Indeed.
My father expressed that he did not want a funeral or any kind of gathering. “Just toss the ashes in the garbage.”
We were like “sure, sure, whatever you want.”
When he passed, we had a family gathering and spread his ashes at sea from my uncle (his brother)'s boat. We also had a community remembrance where about 100 folks turned up. It was for the family and friends. Not for the dead guy, who was just a bit bitter at the end.
If anyone wanted to charge me because I did not obey my father’s grumpy and bitter wishes to have his cremains tossed in the garbage can with no gathering, I would happily pay the fine.
There’s a way to do this that could both honor the deceased wishes and pay respect for the benefit of the living. It’s called a memorial service. By that I mean a ceremony or commemorative event for the living without the presence of the deceased’s remains.
So let’s say someone wants no service or ceremony for the funeral. OK, so you can scatter the ashes somewhere outside in some private place or have the urn buried in a cemetery without any funeral ceremony. And then, a few days after this final disposition of the remains, you can organize a gathering for family and friends at a different location and remember the deceased as you see fit. Heck, I can organize a memorial service for anyone I want tomorrow, if I feel like it. For Oscar Wilde, for Audrey Hepburn, for Marie Antoinette, for Percy Bysshe Shelley, for one of my paternal great-great grandmothers, whoever. That is out of the deceased’s control.
I read you. I don’t think having your remains tossed in the garbage qualifies as a funeral, though.
For my immediate family, I’d probably comply with any reasonable request. Certainly if they want a certain kind of ceremony or anything. I’m not sure what other sorts of requests they might make. As folk get outside my closest friends/family, my willingness would likely wane rapidly.
My wife and I just updated our wills/trust, which caused my wife to ask what I wanted to do with any remains. (I hope composting is legal by the time I pass, so I can just be mulched.) I was stricken by how little I care what happens to my cremains. I’d be fine if they just tossed them in the trash. If there was something to do with them that was meaningful to my survivors, that would be fine. When we discussed various possibilities, it was pretty obvious that any number of sites prohibit it. Definitely national parks, most bodies of water… I think I’d be hesitant to ask my survivors to do something illegal with my waste.
I’m a free person, and a dead person shouldn’t be able to force me to plan and execute an event I don’t wish to, or participate in a religious (or non-religious) service I don’t wish to. If dead guy wants a specific kind of funeral that is antithetical to my needs as a living person, DG can plan it and pay for it, and my role will be to stay away. If DG wants my participation, they need to respect the fact that I’m going to have to want to do it, either out of respect for them or for my own grieving needs.
Actually, only a small number of national parks (in the US) disallow the spreading of ashes - and it appears that obtaining a permit in the rest of them is a very straightforward process.
Sorry if I did not explain. That’s exactly what the community gathering was about. It was just close family on a small boat who did the ashes at sea thing, weeks prior to the memorial service.
I think the whole “Funerals are for the living” thing is pretty much true, but there is one thought about the deceased has me thinking it is partially for them in a small way. I mean, if you attend a number of these ceremonies during your own life, you might think what you’ve experienced is a nice thing for remembering your friend/loved one, and thus when it’s your turn to be honored you feel good that the people close to you will take care to honor you in the same way. Sure, you wont know the difference, but your expectation while you are alive is that there will be a nice ceremony, people will say some nice things about you, there will be a nice meal, and everyone will cry for you. I think expecting that brings some comfort to people.
Actually, I agree in principle with what you say. I never said you should be forced to attend a funeral you don’t agree with. That is your choice. Also, I agree you shouldn’t be forced to pay for it. My point is merely that the survivors should not actively impose things that run contrary to the deceased’s wishes. There is, however, such a thing as a pre-planned funeral, and I think that if a person makes funeral arrangements with a funeral home while still alive, and provides their own money from which to have those arrangements carried out, that then it is, in principle, neither moral for their survivors to veto those arrangements, nor should they have the legal power to do so.
When my FIL died last year, he had expressed a wish to not have any kind of funeral, and he hoped to have his ashes scattered at sea.
MIL wanted a funeral. Much of the family was leaning toward not having one, my attitude was “they’re for the living, do what MIL wants”. Ultimately, she decided not to push for one - which worked out well in many ways as it would have been tricky to arrange travel etc. We wound up having a family meal a couple months later, once she’d moved to her assisted living place up in NJ.
The ashes: turns out there are boats that actually will take you out past whatever the mandatory distance from shore is where it’s legal to scatter ashes. They’ll either do it for you, or you can go along and do the scattering.
I think it’s disrespectful to the decedent to blatantly ignore wishes like “no religious service” or whatever. Of course, some folks DESERVE that disrespect… But all in all, if honoring last wishes, for a beloved family member, can be accomplished without an undue burden, it may well bring some joy to the family, remembering their loved one at the time of the scattering or whatever.
As a semi-humorous side note to ash-scattering: My mother had spent many happy hours at a country club the family had been members of for generations. She loved to play golf, before her health became an issue. She had once said she hoped that some of her ashes might be scattered on the golf course there.
In Catholicism, scattering ashes is generally discouraged / forbidden. I asked the parish priest, when he came to visit her in the hospital, if her wish was acceptable. He basically said “Hey, what I don’t know won’t hurt me!” (this was the priest who looked like a biker - first “cool” clergyman I’d ever met).
I mentioned the wish to the funeral director. As Mom’s urn was brought to the church, he surreptitiously slipped me a small bottle (a pill bottle, actually). So Mom spent her funeral in the urn, AND in my purse.
My brother took care of the scattering, a few weeks later.
I’m dealing with this now, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with (maybe I’ve led an easy life).
My mother passed away in September. She was preceded in death by her brother, father, and mother. Those three individuals were buried in a family cemetery on property that had belonged to her father. My mother wanted her ashes spread in that cemetery. Her father had believed that it would stay in the family for many generations. This, unfortunately, was not to be and the land is now owned by a distant relative who has declared that no new internments, including ashes, would be allowed in the family cemetery. For reasons unknown my grandfather never filed whatever paperwork was required to give the cemetery public access and allow future internments.
So, my mom will not be able to be placed next to her parents and her sibling. I’m having a really, really hard time with this. She didn’t leave a “plan B”, this is what she wanted. And now we can’t honor those wishes.
I honestly don’t know what we’re going to do.
I feel honoring loved one’s last wishes is an act of love and we should do everything in our power to respect them. It’s not our place to question them, to second-guess motives, or to declare them too inconvenient. If someone we care about asks us to fulfill those wishes, and we agree to do so, it is incumbent on us to make sure those wishes are carried out.
Having said all that, it is a total dick move not to have those wishes laid out clearly. Burdening your loved ones with deciding what you would want done with your mortal remains or your estate is lazy at best. My grandparents on my father’s side did that, they left no instructions for what they wanted done with their remains after they passed so we had them cremated and spread their ashes near Mt. Hood. We had and still have no idea if that’s what they wanted but it was an educated guess and I just kind of hope they would have approved.
It would have been much easier if they had made clear exactly what their wishes had been. Mybe my grandfather wanted to be buried in Italy, where he grew up. Maybe my grandmother wanted to buried near her childhood home in LA. I don’t know and never will know.
It’s a really good idea to have all of this in writing and available for whoever our next of kin is so that they can carry our those wishes as flawlessly as possible.
Maybe a good idea for a thread: what should be included in a “when I die” binder to be given to the next of kin upon our death?
My bad. Thanks for the correction.
My guess is it’s precluded by paperwork and anticipation of the PR nightmares of family arguments and lawsuits. Most of the cremains being secretly scattered don’t come from people who left behind documentation of their wishes and assignment of which friend or family member had the right to turn them into a brick.
“My brother only desecrated Mother’s body in public in order to huuuuurt meeee!”
Are you allowed to visit the cemetery? It seems to me that you could discreetly take your Mom along.
My Aunt and Uncle did that, with Granddad’s ashes, visited the plot, dug a quick hole, dropped the old boy in, and hot footed their way out of there.
Got a letter the next week saying it would be OK to inter his ashes in the family plot.
Both of my parents willed their bodies to the University of Kansas Medical School upon their deaths. Dad died in 2016, and our local mortician (who had been advised of this) transported his body the 200 miles to Kansas City. We had a memorial service 10 days later; when Mom received his ashes a year later, we buried them in his chosen plot in the church cemetery.
Mom died in December 2021, post-Covid. Because she had contracted a mild case of Covid a few months earlier, the med school did not want her body, a policy I was not aware of until she had passed. So my siblings and I had to make a decision on what to do, which obviously was against her wishes. We settled for a quick cremation, followed by a memorial service six months later, when the pandemic had more or less ended. We then buried her ashes in the plot next to Dad.
It continues to bother me just a little bit that we couldn’t honor her wishes.
They will feel that whether or not it actually happens.
I don’t disagree- but what if you have no wishes? I really don’t have any - I can make it clear that I don’t care, but I’m not sure if that counts as laying out my wishes.
Right. But I think if someone thinks their final wishes will be ignored or worse mocked and they will be humiliated, their expectations during life about their funeral would be different.
You honored him well.