I mean, the guy is dead-he/she neither knows nor cares what happens to the earthly remains. Would you spend the dough to do this?
I really don’t see the need for this-do you?
I don’t see the need myself, but I would do it for someone I cared about if it was important to them. That they don’t know about it after they’re dead is irrelevant; the promise would have been to the living person.
Yeah, just leave him in a ditch for the weevils. 
They care about burying their loved one in the already paid for site. Not everyone dies close to where they plan to be buried.
I swear sometimes questions here sound like they were written by Data just after he was turned on for the first time. “What is this thing you hoo-mans call ‘caring about loved ones’?”
Seriously, what a strange question. My mother died at an experimental cancer clinic in the Bahamas. (This was back in the 1980s.) Should we have just dumped her there instead of bringing her home to be buried next to her little son and, when the time came, her husband? So those of us who weren’t with her when she died would feel as if we’d had no closure? No grave to visit?
Not everyone feels this way, of course. And I can understand why. But I can’t fathom not understanding the reason many of us want our loved ones buried in roughly the same location.
Burial customs, all of them past basic sanitation, are for the living.
I’d argue that the sanitation part is for the living as well.
Right. I don’t feel that way - me and my parents at least ( can’t speak directly to my siblings ) are kind of unsentimental about bodies. But c’mon, this isn’t rocket science ralph. Of course most people care about tangible attachments to their loved ones, dead or alive.
Some people feel better if they get to “visit” the dead at the cemetery. You’re not going to get to do that if your loved one is buried a huge distance away.
We tend to cremate in our family, but yes, I would bring the ashes back home to put them where “they belong”.
And even if the burial site isn’t already purchased, the family may want the deceased buried nearby so that they can visit. It’s common enough that the airlines have procedures for handling bodies.
So much of this post should be a sticky.
And if the move is domestic, the cost isn’t that much. For a body up to 500 pounds from the Southeast to the Northeast (say for someone’s parents who moved from New York to Florida), Delta (PDF warning) charges $315. Of course usually, the funeral home will make all the arrangements, so the actual cost might be higher.
It’s done for the comfort of the living, and may involve religious ritual as well. I know of a woman who, years after her daughter died, had her body exhumed and moved thousands of miles to a cemetery near her new residence so she could visit her daughter weekly as she was used to. I know of a man who died in a plane crash and was half-cremated whose parents flew to the US from India to hold a funeral, then fly his remains back to India for a riverside cremation and scattering his ashes on the Ganges.
I don’t see a need for it, but I do understand that the earthly remains are enormously important to some people. For those people, relocating a body is important and worth a plane ticket.
My grandmother’s brother died in a veteran’s hospital in 1949 in California. His twin sister, my grandmother, lived in Virginia. The military sent a telegram but the family couldn’t pay to have him shipped home. Back then, people quite often didn’t have the money for such things.
Everything done after death is for the bereaved. The deceased loved on has move on to a different place and really doesn’t care about what happens to his/her meat.
My BFF recently died. She donated her body parts and then we had her cremated. She wanted to be close to her husband, so we took her ashes to the same part of the desert that we had sprinkled him and drank really bad wine and told stories.
Laura was gone, but doing that comforted us.
The mortician on the old “Family Plots” show on A&E regularly prepared bodies for transport out of state. The funeral home she worked for was located in southern CA. She once said in a voiceover that many of those people had moved out there upon retirement; when they passed, their families paid to have them flown back to their hometown or wherever they had spent the bulk of their lives for burial.
I can see the OP’s point, but everyone else here has already stated the reasons as to why.
In some cases I imagine the will stipulated that “when I die I want to be buried in X”. In that case, the family is simply carrying out the deceased’s wishes.
I disagree.
But the living person, the one you had the relationship with, did. Respect that person.
Exactly. She, your friend, alive, wanted this.
nm
I don’t really know how to answer your post Peremensoe.
We must have very different thoughts about this. I respected Laura’s wishes, but honestly, how would she have known if I didn’t?
I did it for me, it made me feel better to do what she wanted, but she is dead and gone. All that was left was meat and we choose to treat it with honor and respect.