We began exploring choices after burying parents in a cemetery as long as 45 years ago. What became clear is we had no interest in our bodies taking up any real estate or being lowered into the ground and then covered up for eventual decay into dust. A friend who died last year with some awful deterioration decided his body would go to medical research, an especially good choice in his case. We signed on for being organ donors long ago. So, now it is a given that we will both be cremated, what about the ashes? None of the kids want to keep them in an urn on a mantel somewhere so our choice, at the moment, is for the ashes to be scattered to some place that had meaning while we were alive and while we are still conscious and alive, we can make those suggestions to those left behind to honor those wishes.
I just want to say that you wont really know how you feel until you hold the ashes. They are heavy and comforting. I was surprised at how much I loved having the weight of him at home.
When my husband died just before lockdown he had decided to donate his body to the hospital for research. And that happened just before the world stopped. In the two-three years it took to get the ashes back the research place would only reply that the body was in the freezer and there were no classes and couldn't say when he would be returned. It was a strange thing to have my husband in suspended animation, but I started to like the fact that he was somewhere. Just when I got so weary from waiting that I thought I might ask for him back - why not? - they informed me that he would be available for pick up from the funeral home in a box. They didn't tell me that I could go, just that it was already happening or happened. Why can they not let loved ones into the process? I would have like to be there, actually.
So many thoughts swirl around my mind as I read this provocative piece! First, remembering the fruitless search my sister and I did for the gravesite of our grandmother...we were not a tight family. But, deeper still, came the realization that the commodification and invisibility of death in our culture had robbed me of the experience of continued connection with"my dead". I had bought into the idea that when we die we are gone. Now I experience daily that only the body dies, love doesn't die. I love that you, Caroline, balance attention on the important work to be done before one dies to ease the transition for those "left behind", the politics of death, and one's one need to embrace the reality of our impermanence to have a "good death", THANK YOU!
What an excellent topic! There are many of us curious old folks out here who may have studied the same trajectory. I started checking out options a few years ago but I found one interesting restriction. I thought donating my body to Yale was the answer until I learned that you had to die in Connecticut for them to take you. What if I were across the very near Rhode Island line when I succumbed? Thank you for reminding me to continue my quest.
We began exploring choices after burying parents in a cemetery as long as 45 years ago. What became clear is we had no interest in our bodies taking up any real estate or being lowered into the ground and then covered up for eventual decay into dust. A friend who died last year with some awful deterioration decided his body would go to medical research, an especially good choice in his case. We signed on for being organ donors long ago. So, now it is a given that we will both be cremated, what about the ashes? None of the kids want to keep them in an urn on a mantel somewhere so our choice, at the moment, is for the ashes to be scattered to some place that had meaning while we were alive and while we are still conscious and alive, we can make those suggestions to those left behind to honor those wishes.
I just want to say that you wont really know how you feel until you hold the ashes. They are heavy and comforting. I was surprised at how much I loved having the weight of him at home.
When my husband died just before lockdown he had decided to donate his body to the hospital for research. And that happened just before the world stopped. In the two-three years it took to get the ashes back the research place would only reply that the body was in the freezer and there were no classes and couldn't say when he would be returned. It was a strange thing to have my husband in suspended animation, but I started to like the fact that he was somewhere. Just when I got so weary from waiting that I thought I might ask for him back - why not? - they informed me that he would be available for pick up from the funeral home in a box. They didn't tell me that I could go, just that it was already happening or happened. Why can they not let loved ones into the process? I would have like to be there, actually.
So many thoughts swirl around my mind as I read this provocative piece! First, remembering the fruitless search my sister and I did for the gravesite of our grandmother...we were not a tight family. But, deeper still, came the realization that the commodification and invisibility of death in our culture had robbed me of the experience of continued connection with"my dead". I had bought into the idea that when we die we are gone. Now I experience daily that only the body dies, love doesn't die. I love that you, Caroline, balance attention on the important work to be done before one dies to ease the transition for those "left behind", the politics of death, and one's one need to embrace the reality of our impermanence to have a "good death", THANK YOU!
What an excellent topic! There are many of us curious old folks out here who may have studied the same trajectory. I started checking out options a few years ago but I found one interesting restriction. I thought donating my body to Yale was the answer until I learned that you had to die in Connecticut for them to take you. What if I were across the very near Rhode Island line when I succumbed? Thank you for reminding me to continue my quest.