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Called up yonder
10 comments
K. and I are thinking of you, Looby. And well done with that oration: it’s a lovely vignette of the man.
a nice remembrance for your father - i can see that it was heart-felt, and that you didn’t lie.
Cremation ceremony? In the UK you ATTEND the BURNING of the CORPSE?!?!? That is an alien concept - here we let the workers at the crematorium handle the messy bits, and we are handed an urn full of dust that we are told used to be our beloved. It could be from the janitors ashtray for all we know, but we are not invited to the actual torching of the body!
Had you spoken of your dad’s crisis before? I don’t recall and it’s certainly something I’d remember. The spirit is strong but the flesh is even stronger. That’s how it’s always been and always will be.
I didn’t attend my dad’s funeral. I wonder what people said about him? I’ll have to ask my sister.
Does cremation lessen a love for someone? How is throwing them in the ground and pouring dirt over them any different? Seems the practical way to dispose of a dead body to me. It’s what we did to my mom and what’ll be done to me. Scatter my ashes in Manhattan.
I had to Google CAMRA. A cause I can support!
DF: No, sorry perhaps I didn’t make it clear. They’re in the coffin while you do all the hymns and so on and then they get moved beyond a curtain to be burned (silently, probably later, when you’re not about). Then like you, we get the ashes (which as you say you, could be anyone’s) I find it a revolting and violent custom, and regret the fact that it has become inexplicably popular since WWII.
Exile: Yes, I’ve mentioned my Dad’s decline before, in the entries called untuned and Yea though I walk through the valley of disco for two.
Burial is gentle, respectful and much more environmentally friendly. As it says on the website of the place where I’ll end up, Cremation “pollutes the atmosphere with hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide, mercury and dioxins, which even in very low concentrations can cause cancer and other illnesses.”
Have a look at their website and tell me that is not a lovelier and more harmonious place to end up that an oven.
In the earth, you will be eaten by little insects and simple animals, which in turn will be eaten by others to form their mouths and wings, and you will literally have eternal life, in all sorts of other animals’ bodies.
Isn’t one of them Robert Plant on the weekends too? This is why the Led Zep reunion isn’t on he is being 3 people at once.
Hmm… a friend of mine had a green woodland burial. However for me - I remember watching some timeteam or something where they dug up a bunch of graves, in one of them the skeleton was all hunched up and on the underside of the coffin lid there were marks clearly indicating that this one had been buried alive. The archaeologist made some comment that this isn’t that unusual. So… given a two floor journey in a lift can give me the willies since then I’ve made it abundantly clear - burn me!
But that was donkey’s years ago, and it is infinitesimally unlikely to happen today. If you’re worried about that you should reject cremation on the grounds that the oven will conk out and leave you half burnt.
Furtheron - some Victorians used to be buried with a little bell in the hope of someone hearing them if they were buried alive. Others used to stipulate that an artery was cut beforehand.
Personally I’d wake up underground than in an oven any day, but as L says it’s really not going to happen these days.
You know, there is a company in the suburbs of Chicago that will take the ashes and compress them into diamonds for you…
The ways firms earn money nowadays! Who thought of, and sold that, I wonder.
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