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I'm keeping my backhoe around just to expedite this procedure. (I don't really want to do the Native American 'stand' thing, just in case I am not totally dead.)
We discussed this and we decided we will be cremated, one will hold the ashes of the other and when they go we will have them blended. The kids get the choice of blending them with concrete to make whimsical garden statuary for their property or they can scattered them as they see fit.
I've told my son if I go first he is to assure my ashes are not to be kept on the fireplace mantle by the ashes of my wife's favorite dog for 20 years
You see too many stories of small cemeteries in neglect or even active ones reusing plots or the highrises for the dead being made of shoddy materials deteriorating. Who would visit our graves when we are gone after 20-30 years, our kids who have to move all over the country changing their careers, my grandchildren when they are 60?
In 100 years when a freeway interchange needs to be constructed it will get moved and the marker possibly placed on someones grave but not necessarily ours. I understand some people wanting this. For us personally, the expense is not worth it though I can see the funeral industry jacking prices on cremations as the traditional funeral business drops away.
I remember a poem from high school, "Thanatopsis," a line something like "the roots of the oak pierce your mouldering body," and liked it very much, being nature-inclined and environmental and all.
For the few people I've lost (to old age/illness) who have ashes buried with a headstone, I find nothing about visiting the headstone. I did visit my father's at his request, to make sure the V.A. spelled his name right and that there was a Jewish star next to his "World War II", as he wanted his stone to show "that Jews fought back." One visit was moving and appropriate.
Otherwise, the whole funeral and/or headstone thing is very unnecessary to me.
I remember a poem from high school, "Thanatopsis," a line something like "the roots of the oak pierce your mouldering body," and liked it very much, being nature-inclined and environmental and all.
For the few people I've lost (to old age/illness) who have ashes buried with a headstone, I find nothing about visiting the headstone. I did visit my father's at his request, to make sure the V.A. spelled his name right and that there was a Jewish star next to his "World War II", as he wanted his stone to show "that Jews fought back." One visit was moving and appropriate.
Otherwise, the whole funeral and/or headstone thing is very unnecessary to me.
I loved that poem---Thanatopsis! Thanks for the reminder. Maybe that influenced me too, 'cause I don't care at all about the abandoned body.
Take it out to sea and dump it so I can sleep with the fishes.
Cremation and scattered on a lake I spent summers on growing up. Simple and no fuss. The funeral/burial industry is super-creepy and expensive and the religious aspects turn me off.
Before DH died we agreed on cremation. In-ground burial just seemed insanely expensive, and why use embalming and cement vaults to "protect" a body you no longer needed? We also agreed that I'd scatter bits of his ashes in various parts of the world- some we'd visited and loved, some I've visited for the first time since his death. So far bits of his ashes are in 8 countries plus the USA. (Curious? Panama, Costa Rica, India, Nepal, Scotland, France, Iceland and Mexico plus USA.) DS knows that when I die I want my ashes mixed with whatever is left of his and they can do what they want, including leaving them out in a Hefty bag.
I don't consider cremation very "green", though. In India they pile 300 lbs, of wood on a pyre, add the body, pile on another 300 lbs. of wood and light it. Even though I'm sure we use natural gas or electricity in the US, that's a heck of a lot of power.
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