<p>Please dispose of me in the cheapest way possible. I recommend cremation and flushing the ashes down the toilet, and if that is not legal, then take them to the dump. Of course, once I am dead you can do what you want with my remains. I won’t care. </p>
<p>Veterans and their spouses are usually eligible for burial (casket or urn) in a national cemetery at no cost, and the spouse’s (or dependent child’s) name will be added to the reverse side of the headstone. So in some cases burial of cremains saves the family money and decisions. Nobody has to decide what to do with Aunt Agnes’ ashes, they can go rest with Uncle Joseph’s remains. </p>
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<p>I’ve pondered this whole question, and sometimes I wonder about people who ask that their ashes be spread in certain places, especially if their requests require their survivors to go through any hardship to honor these wishes. I wonder if they really think they will benefit from having their ashes spread in a certain place. I get that it might have appeal as an abstract thought, but actually requiring loved ones to do this seems odd, as though they actually think they will be able to enjoy the new location.</p>
<p>I guess any kind of request could be seen in the same way. If you are squeamish about cremation and desire your family to spend lots of $$ to buy a casket and traditional funeral, this could be viewed in the same way I suppose.</p>
<p>Whether you believe that all consciousness ends with death, or you believe you will go on to another plane of existence, it’s all the same as it relates to your remains: you won’t care.</p>
<p>I want to be cremated and have my ashes scattered high in the Sierra in a beautiful meadow. My feeling is that I want my kids to ‘visit’ me in a place I loved, a wonderful place that speaks to the meaning of eternity. Cemeteries are such sad, creepy places. I don’t want my kids to think of me in one.</p>
<p>When I said I like the idea of my resting place being in this particular forest, I meant just that. Not that I think that it will really offer me anything. It’s just my idea of heaven (and I don’t believe in another one). But, it’s under a 30 minute drive from relatives…so not a hardship. </p>
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<p>That makes sense to me. In this way, it’s really about comfort for the survivors. I like that.</p>
<p>My beloved grandfather wanted his ashes spread into a certain bay. Grandma wanted to join him, so when she passed later, my Dad and his siblings did this for them. I think it made the kids happy to do it.</p>
<p>I wonder, and if anyone has experience with this I’d love to hear it, if you feel you’ve “visited” when you then go to that ocean/bay etc. </p>
<p>My dad made arrangements for his body to be donated to a medical school. When I contacted them when he was in hospice in the hospital in April, they took care of removing his body from the hospital and preparing the death certificate. They Fedexed me his wedding ring which is from his marriage to my mother in 1946. When they are done with his remains, they will cremate them and send the ashes to me.</p>
<p>My mother died in 1983. When my dad remarried a couple of years later, he and his second wife agreed that they would be buried next to their first spouses.</p>
<p>My dad told me to go to the cemetery with his ashes, bury them in my mother’s grave, and then plant something pretty on top and re-do the footstone. Okay, at least I know what he wanted! We once planted flowers on my mother’s grave several years ago so I think the plan is do-able. My brothers think it’s just because he was too cheap to be buried by himself. Maybe, but whatever. The website for the medical school (Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NYC) says that it will be 2 to 3 years!</p>
<p>I have an aunt whose husband died almost 2 years ago. His wishes were to be cremated with his ashes scattered in the Long Island Sound. He had a boat that he loved to sail there. The boat was not in the water when he died and it would have been very expensive to launch it just to scatter his ashes. A friend found a buyer for the boat right away and it was sold. Her children live 2.5 hours away and so far, they have not managed to assemble to borrow a boat and scatter my uncle’s ashes. My aunt is selling her house now and moving to be closer to her children, and she does not want to move with the urn. (The urn is built to melt away in the water but looks like any other urn.) If it’s still not resolved by the time she sells her house and is ready to move (she already bought a condo near her kids), I will offer to go with her on the Long Island Sound ferry boat between CT and LI just to get the man into the water already!</p>
<p>My husband has a cousin who refused to pay to “open the grave” for the ashes. She went one morning when there was a funeral and the grave diggers were sitting in the distance waiting for the servicel to finish. She took a small shovel from her trunk and worked at the turf and buried the ashes!</p>
<p>Yikes. The last thing you want is to feel like the non-essential dry cleaning riding around for months in the trunk of the car until someone remembers/gets around to it. </p>
<p>Just as my name say, I am the old mom of an 18-year-old (adopted) and it’s just her and me; we are 48 years apart in age. I worry about burdening her with my old age and death when she is still a young adult–I hope not but you never know, right? I told her that if she wants to cremate me and bury me in the grave with my parents, that would be fine, but that she is welcome to do something else if it makes it easier for her. I really don’t care. But I must say that knowing about my father’s exact wishes made it much easier at a very difficult time when he passed away. Once I am finished with taking care of his estate, for sure I will discuss it with her a bit, and have the attorney write something up so she can refer to it when the time comes.</p>
<p>Everyone, please make sure you have a living will! It is a terrible time to have to guess about someone’s wishes, or, worse, to have to convince someone in a hospital of these wishes. I made sure that a copy of my dad’s living will was in his hospital chart and that really, really helped. The hospital was happy to comply with what he wanted.</p>
<p>About half of the many funerals I’ve conducted have been for people who were cremated, and I’d say that about 90% of the people who were cremated were cremated before the service. The 10% that weren’t struck me as odd - why pay for embalming and/or a casket if you are going to be cremated - especially the one gorgeous mahogany casket I remember, that was such a waste of beautiful, expensive, wood.</p>
<p>Most of the cremated folk were buried, although my one member says good morning every day to his partner of 65 years, whose ashes are stored in a beautiful urn, waiting so that they can be buried together. The main reasons for cremating before burial that I’ve heard are: not wanting to envision one’s own or a loved one rotting in the ground (I’ve attended disinternment procedures and they are not pleasant), wanting to be buried with a loved one (often buried on top of someone’s casket), cremation for saving considerable money by not embalming and paying to purchase/rent a casket and paying for a much smaller hole to be dug, and delaying the time between death and burial - that was frequent when I lived in a part of WI where winter burials were not possible, and I have a memorial service/burial of cremains scheduled for mid-July for someone who died out of state yesterday, and whose family can not all gather here until then.</p>
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<p>My mother was cremated after her service because we could not get permission from the powers that be to do so before the service. But we did not pay for embalming or a casket; we just proceeded with the service anyway. Her remains stayed at the funeral home in their holding room until they got the go ahead. It took almost 3 weeks to get the necessary permits for the cremation. To this day, I don’t understand what the hold up was.</p>
<p>My Dad didn’t have any special requests - except to be an organ donor, but his health was too poor for donations by the time he died. He was cremated. We had a lovely party where we celebrated his life and everyone wore either his favorite Hawaiian shirts or similar things out of our own wardrobes. My mother thought for a long time before deciding what to do with the ashes, but in the end we decided to take them to our cabin in Vermont and throw them in the brook near his favorite place to read. It was about a year after he passed away that we actually all got organized and up to Vermont together. We said a few words, one of my sister-in-laws sang. It was very cathartic. And I’m not a very spiritual person so I have noticed nothing. </p>
<p>Ecmotherx2- My dad did about the same thing. He went over at night and buried my grandmother’s urn in the plot with my grandfather. Now, when my parents died (8 mos. apart), neither of them wanted any big show. We had them both cremated. Since dad died first, the funeral home kept his urn for us at no cost. The urn, by the way, cost a whoppin $35. Later, we added my mother’s ashes to his. Cremation ran about $2500 when all was done. I know a funeral would have been a lot more. We did have a memorial service but without the urn. Later on, we scattered ashes in several locations that had meaning for all involved. </p>
<p>MIL’s church has a lovely rose garden into which ashes may be interred. That’s what both FIL & MIL wanted; we didn’t even buy urns. (The church didn’t want urns.) We did make a donation to the church, and their names were added to a plaque on the wall adjacent to the rose garden. </p>
<p>My uncle’s ashes were just interred in a mausoleum at the community cemetery – I think it was about $2000 for the spot and the charges to open/close it, plus some small amount for the engraving on the door. Much, much less expensive than the burial plots for my parents and grandparents in the same cemetery. </p>
<p>I plan to be cremated, and have told my kids to sprinkle my ashes someplace (or places) they think I would like. Don’t want them to feel obligated to travel someplace special that I have picked (heck, I won’t care!). I did tell 'em to be careful if they sprinkle some in the ocean, if the wind is blowing inland the ashes will come back into their faces. My beloved aunt (brilliant college professor, horrible descent into Alzheimers over the past several years) died last year. She is sprinkled several places. After her memorial service, we went to a local lake where she loved to swim and sprinkled some. Some are at their upstate New York vacation spot. And my dad has some in her original hometown that will be buried in their family plot by her parents. So I guess cremation can give you multiple choices. :)</p>
<p>My family knows that my long term desire is to be cremated. I mentioned this to the attorney who prepared my will and other legal documents and he advised me to make sure that my family knows my wishes. I have also done it in writing so none will forget. As for what to do with the ashes, I have spent enough time on cruise critic website to be familiar with the fact that cruise lines allow scattering at sea. Arrangements just have to be made after booking a cruise and the captain will inform the family member on the day and time and a small ceremony is held before dispersing the ashes. So since my favorite vacation is cruising and one of my children is also hooked on the same, the ocean will be my final resting area. And of course, the money saved by not having a burial can be spent more wisely instead of enriching a funeral home.</p>
<p>One reason we chose cremation for my father was so that the college-age grandchildren would have a chance to pay their final respects. He passed away last fall when the kids were in the throes of midterms, and we decided that disrupting their schooling to fly across the country wouldn’t be much of a tribute to Granddad. We had a memorial service at the time, and laid him to rest months later when everyone could be there. Cremation gave us the chance to all be together for a final goodbye.</p>
<p>My mom was cremated and is at home with Dad. She didn’t want to be inurned by herself, so when Dad passes, they will go to a columbarium together. </p>
<p>My nephew was cremated and is still at home with my sister. She is not ready to let him go.</p>