I like cemeteries and have always found them peaceful. I’d be happy with whatever my survivors want. My preference is to have cremation and scatter my ashes in the ocean, but if folks want to bury me and it gives them more closure and peace, I’m fine with that or whatever else they want. I will be past caring. H wants to be buried while and bought us 4 expensive burial plots–his, mine and each of our 2 adult kids. It’s the same cemetery where his folks and sister are buried.
Thanks @m0minmd It was. If it was all in my mind, it makes no difference. What mattered was what I felt, and that was real. I sat down on the bluffs, watched the sun set, and had a nice chat.
I find the idea of my body being buried somewhere or my ashes being carried around . . . . unsettling, but that’s just me and I understand everyone is different. My mother wants to be cremated and have her ashes spread in this little garden of a tiny church she loves (but has never attended) and no memorial service of any kind. My father wants to be buried and for everyone to have a huge party after. If you look up “opposites attract,” there’s probably a picture of them there.
Not sure if anyone has seen the old cult classic film Harold and Maude, but there’s a scene where Harold gives her a gift (an engraved ring, I think) and within seconds she throws it in the ocean. Harold looks shocked, and she says “so I’ll always know where to find it.” Loved that scene.
I like the idea of giving people an excuse to go on vacation. Want to visit me after I’m gone? Take a cruise. 
My mother kept my father’s ashes in their box in her storage unit for nineteen years before she decided to bury them. She wanted a joint headstone with both their names on it, so she went ahead and ordered it. Birth years, death years, for both of them. As she said “I took a guess, so what if it’s wrong?” That was 1999 and she gave her death year as 2003. Damned if she wasn’t right. (I’ve always wondered what people thought when they saw the headstone during those four years.) She didn’t want her estate to spend money on burying her ashes, though, so she told us to scatter some of them on top of the plot and the rest in the ocean off Florida. Me? I want to be scattered from the top of Moana Loa or possibly above the Marianas Trench. I can’t decide if I want to explore the bottom of the ocean or just travel the world.
I have had the opportunity to “decide” what to do with family members ashes (agree, I don’t like the word cremains) over the past few years. My brother, my mother and my dog. My brother was very young, very ill and did not want any part of the conversation. We scattered his ashes in the ocean and it was lovely but a little messy (what do you do with the container(s) from the crematorium?) But every time I put a toe in the Atlantic Ocean, I smile and know exactly where he is. My dog could not voice any opinion, but we buried his ashes in our backyard, in his favorite spot to bask in the sun. We called it Pride Rock (as he would sit like Simba) and while I know we will move someday, it will always be the place our anxious rescue dog felt safe so it is perfect. My mom would not discuss it at all (though she put in her will she wanted to be cremated). Things have changed since my brother died 9 years ago and there were many more options. We found a biodegradable urn made of cotton made for a water burial. She is now in one of her favorite places in the world. I have told my family that is what I want.
I’ve never heard of a biodegradable cotton urn, but that sounds lovely for a water burial. They also use ashes to make concrete balls to be part of reefs for fish in the ocean for folks who are interested in that. It would be less messy. Some of the folks who survived 12/7/1941 have asked to be interred with their shipmates on the Arizona or Missouri when they die and their requests are honored and there is a solemn ceremony at the Arizona Memorial when this happens.
If they can make me into a baseball for the kids of the family to play catch with, I’m good. Otherwise, the ashes can go with the wind off some mountain.
My brother, father and mother died within a few months of each other about four years ago. They were each cremated. My dad’s ashes sat on the shelf behind his favorite chair the whole time their house was on the market. The following summer we buried my parents’ ashes in the plot they had purchased many years before but the cemetery would not allow us to include my brother’s ashes. He went back home with my other brother and remains there. Someday we’ll take him back to the mountains of New Hampshire or Colorado.
When family problems develop for one of my friends, she always says “Dad must be rolling over in the cabinet over this” , since Dad isn’t in a grave where he could be said to be rolling over, or interred or scattered or anything, just sitting on the top shelf behind the things that actually get used. She would love to see his ashes settled somewhere. Sibs can’t agree.
I’ve made it very clear to my family that I want to be mummified and kept on display in perpetuity, like Lenin.
Or like all those popes at the Vatican. I remember visiting as a kid and THAT was quite an educating eyeful. My siblings and I still talk about Poor Petrified Pope Pius.
I have a friend (a little nutty) whose mother loved golf. The mother died a couple of years ago and was cremated. My friend and her brother snuck onto the golf course late one night with the ashes and a rake. They scattered the ashes over a sand trap and raked them in. :-O. My friend and her brother are in their 60s – not a couple of crazy kids. Honestly, I thought she was kidding when she told me this. I’m not so sure her mother would have approved, either.
Why do I have an urge to watch “The Big Lebowski”?
I assume that there are many sets of ashes secretly deposited on Wrigley Field, Lambeau Field, Soldier Field, Pebble Beach, Augusta, and other places where sports fans have spent many hours watching their favorites compete. I like the biodegradable urn for ocean burials. Until she updates her will, I am in charge of my sister’s ashes when the time comes. If her kids can’t agree on a place for her ashes she has told me where in the ocean they should go.
When my mom died last year, it was the first time that my kids had to go through a death in the family. Mom had always wanted to be cremated and her ashes spread in the Pacific ocean, so we did just that in July this year. We hired a company that had a 60 foot catamaran and we went out under sail. While we were sailing, we told stories of mom, of her childhood, of what she was like as a person. It was more a celebration of her life than her death.
Mom wanted some of her ashes put in a little teapot because she loved tea, but she never found the one she wanted to use. Before she died and when my brother and sister was visiting, we went to the funeral home and made the arrangements. The funeral home had a brochure from a company that would take about 1/4 teaspoon of the ashes and blow them into a glass ball (orb). So we had 6 orbs made so we could have mom with us and on display. I have mom as my profile picture.
Here is the website for anyone interested.
https://www.crescentmemorial.com/Product/List/18
I’m not interested in genealogy, but in case someone in my future generation looks for our family, we had a little of mom sent to the veteran’s cemetery to be placed with my Dad.
My daughter and I have talked about mom’s death, what it means and how to grieve. I told her and believe, that you don’t need a cemetery to visit your dead family. You just need to be able to remember them and the feelings that you have (had) for them will keep them alive in your heart. For me, a cemetery doesn’t have the same effect- it’s not a place that has memories of my mom (or dad)- their true selves. That is within me.
It just occurred to me that maybe the reason this appealed so much to me is that my father loved and collected paperweights and this looked very similar to one he had. I guess I think of it sort of like how people buy a little angel or some other remembrance.
I had Mom sitting on my desk at work for a few days… I had told a coworker what we had done and she wanted to see the orb. Several people that stopped at my desk loved it, thought it was a paperweight. When I told them it was mom, they said that they weren’t as weirded out as they thought they would be.
The letter linked in #15 protesting the use of the word “cremains” is actually quite funny.
Doschicos, DH specialized in church and state history and I’ve been with him to see more crypts, memorials, petrified thyroids, teeny bone slivers, big leg bones and you name it. Interesting, actually. But not for everyone.
I do know widows who actually wear the necklaces with the ashes. And plenty of widows and widowers who go to the cemetery weekly (part of some bereavement work I do.) When it’s my time to rejoin the unseen universe, I’ll be happy if they just return me- spread my ashes in a place we all loved. Then remember me fondly.
Someone recently spread what they think were ashes, at the Metropoitan Opera. I get it. But ewww.
Everyone should clear up this detail in their wills - I’m left to decipher what exactly their wishes would be, wish I had asked.
I have promised to come back from the grave and haunt my family if they allow people to come gawk at my dead body. I can’t stand the thought of it! I want be cremated and have my asher strewn around a nice outlet mall :-).
Seriously, my hobby/therapy is glass art and it’s fairly common for people to have glass cabochons fused with some pet or loved one’s ashes. It creeps me out, but to each his own!
I have a small collection of 18th century portrait miniatures that are housed in lockets with glass on both sides, with the painted portrait on one side and a lock of the subject’s hair on the opposite side (under glass). I like that idea better as a way to preserve a part of your loved one than incorporating ashes into a glass object. But then again, having a bodily relic isn’t something that would be comforting to me personally, though I understand why other people feel differently.