Dunno if this will end up in a question needing movement to GQ or what, but here goes.
Cremains are surprisingly heavier then I thought they’d be. I just had the less-than-desireable experience of picking up what remains of my Father’s Corporeal Sub Total. It’s a box about 8x4x8 in a purple satin bag. And it weighs quite a bit, considering.
Now in retrospect, I’ve shoveled the ashes out of the BBQ, and they seem pretty dense, so on a logical level, I’d imagine these would be the same, but still. It’s not something you think about all that much.
Things like: Dad was 270 lbs. Would the cremains of a 110 lb person weigh the same? Is this ALL of them, or do they full up a box of arbitrary size and call it good? Do they have boxes of different sizes? (I dunno, my experience is limited to a population of one.)
Course this could branch out into LP or natural gas, cooking times and the like (I’ve noticed a lot of gallows humor around the house lately…I suspect it’s a coping mechanism.)
For my Dad, I think they just gave us a “sampling” of his cremains. It’s about the size of a coffeecan, and he was about 180lbs. I don’t mind that it’s probably not the whole thing. He’s dead, what happens to the stuff left behind is not a big issue for me and wouldn’t have been to him; we have a bit as a memorial and that’s enough.
When I got my mom’s cremains, they were in a box about the size of a 3 x 5 card file, maybe a bit larger. She was only 5’ tall, tho, and her body had been donated to Emory for medical research, so I don’t know (or really care) if all of her is in there.
When I had to have my mother cremated I talked to the guy about it. They said there is an average that most people come out to be no matter the size. He said he’d seen people who where huge take up a lot less space, and in my mother’s case a lot more. I got a couple of urns for the family and was told that should be enough, a few days later they told me there was more, a box full more.
Dr. Bill Bass, founder of the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility (aka the Body Farm ), did some research into this in the wake of the Tri-State crematory scandal a few years ago after he was asked to be an expert witness in one of the civil trials.
After weighing 50 sets of ashes from men and 50 from women, he found that they averaged 7.6 pounds for men and 6.1 pounds for women. It does matter how big the body is when it is cremated, though; hence the pound-and-a-half difference between men and women.
Bass also reports that crematories (at least, the ones that are doing it properly) cremate one body at a time; that’s all furnaces are designed to hold. After cremation, the crematory staff crush the ashes a little more and remove any extraneous material from the container.
This information is available in the “Ashes to Ashes” chapter of his book Death’s Acre.
My brother’s ashes came to me in a box about the size of a box of tissues (the large size tissue box), but it was really dense and heavy. I didn’t weigh it, but 8 pounds sounds about right.
Hubby picked the box up at the post office. He brought it home and commented that for a small box, it was really heavy. Are you ready for this? “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” Hubby goes :dubious:.
As I understand the matter, cremains are mainly bone … the rest is essentially burned away. If that is true, then the net weight of the cremains based on adults should be simliar by gender, since skeletons may well fall into similar weight classes based on gender.
When we were going to Dad’s thing, we were gassing up in separate vehicles. Dad, oddly enough, was in the trunk of Mom’s car. We’re checking arrangements, and I ask about Dad’s location. Mom (or somebody else) replies, deadpan, “It’s okay, Dad’s in the trunk.”
Good point on the bone matter, I also placed dad in the trunk area of the rented minivan. I hooked the draw-string on the hooks used for grocery bags. I don’t think the designers of the minivan expected those hooks to be used that way.
Seriously- we had my grandpa’s cremains in the box (no need for an urn, we were scattering him off the beach in front of his house). We all go out to the car to drive to the boat dock, and I asked did anybody forget anything? My dad jumps and runs back into the house.
Yep, we’d left my grandpa on the coffee table!
His cremains were lots of fine ash with a layer of grape nuts-sized bone bits in the bottom of the box. I remember I was a bit surprised at how heavy it was- I hadn’t held my grandma’s box so I couldn’t compare, but she was a pretty tiny gal.
PS- I did like the “crown royal” purple velvet bag the mortuary provided!
He’s in a kitchen cupboard, until I figure out what to do with him. My husband’s cremains were sprinkled in the river near his home town – one of his favorite places – but my brother’s favorite place was hooter bars.
If you really want to see the gruesome details, a documentary called “A Certain Kind of Death”, about what happens to LA residents who die with no nex of kin, has a segment near the end show a full crematory process. The final amount of remains for normal sized persons is surprisingly small, about the size you describe. So you probably have everything.
That’s a fascinating film. I stumbled upon it one night, channel surfing.
It might sound weird, but the crematory process was kinda comforting. I’m one of those people who have a smidgen of doubt about consciousness after death. Even though it takes awhile to complete the cremation, seeing that raging furnace made me feel better. No slow roasting.
I just signed papers to cremate my long lost father, and didn’t know that pacemakers have to be removed before cremation. Apparently they explode.
When my dad was cremated I picked up a small box, and didn’t look inside until I had transported it from southern California to Springfield Oregon, where Dad had been born, there to put the cremains in the Willamette River in a swimming hole where he and his buds had skinny-dipped when they were kids. That’s what he wanted. When I opened the box, which, if I remember, was a little heavier than a five-pound sack of sugar, the ashes were in a heavy plastic bag inside the box. It wasn’t like charcoal or fireplace ashes. The stuff seemed almost granulated. It was gray in color. I dumped most of the cremains in the river (they’re in the Pacific Ocean by now), but held back a little to sprinkle over his mother’s grave in a nearby cemetary. I think he would have liked that. It’s all in the ocean by now, anyway.
That’s how my dad’s ashes looked too. He wanted my sister and I to scatter them at a special place so it was necessary to open the box. (The whole box of mom’s ashes was just popped into a container.) The funeral director has scared us witless in the hope of large, expensive funeral.* The ashes themselves looked rather like fine aquarium gravel to me. Nothing recognizable, thank heaven. I’ve since read that the large bones that are left after cremation are simply crushed. Since they’re dry after that intense heat, they just crumble. Worked for me.
I do remember being suprised how heavy the box was for its size. Dad wasn’t particularly big–@5’10", and not massively built. 6-7 pounds sounds about right to me.
After the horrible fright-show the funeral director put us through, he finally disdainfully directed us to the back door and handed us the box. It was gift-wrapped in white and silver paper, the kind of you usually see on wedding gifts. After a moment of parazlyed silence, my sister and I howled with laughter, gasping, ground-rolling, rib-clutching hilarity that just offended Lurch more. Dad woulda loved it.
My sister was also somewhat heavy (and she was slim when she died).
We carried the ashes to Paris (IMS, Dad carried them on with his briefcase). I cannot remember if the airline insists on them being carryon or checked with baggage, but I do know that my parents baggage went to Norway, so he must have carried it on.
We could not get the container open. No-one had thought to bring a screwdriver or any type of implement–and we were stymied by the thought of trying to ask for a screwdriver in French. The lid was glued down.
So, we heaved the whole container into the Seine. It was made of copper, so she is slowy turning verdrigris–which is an effect that she liked, so it’s all good, I suppose.
My grandmother ended up with her best friend Zella’s ashes as Zella for some reason did not want to be buried with her husband. My grandparents tried to toss the box in the ocean but it kept coming back so they took it home and Zella spent some years on a shelf in the basement. Years later when my grandmother died my cousin stashed Zella in Grandmom’s casket. We all got a giggle out of it and I think they would have liked it too.
I took possession of my father’s ashes in 1986. They were in a plastic box about the size of a child’s shoebox, I don’t recall them being particularly heavy. I drove, from Phoenix (he lived in Scottsdale) to a forested spot near Payson, where I first opened the box. The ashes were in a plastic bag. I opened it and scattered them in the deep woods w/ a “Goodbye Pop.” He had done the same, in the same area, w/ Mom.
I seem to remember a mix of fine ashes and some more flake like material along w/ some slightly larger pieces that I figured must be bone.
When I hear these stories about people who may have gotten ashes that were not actually those of their loved ones, my reaction is, so what, I don’t see why it’s a big deal and I suspect that these people are simply trying to get some advantage, probably financial.
I do recall the funeral director trying to tell me that I needed to puchase a casket, as it was state law. I found out that there were cardboard “caskets” that met state requirements. Even then, the funeral director tried to tell me that he didn’t offer that option. I made some noise and they finally provided the box. Apparently it was required for transportation of the body.
One of my oldest and dearest friends was scattered this afternoon along one of his favorite walking/running trails in a NYC park. I didn’t get to heft his ashes (which were in the care of his sister), but they were in a container about quart size…made of Tupperware.
Mostly, the funeral guys were very nice. They did try to sell us a wooden casket, but since it is going right into the crematory (we had opted for a memorial, not a funeral with open casket–my sister wasn’t found for 2 days), we said no.
They didn’t try to shame us or hard sell us. We did choose a lovely maple cremains box with her name etc on it. It’s now empty, but we’ll keep it.
