Hey, my family has one, too! I was wildly impressed with how quickly my father-in-law got his property subdivided and a portion designated as a family cemetery after my mother-in-law died in 2010. We have three graves there now, and I believe that will be it for actual burials. I’m thinking my kids can inter my ashes and those of their dad there. It’s a fairly remote area that requires a sturdy 4WD vehicle or at least one with good clearance to get to, and my brother isn’t willing to put our mom there. My married daughter (the one likely to have kids) lives out of state now, so the upkeep of the whole place will fall on my younger daughter and then in all likelihood it’ll be abandoned in the next generation.
Pretty much the same story here.
But peeps are actually buried there now, that feels kinda strange.
A modest proposal if I may …
-
All the folks like you with a hall closet full of old cremain urns should get together with all the people with a basement or storage unit full of old National Geographic magazines. Then we make a gigantic pile of magazines with urns interspersed and set the whole Great Pyramid-sized pile on fire.
Leave the wind to deal with the resulting mixed ash.
My mother-in-law recently passed. Her daughters all got pendants that hold a tiny bit of the ashes. The urn will eventually be placed into a glass niche at a columbarium in Las Vegas. Apparently so many retirees died there during Covid there aren’t any open spots, so we’re waiting for a new building to be constructed.
The carry-on that held urn was flagged for inspection when my SIL brought it on her flight to the memorial service. Everyone thought this was hilarious.
Same here only the shelf is over my desk. Mom had a bald eagle beanie baby sitting on dad’s cube, so I got a frog beanie baby for mom’s cube.
There’s a river in Idaho that they wanted to be scattered in, but that seems to be illegal. Offspring are in California, Louisiana, and New York, so getting together is difficult and nobody had a huge urge to either develop a Plan B or to lobby for going illegal.
Timely thread, because my sister and I found my father’s ashes in my parents’ old house today. Decided as Daddy’s Girl she deserved them. My mother when alive had said she had sprinkled them at various vacation spots but 80% were still in there.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell”
From reading a few replies, it seems that many people who hadn’t received any prior requests from loved ones about what to do with their ashes chose to find a ‘favourite spot’ to scatter them.
My father had previously told me the precise place he wanted his ashes scattered - atop his favourite mountain overlooking a lake. That necessitated a midweek trip in early Spring and I hiked up alone to do that for him. There was no-one else around, very peaceful in the sunny but cool and crisp morning. I saw a woodpecker on the trip up (Dad was a keen birdwatcher) and at the summit I sat and talked as if Dad was with me until I felt comfortable enough to say a final goodbye. Neither of us are/were religious but as a form of ceremony this really helped me come to terms with now being an orphan (this was in my thirties) and it remains a powerful positive memory for me.
I wish the OP similar peace through a difficult time.
My wife had a cat she had raised from a kitten, and when it died she (the cat) was buried next to our garage, in a spot where she used to lay when we let her out into the yard. After my wife was cremated I put some of her ashes with the cat.
My wife and mother had become good friends so some of my wife’s ashes were scattered over my mother’s grave - strictly against the rules of the Catholic cemetery. More of her ashes were scattered over her parents’ graves; It was a a public cemetery so I don’t know if that was legal, nor did I care.
The bulk of her ashes were placed in a custom-made pottery jar I had commissioned. When I moved from Chicago to North Carolina I packed the urn into a padded box and included it with a shipment of about fourteen boxes of books and other stuff. When the shipment was delivered I made sure that I had the right number of boxes and had them put into the spare room for later unpacking. It wasn’t until several months later that I checked the boxes more carefully and realized that the box with her ashes was missing, having been replaced by UPS with a box of auto parts by mistake. I called UPS to have them pick up the incorrect box, but they were unable to locate the box with my wife’s ashes.
Both of my parents have expressed the wish to be cremated. My father wants to be interred next to his wife (fine), but my mother has expressed no preference.
My plan is to leave the ashes at the crematorium. Why on earth would I want them? The idea of keeping them, making jewellery out of them, scattering them somewhere, or whatever all seem really odd to me. If I’d like a nice urn to remember her by, I can get a nice urn somewhere else, probably much cheaper and more to my taste, and—bonus—not have any cremains inside!
This does not mean that I don’t love my mother, and I’m sure I’ll need some sort of ritual way to process the death. I just don’t want her leftovers to do that with.
I have refrained from suggesting that, because Dad was a wastewater (formerly sewage) treatment plant operator, we could take a shot at chucking the cremains into one of his plant’s muffin monsters.
The idea came to me when I learned (assuming it’s true) that if cremains sit too long, they consolidate into something like a brick.
(Muffin Monsters and other grinders are used to break up things that get caught in the intake screens.)
“There were extenuating circumstances.” - Beck’s tombstone inscription (but not anytime soon, please, my friend!)
Mom put Dad on the workbench in his shop. I put Mom next to him years later. And that’s where they sit, until my brother gets off his ass to arrange to plant them in the plot they have. But, Hey? What’s the hurry?
My mom told me once she wanted to have her ashes scattered in the mountains because of her love of the mountains. She passed around Christmas of 2022, so we decided to wait until last summer to take care of her last wishes.
My wife and I made an amazing road trip out of it–three weeks long and 7,500 miles. We left New Jersey, made our way out West, met up with family, and went as close as we could to Mount St. Helens–that volcano always held a special place in her heart, and I remember visiting it with her on multiple occasions when we traveled out to see her.
Then we made the return trip, by way of one of the Southern states where an estranged sibling of my mom lived. That was one of the more difficult parts, but I knew I had to give the news face-to-face.
Unfortunately, the anger my mom had held was too strong, so I knew I would have betrayed her wishes had I involved her sibling before her ashes were scattered.
It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission! (plus a touch of discretion)
Ashes are not considered a health risk, and generally you can scatter them on any property if you have the permission of the property-owner. That can be hard for public property, but it’s generally easy for private property. They look kinda like concrete dust, (or ground up bone, which is what they mostly are, I think) and blend in well with dirt.
A few state laws, since we haven’t had any cites, yet:
A third alternative is to scatter the remains at sea or on private grounds with the permission of the landowner. Scattering on public land may be prohibited or may be allowed only by written permit. You must check with the appropriate authority before scattering cremated remains.
There are no restrictions on the disposition of ashes once cremation has occurred. However, prior to the dispersal of cremated remains, permission should be obtained from the land owner or the applicable agency (e.g. – municipal government for town land, or the Department of Conservation and Recreation for a state park, etc.)
They can also be scattered at sea. I believe that US federal law requires you to be 3 miles off-shore.
It’s surprisingly hard to find a document published by a state that says “we don’t have a law”, but I found references from what looks like reliable sources in other states that I checked that said “there are no laws governing what you do with the ashes”. I think a lot of the relevant regulations are probably general “disposal of stuff” laws.
And, as a “believer”, I’m of the position that when you’re dead, you’re dead, you move on, and that’s the end of it.
For both schools of thought, a corpse is no longer a person. Neither is a pile of ash. They’re gone, gone, gone.
So why all the hand-wringing about what to do with “Dear old Grandpa”? Um, Grampy’s outta here. You’re agonizing over a cup or so of carbon?
What got me ranting is that I sometimes take my mom to visit my dad’s grave. Every time, she laments that she should have bought a plot with a better view. “He doesn’t even have any shade.” (Maybe we should have slipped some sunscreen in the casket with him?)
She wouldn’t be beating herself up about this if she really believed what she claims to. She’s quick to identify as a Christian, and says he’s “with the Lord”, and pictures him exploring other galaxies. Well, if so, he sure ain’t hanging around a small town cemetery kvetching about the view.
Nor would he care where his ashes ended up.
Well, yeah. Funeral, mourning and burial customs are for the living, not for the dead. They’re for the psychological health of the survivors. Caring about that cup of carbon is perfectly normal, as is not caring about it. Everyone deals with loss in their own way.
just the way hed of wanted it …
My parents were both JWs and the JWs monopolised their funerals but both were cremated and their ashes buried in unmarked positions in the local crematorium/graveyard’s ‘Garden of Rest’.
While I still have some of my late wife’s ashes here - back to that later - we chucked the greater part over the cliff and into the sea.
A bit of back story.
I met my wife when she was 14 and I 18. During the summers she would sneak out of her house at about four a.m. and I would too, she lived a couple of hundred yards from me.
We would walk through town and up onto the cliff at the other side of town, sit on the clifftop and watch the sun rise and the fishing boats returning to harbour.
While there was no hanky panky as she was still too young we thought we were so circumspect.
Turned out her parents knew, as did mine. Not only that but my grandad was a quarter mile away watching us. I hadn’t accounted for the fact that one of his jobs was coastguard and he was in the coastguard tower with his big binoculars.
After her cremation the kids, my brother and I went to our place on the cliff top and heaved the ashes over.*
Viking burial for her, partly as we used to live in Sweden.
Built a Dragon Boat that unfortunately capsised on the first sea (bath) trial and I still have to build a more stable vessel to carry her ashes to Valhalla.
- My daughter works for a funeral director, is their embalmer and embalmed my wife. Asked about scattering the ashes and there didn’t appear to be any restrictions for what we had planned but this may not apply everywhere.
Exactly. I scattered my mom’s ashes in places i visit because it’s a way to remind me of my mom, and of happy times i had with her. I sometimes wear the one shirt she had that fits me, too. She’s not in the shirt, or in the ashes, but they remind me of her.
And I’d guess the reason to want a grave site with a nice view is so that you can enjoy the view when you visit the grave.
I told my kids they should do whatever works for them when i die, as i will not care. When my DIL suggested that guidance can be helpful at a time when you might not want to make decisions, i suggested cremation, a traditional Jewish burial, or a funeral pyre with 12 matched horsemen on 12 matched horses, processing slowly around it as it burns. But i emphasized that the funeral is for them.
(An Indian friend says the funeral pyre is a bad idea, as they stink.)