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The Final Disposition
Unlike dumb animals, who leave their dead lying around willy-nilly, we humans, philosophic and spiritual beings that we are, seem to have a need to invest meaning in our mortal remains.
You might be an educator who arranges to have your corpse plasticized (see right). In that way, you can continue teaching after death when your plasticized corpse tours with Body Worlds (an exhibition of plasticized bodies). Your mortal remains, twisted into all sorts of fantastic poses, will help teach the world what the insides of a human body look like in action. Muy macabre.
If you’ve loved Mother Nature throughout your life, the hippest way to invest meaning in your mortal remains is to arrange for a green burial. In a green burial, the cemetery usually has no gravestones, rows, or urns. Your loved ones may come to the graveyard service to listen to a eulogy — and end up helping to dig the burial pit. Your mortal remains, wearing only a shroud (and unembalmed), will therefore return to the earth much more quickly than it would in a traditional burial. A natural stone, or sometimes even GPS coordinates, identifies the location of the grave. Muy romantic.
If you’re a traditionalist, in love with rites and rituals, the common American funeral is probably just your thing. The funeral typically takes place in the same church that you and your spouse attended during your lifetime. Here your embalmed remains, sometimes lying in an open casket, are positioned a few steps down from the altar. You’re looking good because a mortician had previously combed your hair, put a bloom in your cheeks, plucked your eyebrows, and decked you out in your Sunday best.
After the eulogy, your body is transported in a hearse to a cemetery and buried in an expensive casket (typically between $2,000 and $10,000). The casket is often enclosed in a sealed concrete box (another $1,000), a requirement in some cemeteries to prevent the casket from collapsing and to prevent water seeping into the casket. Muy expensive.
If you are the hopeful sort and you’re desperate for more life than you’re given, you might have your body frozen cryonically (usually at —320.,8 degrees F.) and stored in a refrigerated, insulated capsule. Then if things go well, you might be “resurrected” (very doubtful, by the way) on some future day when science is more advanced. There are about 250 people in the US who are now frozen cryonically as they await their resurrection. Muy brrrrr.
I have a fondness for organization and neatness, so I plan to be cremated. I like the idea of my body being burned down to a small neat and clean pile of ashes. Muy caliente!
My daughter is a funeral director and a licensed cremator, so over the years she’s told me a lot about cremation. Let me tell you what I’ve learned.
During cremation, funeral homes require that the body be enclosed in an easily combustible wood, wicker, fiberboard, or cardboard casket. Both your body and your flimsy casket are thus cremated in a firebrick-lined oven at over 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit for about two hours, a process that burns away all soft tissue. All that’s left, then, is your fragile skeletal structure and a tiny bit of casket material. These are pulverized in a machine designed specifically for the purpose. What you’re left with are “ashes” (actually bone meal and tiny bone fragments), weighing about seven pounds or so, about the size of a child’s bowling ball. Any metal pieces (bone screws, etc.) are removed at this point before the ashes are returned to your loved ones, usually in a shoebox-sized container.
You can buy a handsome urn to put your ashes in, or you can put them in your own handmade container. Or you can scatter them into a favorite lake or stream. Marie and I have scattered a friend’s father’s ashes in the Kitakami River in Japan. I have a friend, a glass artist, who fused the ashes of her father into glass.
There are a variety of companies that will make beads out of your pressed ashes. There is even a company that claims that it can make a diamond out of the small carbon that remains in your ashes, though this is disputed by a number of experts.
A few years back, I made two miniature caskets (eight-inch long) out of ebony-inlaid cocobolo (my favorite wood) for my mom’s and my dad’s ashes. Into each casket, I have also placed a photograph and one or two small items that had significance to them. Those two tiny caskets sit on the mantel over our fireplace. I’m reminded of my mom and dad every time I do my weekly dusting. I like that.
I’ve already made a tiny casket for a portion of my ashes. I’ve asked Marie, who is five years younger than I am and is therefore likely to outlive me, to place my little casket next to my mom and dad on the fireplace mantel. So there we’ll be — mom, dad, and son — until Marie joins us someday. Then four little caskets. Muy neat.
Postscript: Marie and I own part of a family cemetery plot, purchased long ago by Marie’s parents (who are buried there). I think Marie wants a portion of our ashes to be buried in our individual plots so that our children will have a fixed spot to go to, a quiet and woodsy place, to contemplate the mysteries of life — and the awesomeness of their parental units.
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Published in General
I’ve officiated at many “green” funerals, down here on the farm. Most of them start with me getting out the tractor and the backhoe.
Still, a couple of years ago, Twiggy (“woof”) died in the middle of what seemed at the time like a time of cryogenesis. There wasn’t a hope in hell that I could dig a hole, and it was either “wrap her up and leave her in the barn till this passes” (don’t laugh, I’ve done that more than once) or do something else. Since she was (relatively) small, I had her cremated and picked up her ashes a week or so later. We scattered them in the garden. That seems entirely appropriate to me.
Many years ago, Oliver the rabbit passed on. I’ve written about him here a few times. His personality was so enormous that we couldn’t let him go without some sort of official observance, so Mr. She devised his own version of a three-volley salute, and we buried our little soldier on the farm, with military honors.
You do what you gotta do.
I want my bones to be part of an American version of the Paris Catacombs.
I see no point in taking up space in the ground once I’m gone. I told my wife if I go first she should cremate me and put me on a shelf.
She doesn’t like that idea at all – thinks it’s creepy.
Thank you. Some people have exciting and dangerous stories: like @maxknots who recovered from a student-induced triple flat inverted rolling spin in his TA-4J jet that tore off the right wing and successfully landed it in a CVS parking lot while not spilling a drop of his coffee or like @kirkianwanderer whenever she talks about her daily diet. I just have boring stories about making my dead mother-in-law late for her burial or forgetting to kiss Mrs. Tim on the altar after the priest pronounced us man and wife.
In our family, the measure of the quality of an event is how good the stories are that you get out of them. A disastrous event is a success if it results in a good story.
My almost-twin sister passed away unexpectedly at age 51. We’re at the church waiting for the mortuary to bring her in the casket for the “viewing.” We’re waiting, waiting, waiting. They were about 30 minutes late because some dopey person ran a red light and T-boned the hearse! They were sending another hearse to get our sister and bring her to the funeral.
When we got word of why there was a delay, we couldn’t help ourselves! Everyone started to laugh! You see, our sister had driven a school bus for 10 years, and she had always complained about the stupid and careless driving she was constantly subjected to in her job. To have someone run a light, and bash into the hearse, making her late to her own funeral was simply too much!
I loved that series of books. I did read fairly extensively about Navajo practices back in the early 1960s when I took a Cultural Anthropology course under Walter Goldschmitt who authored what was then the primary book on CA. The Navajo consider the dead body something that needs to be dealt with as little as possible. I tend to agree. When and if I ever die, I would like to be cremated. I don’t much care for cemeteries having grown up in Queens, NY and having driven by Calvary Cemetery probably thousands of times on my way into Manhattan. I don’t know how large it is, but when there are that many graves the whole thing begins to seem vulgar, at best.
Now THAT’S a good one!
Nice.
Vulgar? A cemetery can be a beautiful place. I like cemeteries (well, not at night when all the ghosts are about). New Orleans has lots of very old cemeteries which can be very interesting to tour.
Plus, most of us want to be remembered in some fashion, and a grave or marker can serve that purpose, even if it’s only some total stranger viewing your grave. The Jesuits of the Central & Southern Province (GREAT name for a railroad) have a cemetery at Grand Coteau, LA, where they bury most of the priests from the Province. I went to, and taught, at Jesuit High in New Orleans; so many of my old teachers and some friends are there. I go there once or twice a year, pray, and spend some time with them. It’s nice to remember them. I don’t think it’s vulgar in the least.
All parties need to be flexible. No one should try to exercise a veto over schedule.
I worked at my family’s funeral home before I took my job here. I’d even thought of taking it over, since I was the only member of my generation that’d ever done anything other than a brief stint in the office there, but the business has changed so much (I’d rather not run a crematorium- and you should see the people coming out of mortician school nowadays…. Yikes!) and, more importantly, the town has changed so significantly (it truly was the Village of Tequesta not so long ago) that I decided I’d probably regret doing so. I suppose it was the CoViD regulations that finally did me in.
It kinda makes me sad. I completely understand the comments above about members being unsentimental about their own corpses, but I think our civilization’s decline has more than a little to do with our blasé attitude toward the dead. I’m grateful for my 100+ trips to the local cemeteries, but I suppose times are always a-changin’. Or the mores, to be a-more precise. But I can also appreciate that my grandfather was probably unique in his willingness to work with families that couldn’t afford it than a typical funeral home is – and they really can be costly.
I suppose if I thought people would show up, I’d pay for a burial ahead of time and insist on a very tight time limit for any eulogy. If I had a dollar for every minute spent listening to someone drone on, often about themselves, I could surely cover the costs. (And I can’t think of anything more cruel than to make it so friends and family regret attending the funeral of the loved one of a needy eulogizer.)
But this is all folly: if I think at all about what a funeral service will look like if I were to live a long life, I’d surely yearn for a sudden unexpected death. In any case, I should take up some more dangerous hobbies. It’s probably not a bad way to meet some better potential-friends. Alas, Kent. Soy muy macabro. Pero no barato!
She can store you on a shelf next to the water heater.
My parents are ‘inurned’ at Tahoma National Cemetery – a perfectly suited place for them with spectacular views of Mt. Rainier. We took a small portion of my mother’s ashes to Mt. Rainier proper and scattered them soon after she died. This week, we are taking a similar small amount of my father’s to the same location – 3 1/2 years after he died. No sense rushing anything.
Very nice post and, we visited several cemeteries in Georgia and South Carolina a couple of years ago: they were beautiful and amazing to us.
Susan, I too like the idea of scattering the ashes in a meaningful place. It may be sentimental, but it feels right.
Same here. It’s also quite cost-effective, I understand.
I remember passing by a local cremation facility and seeing an old vacuum cleaner sitting on the curb with a “for sale” sign on it. The thought of so many souls trapped in its bag was, well, humorous. :)
This essay brings up many important questions. Primarily among them is, if we take a saint and use their ashes to make glass knives or diamond bullets, will those weapons be effective against vampires and other forms of supernatural creatures who derive their power from the forces of darkness?
My stepson Michael’s funeral was inexpressibly sad. (You know this is the case when there are three officiating priests and they are all in tears themselves.) At the end, I read a short eulogy and finished up (having cleared this with the parish priest first) talking about Michael’s famous off-key karaoke performances at the local bar and leading the congregation in a spirited rendition of one of his favorite songs, Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World (aka “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog”). The organist (known in the family as “The Thumper” for reasons that you can, perhaps, imagine) extemporized, and enthusiastically joined in. People jumped up out of the pews and danced, it was cathartic, and it completely changed the tone from one of awful sadness at Michael’s sudden passing to incredible joy that he’d been in our lives.
Fast forward five years to my mother-in-law’s death and funeral plans. I’m on the phone with the parish secretary at the (same) church, talking about plans and music. “I hope we’re not going to have another exhibition like the one at Michael’s funeral where that woman got up and sang that disrespectful song at the end,” she said. “Yes,” I said. “Disgraceful. Geraldine was a great Elvis fan. I hope no-one ends the service singing Blue Suede Shoes.”
I saw the old biddy at the back of the church when I got up to deliver Grandma’s eulogy. (Everyone called her Grandma, even Mr. She. It was the role that defined her.) Pretty sure the Church Lady was on pins and needles the whole time. All’s well that ended, though. We satisfied our itch by walking Grandma out to a stirring chorus of How Great Thou Art.
Meow.
There are lots of other possibilities.
There’s sky burial. Let the birds pick your bones. The Parsis in India and Tibetans practice this. I’ve known a lot of Parsis, but have only discussed this once. The woman explained it had to do with their flight from Persia and the only way of disposing of dead bodies of those who died along the way was to let the birds feed. So tradition. I never asked if they had done that before the flight.
There are large mounds in the North of England containing bodies that had been disassembled. Skulls in one pile, ribs in another, etc. I wonder why they did this. Seems like a lot of trouble/care was taken. I doubt they were people killed since there were so many.
Or you could wind up in the belly of someone in the Amazon (like one of the Rockefellers, probably), Papua New Guinea, Manhattan or Seattle. If it had been 120 years ago, that could have been the final disposition in Cameroun in Africa where I used to live. The Germans, who ruled back then, came across the tribe and told them to stop. They didn’t so everyone in the tribe was slaughtered except for the children of the chief. The children were taken back to Germany and raised there. A man I knew was married to the granddaughter of the chief. He used to kid her about being a cannibal. I thought he was foolish or maybe brave. Who knows when he would wind up in a pot.
I’m glad there are cemeteries. Not only for genealogy purposes but also without cemeteries, I doubt Spoon River Anthology would exist. That’s one of my favorite books of poetry.
If I could do anything, I would be partial to a Viking funeral. A burning ship just has an appeal.
Thank you.
My condolences to you as well. The sharp edges of grief seem to soften after a while.
Or there’s this:
A funeral certainly brings out the best in the dead. At some funerals I’ve attended, the deceased is spoken of as if they were a saint. I’ve only been to one where the minister acknowledged that the deceased was not a man of high character.
Former military persons can arrange far burial at sea.
The native Americans of the Columbia River would build a platform and put the body there to be consumed by the birds. Memaloose Island means place of the dead.
I’m surprised you omitted human composting, as the Oregon legislature just legalized it.