Ashes To Ashes

 "She just dumped your grandmother beside the road!" My grandfather was indignant.  He wasn't talking about a hurried stop at the supermarket or the aftermath of a homicide, but was shocked by how casually my mother had disposed of his wife's ashes.  Grandma had requested that her ashes be scattered in a place where she could see Copper Island on Shuswap Lake, as for the previous 30 years, their lakeside home had a view of the island.  For a year, the urn with grandma's ashes had been resting on the top shelf of the hall closet, and grandpa wasn't getting younger or healthier, so my mother bullied him into accompanying her to do the deed.  He was reluctant to surrender the ashes, but his traditional Presbyterian upbringing wouldn't allow him to shirk his duty.  It was early Spring, and the snow hadn't quite melted.  My mother had no intention of scrambling to the bottom of the embankment to cast the pixie dust over the pristine frozen field, so while she struggled to extract the remains from the urn, her father got out of the car above to bear witness and saw her shake out the ashes onto the snowbank.  My grandmother had chosen cremation because she was afraid of being buried alive in a coffin.  The law states there must be at least a 48-hour waiting period between a death and the cremation.
 
Many people don't know what the law is for scattering ashes, but in Canada, there are no federal laws restricting the practice of scattering ashes on Crown Land or on oceans, while National Parks have rules about distances from trails and water.  Ashes can be distributed on private property with the owner's permission.  Some people choose favourite or scenic spots to have their ashes distributed, including the choice of multiple locations.  My mother, who hankered to travel, requested her ashes to be scattered off Harling Point below the old Chinese Cemetery in Victoria so she could end up wherever the waves carried her. My father's ashes were spread by the wind on the bare hill behind an old homestead in the British Columbia Interior that, in his later years, he would climb to watch and listen to his children and grandchildren playing in the garden in front of the log house below.

Cremations must be carried out by a licensed professional, such as a funeral director who requires a business license for the crematorium. In my hometown in the 1960s, some Hindu families cremated their relatives on huge pyres on their agricultural land because crematoriums were not equipped to manage ceremonial preferences.  Private cremation is no longer legal, if it ever was.  In official modern cremations, the body is placed in a combustible container, then cremated at high temperatures for two to three hours. After cremation, any metal is removed, and the remaining bone fragments are processed into a fine material, which is then placed in an urn for the family.  This material is mostly the consistency of sand, but some of it is fine white powder, which goes wherever the wind blows it.  Many a family member has come home from an ash scattering wearing part of dear grandma on their shoes, clothes, and hair.  There can also be fragments of bone among the ash that were not crushed to powder in the mix, though what part of the body they came from is not usually identifiable.  Rather than anonymous dust, they are a reminder of the origin of the material.

Cremation is chosen by 80% of people in my province of British Columbia for many reasons.  Burials can cost 4 to 5 times what a simple cremation does, without consideration of the cost of a burial plot, which, if at all available, is very costly.  However, cemetery plots are like real estate, and multiple family burials, either in coffins or urns, can be done in the same plot, using a stacking method.  A friend who recently died requested that the urn with her ashes and those of her recently deceased husband be buried in her parents' plot, above their coffins. Many people prefer burial and a headstone to ash scattering because it creates a place for a family to return to.  Whether what is buried is ashes or a coffin, it is a location to anchor the deceased to the real world, while ash scattering is nebulous and impermanent.  For years, I have been an avid watcher of a UK program called "The Repair Shop", where artisans restore damaged objects to their former glory, and I have noticed many relatives bring in items and say, "That's all we have of them."  Cemeteries can be visited, though some avoid them as they are a real reminder of mortality, while an object like a music box that belonged to a grandmother can be kept in a home and is a tangible, everyday reminder of the person it was attached to in life.  For some, having an object to remember a person by is as powerful as visiting their place of burial. Whether those left behind after a death choose cremation or burial, both are final and remind us that every material in this world will eventually become dust.  Cremation skips all the stages in between and goes directly to the point. 

My sister worked in a city park that had a well-established rose garden, and would see people park their cars and sidle up to the garden like spies, trying to hide an urn under a coat.  Not having investigated the rules and afraid of being denied permission, they want to fulfill a loved one's wishes, but if a city vehicle comes into view, they panic, dump the ashes in a heap and run for their cars like they have been caught ripping up the flowers. The least squeamish of the park employees has to rake the mound of ashes into the soil and extract the metal number tag from the remains, so the roses can profit from the potassium and calcium.  If the family were unobserved, they might take the time to spread the ashes with a scoop, but if there was a blustery wind, the park employees would find the leaves of the roses covered in a fine white dust and would have to put on the sprinklers for a while before working in the garden. 

Cemeteries with bodies buried in them take up valuable land that could be used by the living for habitation and agriculture.  If all of the 110 billion people who have died on earth were laid in the ground, there would be no space left for the living. Chinese immigrants to Canada who died in the 19th century were buried locally, but after 7 years, they were dug up, their bones cleaned, and sent back to their homeland. The old inhabitants of Naples collected the bones of the deceased into catacombs, where time-bleached skulls are stacked on woodpiles of long bones. Europe has many walled cemeteries, with the loculi stacked high as if they were apartment complexes in miniature.  Even modern cities offer niches in a Columbarium, many of them private enterprises that require yearly upkeep fees. In terms of land use, cremation is more ecological because it requires less space, or no space at all if the family chooses to scatter the remains.  Some of the older cemeteries in my hometown had wooden crosses that rotted after fifty years, and the headstones of those who could afford them have been pushed into the corner of the designated land, so the open space where bodies are buried has been turned into a park, a place for the enjoyment of the living.