My Personal Aversion To Cremation!

I learned last night, June 18, 2019, of the death of a friend I have known for fifty years.  He was seventy, had never married, and was found unresponsive in his apartment on Sunday, June 16, 2019.  He was the third friend I had known since 1968 who has died in the last eight years.  All three had never married, had productive work lives, and were cremated, given quiet memorial services by their closest relatives, and slipped from the world with little to no fanfare. All three were cremated and their ashes disposed of in some manner which was acceptable either to themselves or their families.  All three had siblings who were more than capable of having paid for a more customary funeral.  Two of the three had been raised in Eastern Kentucky under some level of influence  from the conservative Old Regular Baptist Church.  The third had spent two or three years in Eastern Kentucky as a college student and still maintained numerous serious relationships with native Eastern Kentuckians.  Two of the three were native Appalachians.  The third had been influenced by the time he had spent in one of the most traditionally Appalachian counties in Kentucky.  I must admit that I do not know that any of them had or had not expressed a desire to be cremated.  But I do know that all of them had grown up in families where traditional earthen burials were the norm.  In fact, one of these three had a sibling die within this week who was buried in a traditional manner in the same cemetery which their parents and another sibling are buried. 

 I realize that cremation and some wide range of options for disposal of ashes has become very prevalent all across Appalachia.  But I was about forty years old before any of my relatives were ever cremated.  I have been deeply influenced by the mores, traditions, and spiritual beliefs of the dominant Appalachian Culture in which I have spent most of my life.  I admit that I am not particularly religious although I do claim a degree of spirituality.  My personal aversion to cremation lies quite simply in my personal belief that it is barbaric.  I can think of no more appropriate word to use to describe cremation than barbarism.  I have no belief in particular that anyone will be resurrected from the grave prepared to use the earthly body which they occupied during their lifetime.   I have personally participated in the funeral arrangements for my mother-in-law whom I dearly love and will always miss.  She had expressed a desire to be cremated and to have her ashes scattered into the Sheboygan River at Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, at a riverside park where she often took my wife and her siblings on the weekends.  The memorial service was conducted in a funeral home where several members of my wife's extended family have been served in their passing from the world.  At my mother-in-law's memorial service a sizeable crowd was present and the immediate family then left the funeral home with her ashes for a private family ceremony at that park.  We took the ashes in their cardboard box and the several dozen yellow roses which had been provided at the memorial service to the park.  After a minimal number of small, indistinguishable remarks, we passed the ashes in their box from hand to hand and each of us scattered a few ashes and a rose or two into the river and watched the ashes sink out of sight as the roses floated down the stream out of sight.  While a few of you readers will probably say something such as "what a lovely ceremony", I am still of the same opinion with which I grew up: "Cremation is barbaric!"