Well, against the wishes of the EPA and a half-dozen ecologists, half of Dad’s remains are watching a gorgeous sunset in the Pacific Northwest and will, at high tide, be carried out to the sea he took great pleasure in.
The other half will hang out in the Rocky Mountains. Godspeed Daddy.
I don’t know if dumping her container is against the French equivalent of the EPA, but it is over and done with now.
I just hope that she is not dredged up if they ever do that to make the river deeper (does the Seine silt up? The things I do not know!).
How is it so bad to scatter ashes, rather than burying them? Either way, you’re back to Earth, so to speak…
I could see policing it so that one area doesn’t get dumped on and change the eco-system there, but scattering would seem to preclude that.
We are leaving the country next week, and I ran across the “transportation of dead bodies” section on the airlines website.
Cremains can be carried on or checked. Caskets will enjoy special treatment and care in the baggage hold. American Airlines even give you the name of the guy to call about taking your loved one on their last vacation! 
Fascinating.
I have probably posted this before, but I just love the idea so I’ll post it again!
I want to be cremated. Then, I want my ashes distributed into a bunch of embellished glass vials. Any of my friends and loved ones may take one. Then, when they travel someplace really cool, I want them to take me along and scatter me.
Just think- I could end up on Mt. Everest, in the Serengeti, in Antarctica, on top of Half Dome… what a blast!
My dad is actually warming to this idea too, so even if nobody else does, I’ll probably save back a bit of his ashes to take someplace cool.
Forgot to add-
Most of my ashes will be scattered in the same place as my paternal grandparents (and eventually, my parents and my brother)- right out in front of the family beach house, just past the surf line. Yeah, I know it’s a violation of the distance limit, but I don’t care.
There is always the suspicion that you don’t have everything, so that segment cleared things up for me as well.
When my sister died two years ago, she had not specified what was to be done with her remains. The choices were burial in some gravesite the rest of us would have few opportunities to visit, or cremation. We chose cremation, partly because of that consideration, partly because of numerous general discussions over the years in our family regarding the amount of otherwise potentially beneficial real estate taken up by dead people, and partly because my mother really liked the idea that cremation meant that the brain tumor that killed my sister, and made her life unbearable for a year and a half prior to her death, would go up in flames as well.
Her cremains are in a metal box that rests inside a little carved wooden case made to hold the box containing several sentimental personal effects. That way if we ever agree on a location where she might have liked her ashes to be scattered, we still have something to remember her by. It is shockingly heavy.
At the funeral home, we were also confronted with the fact that we needed a box to put her in for the cremation. As dubious as I find the practice of buying fancy boxes to drop six feet in the ground, I find the idea of buying a fancy box to set on fire completely ridiculous. My mother had taken a year off from her life to care for my sister, and all she had was my sister’s life insurance payout, a couple tens of thousands of dollars, and damned if I was going to let some funeral director convince her that Val would have been OK with her spending 3 or 4 of those thousands on a box that was destined to wind up a charred cinder within a day.
I could see my mother struggling with the decision. Who, the sudden face of having to cremate one’s child, would want to commit their ashes to being mingled with anything other than the finest wood? Laying aside my agnosticism, which was having a horrible time of it anyway that day and needed a rest, I suggested to my mother, truthfully, that Valerie hated to see fine things ruined, and that to whatever extent we imagined she was aware of the goings on, to see a really beautifully-crafted casket going up in flames around her would cause her no end of anguish. So, for a few hundred dollars, particle board it was. Sorry, Val, just thinking of Mom, as I’m sure you were too.
I recall some comedian from long ago saying, “My uncle asked that his remains be taken up in a plane and tossed out over the state of New Jersey… but he didn’t want to be cremated…”
I think we went with the particle board as well, if not the cardboard box. While I understand the funeral business needs to stay in business, I no more want to see mahogany going up in flames OR moldering underground.
I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered in England, near Durham. I am torn about wanting a plaque somewhere that says, “I was here”. But then I think of all those forgotten graves all over the world.
If it’s a popular spot, then lots and lots of people scattering cremains there can alter the local ecology, particularly if it’s a nutrient-poor ecology such as a peat bog or moor, because cremated human remains are quite rich in phosphates and other plant nutrients and this enables non-local species to invade and upsent the balance. There was recent a news story about this happening somewhere in the UK, but I can’t find it.
My father was cremated, and we received his remains in a sealed wooden box. It is quite heavy, but I had assumed that was from the weight of the wood. Now I wonder…
Dad is currently sitting on a table in my brother’s house. Mon says she wants to scatter his ashes somewhere up in the mountains near Lake Tahoe. I’m pretty sure we will be breaking several Federal statutes when we do so, but I’m not terribly concerned about it.
My dad’s cremains came back from the funeral home in a plastic bag inside a white box about the size of a shoe box. Two of my brothers walked over to get him, and took turns carrying the box home. He went up on the bookshelf for a couple of months until my mother moved out of that house, and then he wound up on the refrigerator in her new house. Some of us were kind of amused that he was still kind of in the middle of things. Anyway, several years ago my brother the carpenter used wood from the black walnut tree that used to be in front of the rental house my parents had (the one they rented out, I mean) and made two lovely boxes. Dad went into one, and a few years later Mom joined him in the other one. They currently sit on the bookshelf in my living room.
My family has never been very shy about talking about death and such things, and several years ago my mom started asking us to think about what we wanted of hers, if anything, after she died. There were things that meant “home” to each of us. My son asked if he could have the barometer that hung on their living room wall, and when I asked my youngest if there was anything she wanted she said, “Grandma and Grandpa”. So we have the remains here.
a good friend of my dad’s died some time ago. he was a major coffee addict. he now rests in his favorite percolator on top of the fridge in his kitchen. his wife thought it appropriate.
After my grandmother’s funeral (in Boston), the funeral home shipped her ashes to Washington so they could be buried next to her husband.
The post office lost grandma.
My mother was absolutely livid that the funeral home, after charging all that money, didn’t even use a shipping service that could track their packages (this was pre-Internet, I don’t know if the USPS does tracking now). They found her again pretty quickly, and I calmed mom down by pointing out that if we could have told grandma about this, she’d be on the floor laughing.
oodg OG! :eek
That rocks.
