“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Woody Allen.
I’m not opposed to a bit of macabre fun now and then. In fact, I sorta thrive on it. And lately, for some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about my “mortal remains.” Or, more accurately, “cremains.” There’s a lot to be said for the cost-effectiveness of lighting a flame under my dearly departed rigor-mortised butt, rather than spending $10,000 on a full-on funeral home burial that includes a casket, vault, flowers, obituary notices, acknowledgment cards (Facebook will due just fine), and perhaps a celebratory party (if the goner is Shari Draper--read my way-hot-to-handle novel Beauty and the Boss, written under the name Samantha Stevens--to understand that Hollywood insider’s joke).
From personal experience, I’ve learned that one definitely needs a sense of humor when dealing with ditching the earthly remains of a loved one. Like, what to do with Grandma Joan’s body after she leaves to meet up with Grandpa Larry at the Decay Buffet? It sure can be expensive-o! Don’t be surprised by surprises.
When Aunt Louise came out of the oven and was swept into a plastic bag and delivered back to us in a cardboard box roughly the dimensions of a Harry Potter novel, what we were actually receiving was her pulverized skeleton. Shocked? Yep! And, dear Grandma Wendy’s body and organs vaporized while she was busy baking her buns for an hour and a half—at 1400–2100 F. If I’d been paying attention to NCIS, I’d know that bones don’t burn. So, it’s off to the cremulator, which is a fancy name for a big ol’ pulverizer—think stone grinder that mills wheat or corn into meal. Twenty minutes later, voila! The process is complete, and Grandma was ready to be scooped up, poured into a Ziploc bag, then transferred to an urn or buried in the ground, or scattered hither and yon. Or not.
But are you getting your elegant Auntie Felicity’s cremains or those of Agatha Zinneman, some anonymous ne’er-do-well whom Auntie Felicity would never have invited to her famous candlelight suppers (tip o’ the chapeau to Hyacinth Bucket!). Aunt Felicity was a wee bird of a thing compared to fatso Agatha, whose midnight runs from her bed to the snack stash for a Snickers Bar contributed to her demise. Felicity’s cremains should weigh a lot less than Agatha’s. Check the weight. It’s been said that loved ones have a sixth sense about the right/wrong cremains they’re given by funeral homes or crematoriums.
According to an article I read in USA Today, there’s a huge demand for body parts on the black market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b398NvlDacY. Things such as bones and tendons as well as organs are prized by tissue banks. According to an internet search, the price of a kidney is about $200,000. A liver is $157,000. A heart is even less: $119,000. An analysis of market prices for fresh or Green Giant frozen body parts used for research and education was compiled by Annie Cheney, author of Body Brokers: Inside America’s Underground Trade in Human Remains.
Buy this fascinating book, which every mystery writer should own, and everyone who knows a dead person will find fascinating.
That same USA Today article explains, “[Some] Funeral home employees, crematorium operators and others with access to the recently deceased have secretly dismembered corpses, taking non-organ body parts such as knees, spines, bone and skin without the knowledge or consent of family members.”
Alistair Cooke, the famed British/American journalist and renowned host of Masterpiece Theater for 22 years, was a victim of body snatching. For the grisly stuff, click here: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5066147.
Neat and complete? Well, maybe not so much. Here are a few anecdotes from people who thought, as many of us do, that arguing over the division of the estate is the biggest problem when Mums or Dadums, or your SO’s passport to planet Earth expires.
Jorge worked in the “death care” biz in a retail casket store. He says that funeral homes are a money-grubbing, hit-you-up-for-all-you’re-worth racket. “Funeral homes don’t like to have bereaved families buying caskets and urns from retailers because they make so much money selling coffins at insanely marked-up prices.”
While strong-arming emotionally numb survivors interested in buying less expensive caskets from retailers (or even the funeral home: “Tsk tsk. You want the welfare casket?”), many funeral homes will go out of their way to make the burial or cremation process as difficult as possible.
Recalling one particular incident, Jorge says, “You’ve heard of ‘dead weight.’ This one funeral home I dealt with intentionally damaged a casket from our store out of spite, so we had to personally take the body from the ruined casket and place it in a new one. The funeral home people just stood back and wouldn’t lift a finger to help. So, my boss picked up the dead man’s feet, and I took the upper body, and together we desperately struggled to get this dead weight over to the next casket. All I could think of is that I hoped it wouldn’t rip.”
WHAT? RIP? NOT AS IN, “REST IN PEACE?
Exactly what you’re picturing. Yeah, it happens. “There are two occasions where this could easily occur,” Jorge continues. “In drowning, the body is bloated, and limbs start to disjoint from the muscles because they’re all fluid. The same sort of thing happens with embalming fluid. They take out all the blood and replace it with formaldehyde and methanol, and stuff to preserve the body. That means there are a lot of hollow spaces filled with these fluids. So, we’re lifting the body, but there wasn’t any support in the middle, and I thought it was going to literally rip apart. There was some fluid leakage coming out through the ears and nose, but the guy remained intact.”
[Note from RTJ: A dressed corpse in a casket could be hiding all sorts of stuff the family wouldn’t want to know about. But you’re probably better off not thinking about this or checking. Sorry I brought it up.]
Camille wanted to have her pet cremated. Yeah, pet cremation is big business. She had a frog. Seriously. But it was a special prince of an exotic frog, so I’ll give her the benefit of the sanity doubt.
“It was the size of a dime,” she says of the frog. “After a year and a half, he suddenly passed away. I had him picked up to be cremated, and his remains were to be delivered back to me in a few days. Instead, I got a phone call saying that there was nothing to deliver because he just went up in a puff of smoke and disappeared into thin air—just like the $75.00 I paid for this ‘service.’”
This is where a toilet would have been as good as any other means of disposal. Camille was naturally disappointed but agrees that they could have brought her cigarette ashes as a ruse. Instead, they chose to be honest. However, she also agrees that they should have known in advance that it was possible there would be no remains due to the small size, which would have allowed her to make other arrangements. (I’m seeing that toilet again!)
Jim’s story gives new meaning to the phrase, “From ashes to ashes …” When his dad died, Jim agreed to take the cremains to his home in Alaska, where dear ol’ wanted to be scattered. Procrastinator that he is, Jim stashed the box under his bed—where it stayed until his house burned down.
Tommy (a real duffus) was selected to spread the ashes of his friend and neighbor, Don, from the balcony of the deceased’s home in the Hollywood Hills. It was a lovely spring evening. The invited guests were sufficiently inebriated. Tommh indicated that it was time to do the deed. Gathering on the deck, the lights of Sunset Boulevard twinkling in the distance below, Tommy said a few words in praise of Don’s long life and accomplishments, then he opened the cardboard box, and … instead of the powder wafting away like the Old South in Gone With the Wind, the Ziploc bag fell out of the box and down into the impossible-to-reach canyon 100 feet below. Tommy has a history of grotesque failures. He once caught his own manhood in the zipper of his jeans. [Note from RTJ: Always wear your Calvin Kleins, boys!)
SUGGESTIONS FROM A USA TODAY ARTICLE
• Witness the cremation. If the loved one is to be cremated, more crematoriums today have set up viewing rooms where family members can watch the body be put into the cremation furnace.
• When a loved one dies, family members may agree to donate some or all of the body for research or transplant. The family should ask for and keep a copy of the consent form that was signed. It should include information on what the family agreed to donate.
• Research the funeral home that is chosen, who the owner may be, what their affiliations are. While the request may be legitimate, family members should be cautious if a funeral operator also asks about donating the body.
TRIVIA (Or stuff I didn’t know)
• The so-called “Death Care” industry rakes in $20 billion a year.
• There are 19,000 funeral homes in America.
• Cemeteries number approximately 144,000
• Over eleven hundred crematories are “scattered” about the country.
• Enough embalming fluid is used each year to fill eight Olympic-size swimming pools.
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So, here’s the promised list of some cool places where you can save a bundle as you prep to send your stiff off to the Bone Zone.
Make Your Own Casket
Assembly kits! Fun for the whole family. These folks provide low-cost biodegradable caskets for natural “green” burials and cremations and are perfect for orthodox Jewish burials. Easy assembly, too!
Consider a Cardboard Casket
A simple cardboard casket offers the opportunity for personalization since you can draw or paint on them. Kids (ages 10 and under) love this! https://www.greenfieldcoffins.co.uk/?https%3A%2F%2Fwww_greenfieldcoffins_co_uk&gclid=Cj0KCQjws4aKBhDPARIsAIWH0JWv6KO_cMeuhpvrhLkuzcff4gkxg4PaF-Ud5mhdAkfEuGF3JU-xagUaAmMnEALw_wcB
Natural Burials
Cremation Urns
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