If you don't fancy a firework display, what about being turned into a paperweight? Might as well make yourself useful when you're dead.
Tom Sutcliffe wrote about this sort of thing in The Independent, and how his dog almost peed on a pile of ashes - not quite the dignified ending the family might have wanted. At least a paperweight might not get peed on, unless you carelessly leave it in the loo.
A few years ago, a retired RAF officer told me how a former colleague had requested that his ashes should be scattered from a light aircraft. It proved to be difficult to fulfil his request, as the ashes blew back into the cockpit as fast as they were thrown out. Some were swept up with a dustpan and brush after landing; he didn't say what they did with them.
A lot of people choose to have their ashes scattered in places that had special significance for them - on the top of hills, on football pitches, and so on. So many people are doing it these days that it's become a pollution problem and the government had to bring in new anti-pollution rules. Surely the ashes firework displays might be in breach of these rules, as they can't control where the ashes will land?Carelessly throwing ashes around is as anti-social as littering, it seems to me, and not nearly as "tasteful" and romantic as many people might imagine.
Update, September 2018
I've been given a small container with some relative's cremains. The rest have been distributed among other family members and in places my relative enjoyed visiting. I didn't ask for them and didn't want them. I think the idea was that they should go in my garden somewhere. When I'm dead no one in the family will have access, since I'm a tenant, so that'll be that. Meanwhile, they sit on a bookshelf. To prove how illogical I am, a box of my last dog's cremains are nearby, to be inherited by my next of kin. Can you imagine them being passed along after my demise? Well, they won't be my problem, will they?
Oh, and I've just learned that it's now possible to have ashes sent into space.
6 comments:
I had a conversation with some people around the pizza counter. We all had stored our parents' ashes in mundane places. The tool shelf, the linen closet, behind the television.
What surprised me was the amount of ashes and their heft.
It ought to be a sprightly little parlour game, to dream up the most outré things to do with ashes (or even pulverised bone). But the entrepreneurs have already left parody for dead.
My own favourite story is that of the aristocrat who had his ashes fired from a cannon on the battlements of his Welsh castle, which overlooked a broad estuary. There was a terrific bang and a great puff of smoke. As the onlookers applauded the encased remains smashed through the rigging of a yacht below, almost killing a crew member.
It would have made interesting evidence at the yachtsman's inquest.
According to Wikipedia,
"The mean weight of adult cremated remains in a Florida, U.S. sample was 5.3 lb (approx. 2.4 kg) for adults (range 2 to 8 lb or 0.91 to 3.6 kg). This was found to be distributed bimodally according to sex, with the mean being 6 pounds (2.7 kg) for men (range 4 to 8 lb or 1.8 to 3.6 kg) and 4 pounds (1.8 kg) for women (range 2 to 6 lb or 0.91 to 2.7 kg). In this sample, generally all adult cremated remains over 6 pounds (2.7 kg) were from males, and those under 4 pounds (1.8 kg) were from females."
As Charles points out, they're mainly pulverised bone.
In our local crematorium they have a box full of spare parts - metal plates and rods from orthopaedic surgery mainly - that have been removed before pulverisation. Must ask if they get them recycled.
People like to talk of cycles of life, which I have never understood. It seems to me that we flat-line until we hit the buffers; that what goes around (if you're cyclically minded)doesn't come around (unless you fall for supernatural recycling theories). No, it's alpha to omega, with as many letters of the alphabet in between as we're lucky enough to get. It's omega, pht.
For all that, I enjoy the coincidental equivalence of our birthweight to our deathweight (as bone dust).
Hadn't considered the birth weight/death weight thing. As you say, interesting...
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