or suffer, on account of being dead.
Where do you get the ball-kicking thing from? You can’t imagine that a mother grieiving the loss of her son, busying herself in an attempt to be helpful to his family and control her ownself, might suddenly be overwhelmed with emotion?
People do funny things when they’re grieving. When my mother died, I went into overdrive–cooking repeated meals for everybody in my family, cleaning every single item in my house and my dad’s, coordinating getting people in town for the funeral, and so forth, without shedding a tear. But when my father tried to thank me for everything I was doing I burst into tears, because he broke the momemtum I was using to keep myself under control.
He wasn’t kicking me in the balls, though. It was unavoidable.
I’m not sure what the antecdent of the bolded pronoun is. Is it that Jack wished to be cremated & scattered, or that Hannah agreed to it? It is, after all, possible for the first to be true without the second being the case.
