cremation costs

Just found a place which will pick up the body, burn it, urn it, and do the paperwork for seven hundred bucks. I have had people ask where I want my ashes spread. Well the wife is going to put some in one of our porta potties and probably spread the rest over the islands.

People cringe when she talks about a pinch in the portable toilet. An entire industry has been created by suggesting that each person should follow this cookie cut death ritual which involves buying expensive things to protect a dead body and buying stones with writing on them. I only visit my parents grave site if somebody else is being buried. Who walks through a graveyard trying to learn more about those who died. Yet, the beauty and majesty of nature is the highest memorial for those who lived before. I am not too happy about that blue dye in the porta potty, but heck, I may be a drummer in the blueman group in the next life.

I want my ashes to be kept by each of my kids. I want to be in an urn over the fireplace so I can be in the middle of everything.

That is a cool place. Ten years ago I would go to funerals and few were getting cremated. I would say it is about sixty percent now. When I walked the family plot in Birmingham, I remembered as a kid running around on visits and looking at the oldest grave markers. I took my granddaughters over to the marker which had a photograph I would look at as a kid. We did not know those people, but we were probably the only visitors in fifty years. Burial grounds are barbaric. Cremation is a natural process of becoming one with the earth again.

I have sat with funeral directors who played on family's love for the deceased to upsize everything as if the same is a measure of love. It is a con. People should be efficiently processed so not to take up valuable space and freed of barbaric ideas of how one enters heaven. It is not being buried with only people of your faith, and it is not about having the most deference to religion on your headstone.

I've said it here before... but I want to be mixed with concrete and molded into a fish habitat.

My mom wants to be a bird bath. We've taken my father's ashes to his favorite places.