I know about the outfit in New Mexico that will launch a lipstick worth of your loved one’s ashes into a sub-orbital path. And then there’s the folks who will crunch down that carbon powder into a gemstone-like thing. What else is out there? And this is for a doper, and money is no problem-- What can we do that would be really cool?
They mix the ashes into the concrete for artificial coral reefs.
Thats pretty cool. What she really wanted was to be dumped out at altitude over the gulf. I understand there are some laws about that…
Then try Grace Air
You can’t go along for the flight with this company, however. Something about “insurance requirements”. Let me see if I can’t find something else.
This is cool. The Eternal Ascent Society will scatter the remains anywhere at an altitude of 30,000 feet (about 6 miles up). The family gets to release the balloon.
You could shoot the ashes from the mouth of a cannon, as author Sarah Vowell did with her dad’s and the Russians did with one of the False Dimitri’s.
Paul Harvey once told the story of a factory owner who had his ashes mixed in with the sweeing compound for the evening’s clean-up.
Some black pigments are made from bone ash, so that might be an option; using your remains as a medium of a portrait of what you looked like in life. Not as creepy as having yourself stuffed.
But you’d have to put in a special order at the crematorium: usually they just burn you enough to take off the flesh and dry out the bones, then they run it all through a hammer mill to turn you into dust. This would be unsuitable for pigment, but you could mix it in with clay and have a statue made. Or as with DH Lawrence, whose ashes were mixed in with the mortar of his mausoleum.
Who was it?
See this thread.
