[QUOTE=AuntiePam]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
