Bindrunes for Transformation

When someone I love dies, I say silent prayers that they be free from pain and the tethers to their physical body. I wish that their spirit and soul- for I have seen all the proof I need to believe they exist as entities of their own- transition into whatever it is that comes next for us, as effortlessly as possible. I wish their souls to be at peace so they do not walk in the waking world. In the moment of loss, I try to be selfless.

How do we grieve? How can we wish our loved ones peace in the wake of their loss? How do we say goodbye in a meaningful manner? I’m the kind of person who needs something tangible. I want to put my hands on the dead body and feel that lack of life. I need to feel that their spirit has moved on. I need that in order to convince my brain there is a reason for the physical emptiness that will come. I like to be hands on. It’s not for everyone.

            In the last three years we have had to put two dying cats to sleep, both of whom were young enough that the moment left us unprepared. We stepped up and did what needed to be done, but afterwards the grief left me wanting for more, for a ritual to help me process through the transformation as well.

I like symbolism and the magical intention of it works for me. I use runes in a lot of my healing work, not for divinatory purposes, but for the magical focus of their linguistic meaning, and the emotional translation. I understand the energetic connection between their forms, how one shapeshifts into another, and their origin stories.

I took that knowledge into the woods. Both cats were cremated, the bodies that had betrayed them burned to ash. To heal and soothe my heart, I did my ritual with water. I used the beorc rune, the symbol of the birch tree, of growth and new beginnings. I mirrored it on itself so it became a bindrune, and I took note of the other runes in the image revealing themselves to me. I drew my bindrune for peaceful passage on a piece of birch bark. I threw the birch bark into the water and I let myself cry for my loss.

On a second piece of bark, I broke the top staves off the bindrune and spread them, like wings unfurling. I drew that onto a piece of sycamore bark. Sycamore sheds it’s bark by growing more wood rings beneath it, stretching and splitting it until it sloughs off. I threw that one into the water and simply quieted my heart while it was swept downstream. I waited until I couldn’t see it anymore.

I drew a third bindrune on another piece of sycamore bark. I broke the bottom staves and spread them, again, like wings unfurling. I thought of all the wonderful and weird memories I had of Luna and Bella, and how they both filled my life, in similar and different ways. I let that joy fill me, and I set the bark adrift in the water.

I drew one last picture on another piece of birch. I drew a more fluid interpretation of the bindrune with the staves broken. I drew a butterfly. I said a prayer of hope for Luna’s transformation, for Bella’s transformation. I knew my grief would remain for a while, yet, I accepted the necessity of both passages as I laid the white bark in the water.

It didn’t make the hurt go away faster. But it was a ritual that was meaningful for me. To open the way for dealing with my sadness, it allowed me to accept that we did what we could for Luna, and for Bella. It helped me accept that, as unfair as it seems, both of their times were meant to be shorter on this earth, and that we gave them both good and full lives while they were with us. It reminded me of the love, and because of how much I loved them, it’s important to share that love and carry it on into the world.

Author’s note: In the photos for this post, all the pictures are on birch bark. I do not take photos while I am doing my rituals and did not have any sycamore bark at home to use.

Grieving

(But) this love will carry. This love will carry me.

I know this love will carry me.

~ Dougie McLean

This chorus has been the ticker tape thread running through my heart this last week. It buoyed me through the days of tripping into unknown routines that Bella had been a part of. It held me every time we started games we’d play with her, waiting for her to say her line… cue the crickets and silence. Then the remembering that she was gone. Is gone.

In my grief, I say a prayer for every parent, and every ancestor of mine, who has ever lived to see the death of a child. I cannot imagine that pain and I intend no comparison. But I feel like I have a small window of insight into that kind of loss. I have no human children, but ten years ago we brought home a sick, dying kitten...

You take a living being in. You raise them. You care for them. You watch them explore the world and you hold your breath when they take their first steps. Their first wounds. Their first joys. And you become a family. Then, one day… they are gone? What words can describe such loss?

I am the kind of woman who sees life as life. A part of my family is missing. Again. But the difference is tangible this time. Both of the young cats died before their elder, who spends most every minute sleeping on a soft cushion. Now, the house is still. Disquieted. There used to be a foundational layer of energy in this home, made up of small feet padding around and about, patrolling and getting into mischief.

That is what death took from our house, literally pulling the energy-rug out from under us. Well-worn pathways feel abandoned. Haunted. Gone are the backdrop noises that made me wonder things like, where did she just jump down from? Already, I can see the need for new life in this house, but it will wait.

I spent most of the week in a weird fog. I was numb. The days seemed unchanged to me and I was aware enough to note that the thought was odd, since our world has changed. I would stumble into the list of things-that-will-never-happen-again and would cry for a moment. And then move on. I was thinking that I was doing much better than when Luna died, which unnerved me. Because deep down inside my heart, I could feel the small child holding back tears with her hands across her ears singing, “la la la la!”

I’ve been in denial. It’s normal. I just didn’t think it would be so easy to do when the physical evidence of her death surrounds me.

This morning, the Veterinary Hospital called us to let us know that Bella’s ashes were there for us to pick up. I suddenly felt deadened, like weights had just been piled on top of me. And I started to feel the grief climbing up through my belly and my throat for my mouth. We were bringing Bella home. We were bringing what remained of Bella home. It was very real. It is very real.

There’s no timetable for grieving. It’s different for everyone. As routines change and time passes, the daily pangs ebb and healing occurs. We move forward because it’s in our nature. I let myself trust that it will come. Bella’s ashes are home now, awaiting transformation for when my heart is softened and not so raw.

Listen to Dougie McLean sing This Love Will Carry from 2010.

Your Options After Death

If anything has become clear to me while doing this research, it’s that we need to start rethinking what place death, grief, and the disposition of the dead have in our culture. I would hate to lose the solitude of cemetery parks. In some cities, they are among the last vestiges of undisturbed, though manicured, green left. But cemeteries have physical boundaries and eventually all the plots will fill. Only in America do we think that if we purchase a plot, it’s ours for life, death, and afterlife.

Our country is fairly new and other countries have been dealing with this issue for centuries. In many large cities, after a certain time period had passed, allowing for natural decay, graves were disinterred so that newly dead could take their place in consecrated ground, and the bones were placed in ossuaries or charnal houses. Ossuaries allow for bones to be placed and stored in smaller boxes. In catacombs and charnal houses, the bones would often be broken up, skulls stored together, long bones stored together, etc.

Maybe we need to move away from permanent monuments and resting places. How much time do we need after death? How many generations pass until no one remembers us? Why bury your loved ones in a cemetery if you never visit them there? As an amateur genealogist, I have spent many afternoons reading and searching for the tombstones of my ancestors. I have felt the joy and thrill of discovering their resting places. But there are too many of us, to each own a piece of land for life.

I will have no descendants. And I will have no gravestone. So I need to rethink what I need and what I want. As well as what to leave behind to best serve those who love me when I die.

Funerals serve many purposes. They confirm the reality of death for those left behind. In theory, they aim to provide a contained environment for the living to come together and process through grief and mourning. It is a time for the living to remember and pay their respects to the dead, bringing closure to that life. It is the end to a story.

Most people don’t think about the details of planning a funeral until they are thrust into the crisis of death. In that moment, we don’t think to shop around and we are easily talked into traditional standards. So think about it now. Choice of funerals and services are largely influenced by family preferences, religious beliefs, and traditions. If you start the dialogue now, you could pre-empt any squabbling between loved ones after the fact. So, what do you want for your body when you die?

A Smattering of Options

You could find a place that would allow you to put yourself in the ground in a simple box, or natural fiber blanket or shroud. The purpose of a green burial is to return to the way things used to be; returning the body to the ground in a manner that does not hinder decomposition. Natural burial is where the body is returned to the earth to decompose in the soil. It has been practiced in Islam for almost 1500 years. It was reintroduced to the UK in the 1990s by Ken West and has gained popularity in Australia, China, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and North America. Find more information at The Green Burial Council and The Natural Burial Movement 

You can try your hand at a home funeral, where states allow. You can care for your dead and tend to their body yourself, seeing the entire process through, reconnecting to the event as a rite of passage. All but eight states in the U.S. have won the right to home funerals if they want them. Check out the Home Funeral Directory and the Home Funeral Alliance

This is a good article about a family who took on a performing a natural burial in 2007. It chronicles the choices they made, how they went about it, and how the different family members responded to it. It’s very thought provoking. Click on this Smithsonian article to read a real-life story of people finding closure in tending their own dead.

Thinking Outside the Box

One of the options available is to send your loved ones’ cremains to be pressed and heated into jewelry. You can have them made into earrings or rings, big gems for yourself or smaller gems to divide up into separate pieces for you and children or other loved ones. I like this idea, because you can leave a legacy, an heirloom that can be passed down through the family. No need for a tombstone, you become a travelling wearable memorial. You can read more about it, including testimonials, at the lifegem website.

You could merge your ashes with the seed of a tree and find new symbiosis as you feed its growth. You can truly become one with nature in a way we couldn’t in our bodies. At least until the tree dies and becomes something else. But trees are good. There aren’t enough of them anymore and they feed off of our carbon dioxide and provide us with oxygen. Do you want to Become a Tree After Death? If you want more of the metaphor, this other version, though pricey, allows you to see a visual shift as the tree grows, cracking the ceramic cover of the cremains, found at the Spiritree site.

You can simply scatter the ashes of your dead. Check out the laws here.

For something different, if you’re really invested in feeding the earth, you can have your body turned into liquid fertilizer. Not kidding.

You could gift your body to medical science. It’s important to note that most facilities have a weight cut-off limit. Some can’t accept a body more than 170 lbs max and others top out at 250 lbs. It’s something more people are looking into, as the facility will cremate the body for you, free of charge, when they are done, and send them to you, though you may have to pay for shipping or pick it up yourself. When used for medical science, your body must be embalmed and the formaldehyde adds a lot of weight. Many facilities don’t have the equipment or manpower to lift and shuffle around the bodies. They have to be easy to store and move. Check out the options at Life Legacy or Science Care or Bio Gift.

Death as an Industry

Death is a rite of passage that touches each of our lives, either through the death of a loved one or our own eventual demise. No one escapes. For that reason alone, we should talk about it more, but we don’t. We don’t value our emotional bodies in this society. Grieving is dirty and uncomfortable for everyone, and we have come to expect that it will happen behind closed doors. We prefer to leave it at the funeral home, as if we are pretending that death doesn’t happen to us all. That we don’t all grieve at some point in our lives.

We let the professionals handle death and it becomes something that happens to us, with little involvement from us but our grieving. Outside assistance with death will always be helpful, but the industry we’ve built around funerals allows for people to stay in denial. It allows for us as individuals to let our grief overwhelm and paralyze us, when the challenge is to claw our way through it. What closure can be found in viewing a corpse we have tried to make appear as lifelike as possible? How does that reinforce the reality of the death of the human body to our rational minds?

Why has it become its own industry? When did we allow outside parties to tell us how to handle the passing of our dead? I’m not dogging funeral home directors or morticians. I want to make that distinction clear. I have met some who were simply stepping into their family business and the legacy of caring for the dead. It is sacred to them. And others have felt a calling and a pull towards helping be in service in that way. We all try to find the place in this world where we best fit in. That’s not the concern for me. What I’m interested in is the way turning death into a third-party industry has affected the way we process it as a culture.

“Americans have lost the desire to be active participants in

funerals so we have very little exposure to the dead. I think that

if we were to witness the peaceful death of a loved one and play

a larger role in their funeral proceedings, Americans would be

less afraid of death and more at peace with themselves.”

 ~Loretta M. Alirangues,

“Funerary Practices in Early and Modern America”

In Judaism and Muslim deaths, when a body dies, it is buried as soon as possible. At death, the family stops to care for the dead before resuming their lives again. There is no need for embalming or refrigeration. They allow the clock of their worlds to stop. The way our culture works, we don’t allow for people to stop their lives at the death of a loved one. We are all part of a larger machine that we have given over power to and it infiltrates every aspect of our lives. When my Grandma died, I did not get bereavement time. I took it but I took the time off of work without pay. I informed my boss that I would be out for a week while I grieved with my family. It could have cost me my job if my boss had decided to be cruel. But I knew then that it was important to be part of it, to be there with my family through the transition. Our entire way of being a family shifted when she died. I knew that it would be a moment I could never reclaim. I chose my family first. We need to get back to putting people first.

I am not a fan of viewings. I do not appreciate the embalming process. I do not enjoy the lifelike tint of the corpse. When my Grandma died, I went to the funeral home to have some alone time with her because I had not gotten home in time to say goodbye. It actually threw me that she did not appear dead. The fact that she appeared to be sleeping made it harder for me to grasp. There was no death pallor, only an orange glow and too-much rouge.

It was putting my hands on her that brought reality home to me. It was feeling the cold of her body that made me understand. I touched her skin and I could not feel her vibrant energy. I could not feel the familiarity of her hugs. Whatever made her who she was, was gone. My Grandma was dead. I had to go to the funeral home to have that moment. I had to go to where her body was, in a strange place.

There are currently about 15,000 funeral homes in operation in the US. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2006 was $6,200, up twenty percent from $5,180 in 2000. I don’t know what costs are covered in their average, but it fits the prices people I know have been quoting me. For a minimal cremation, no frills, including obituaries, it cost a friend $1,600 in 2011. For a funeral with cemetery burial, as cheap as possible, it cost another friend $5,000 in 2012.

You know that death became in industry when they passed the Federal Rule of 1984. It was put in place by the Federal Trade Commission to require all funeral homes to provide consumers with price information over the phone, and, upon request, a written itemized list of their fees. This was done to insure that no funeral home could gouge the mourners in their time of grief. And with this rule came a way for people to learn how to navigate the industry that taking care of the dying had become.

For instance, funeral homes cannot embalm the deceased for a fee without permission from the family unless required by law. In history, homes would do an embalming and then pad the bill with the expense. Some funeral homes have a policy that if you want to hold a viewing, you have to embalm the body, but embalming isn’t legally required. That is the specific funeral home, and many directors and morticians have bought into the belief that embalming bodies saves the living from disease. If you need to delay, refrigeration is another option, where dry ice is used for the viewing. The trouble then may come in finding a place that has the ability to refrigerate.

Funeral homes cannot require you to purchase a casket for cremation. A cardboard box is all that is needed for the body to set in. Some crematoriums do not even require that much. And just because a funeral home doesn’t have any of its catalog’s cheaper caskets on hand does not mean they cannot get you one within 24 hours. You actually don’t have to buy a casket from the funeral home. You can acquire one on your own, and under the Federal Rule of 1984, the home is not allowed to charge you a handling fee for accepting one from an outside source.

Don’t be afraid to shop around and compare prices. Even better, do it now, before you need to. Obviously prices will increase, but you’ll get the feel for who you’d want to give your business to. Better still, not all states require the use of a funeral director or funeral homes for viewings. Unfortunately (for me) New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Louisiana, Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan are some of the ones that do. In other states, it’s legal to plan and organize your own funeral. Right now you’re thinking, why would I want to? But maybe death is supposed to be hard. Maybe preparing the way for others is the spiritual-yet-not-religious thing missing from our lives that would naturally help us greet our own end more peacefully.

Standard funeral costs are made up of the services of the funeral director, the use of the funeral home facilities, embalming, the casket including linings and pillows, burial vault, obituaries, the disposition of the body including the cost of the grave site, the opening and closing of the grave, the cremation, transportation of the body, flowers, clergy, grave markers or plaques, and various other incidentals. Often in our grief we worry about being seen as cheap, as if the amount of money we spend displays how we felt about them. That myth is a by-product of our death services becoming its own industry, like how Hallmark Cards make a mint off of perpetuating Hallmark as the brand that says you care the most.

In this current economy, it is foolish to fall into that trap. We should do for our dead to the best of our abilities, but the dead would not want the living to bankrupt themselves on memorialization. When a person dies, their spirit moves on and only the body remains. Do for that body, as it was the sacred vessel of your loved one, but remember them in your actions. Speak their names to the winds and tell their stories. Truly the best way to honor the loss is to remember them by living.

A Funeral in 2004

I have attended a lot of funerals in my lifetime, which has not been nearly as long as should warrant that statement. But I tend to see that fact more as the result of all the people I have known whose lives have touched mine. Each funeral is double-edged. There is grief in the loss of a loved one and simultaneous gratitude for the friendship that created the grief.

My first experience with attending to the details of the dead came with my Grandparents, who died three years apart. I admit that the detail-planning was a lot to take in amidst the thickness of the grief. When my Grandma died I was more of a spectator, learning the process of death for the first time. With my Grandpa, I was more invested.

My Grandpa died in the hospital at 9:03 at night. The nurses told us to take all the time we needed, and asked who we wanted them to call. My mom gave them the name of the funeral home we were using. When we left, my Grandpa’s body remained at the hospital for the Funeral Director to pick up. My Grandpa and my mom had decided to use the same funeral home as we had used for my Grandma but other than that, little arrangements had been made ahead of time.

My Grandpa had been fighting his cancer. He thought he was winning. But when the doctor told him that the treatments weren’t working, and he was looking at weeks, not months, my Grandpa slipped into unconsciousness that same night. I will always believe it was a choice he made to be done. To stop fighting. He was in a lot of pain. By the next evening, surrounded by loved ones, he was gone. He never regained consciousness.

When we went to meet with the Funeral Director the next morning, he was kind, walking through the checklist of choices we needed to make and information he needed to retrieve. He took down the details for the obituary; names of living relatives, work history, local groups he belonged to, etc. He told us he would send the obituary into the local newspaper for printing.

When asked if we wanted to have a viewing, we said yes. The Funeral Director said that we’d have to have the embalming then, and added it to the sheet on his clipboard and we moved on. We walked into the show room and picked out a casket.

            When we picked out a casket for my Grandma, he said whichever one we wanted for her, and we picked one of Oak. It was pricey, but compared to the caskets in the showroom, not ridiculous. When we entered the same showroom for my Grandpa, money was an object. It’s something I’ve been hearing from a lot of people about the choices they’ve made for their own loved ones. Often finances have to come before what they would want to do for their loved one. Which speaks to the industry that death has become in our culture.

            For my Grandpa, we chose a Pine casket, which looked very much like every other wooden casket in the room. Not that any casket is less than another. All wood is sacred. And it only matters in the moment of purchasing it. No one is going to see it when it’s in the ground. It is kind of set up to make you feel like if-you-loved-them-more-you-would-show-it-by-picking-a-better-casket. It must be hard and overwhelming for those trying to make these choices from a place of extreme grief. We didn’t need the fancy linings or the fancy pillows, or the secret compartment in the casket for belongings and we were all in agreement on that. If you knew my Grandpa, he would have approved of the simple and classic choice we made.

Then we picked out a vault, which can be required when a body is embalmed in some states. I have also learned that some cemeteries will require the use of a vault whether the person is embalmed or not, and whether the state requires it or not. Using a vault assists with the ease of their ground maintenance, as vaults help keep the ground from shifting too much as the casket settles.

We planned the dates for the viewings with a simple service at the funeral home through the use of their retired minister. My Great-Grandparents were Roman Catholic but my Grandpa never claimed any religion as his own. What the funeral home could offer seemed the best option. The funeral home made arrangements with the cemetery for opening and closing the grave site for us, but only because we were using them for our service.

Then we waited until the viewings, sitting in quiet, sharing stories, cleaning to keep hands busy. We called family and friends and received them at my parent’s house. The viewings at the funeral home were a blur. Lots of reunions with people I hadn’t seen since childhood. It was an unfortunate circumstance and yet I thought my Grandpa, who enjoyed his alone time as much as he enjoyed socializing, would have approved at how much laughter filled that cold and somber room.

The morning of the service was a joke. I know the retired minister meant well, but he couldn’t remember my Grandpa’s name and he used the opportunity to throw every Bible story he had ever been fond of into his eulogy- and that is me being kind. I wish I had been a bit older. I wish I had anticipated the end was coming. I wish I could have stood up there and spoken to the awesomeness that my Grandpa had been made of. Still, the comical eulogy served as the source of much laughter during the afternoon.

We divvied up the flower arrangements, deciding what would go to the grave site. The plants we separated up for family to take home to grow and renew. It was touching to see the flowers come in from people we didn’t really know, whose lives my Grandpa had touched. The webs we weave in life are far larger than we can perceive.

It was a warm spring day, just after equinox in the cemetery. Standing graveside was the most natural part of the entire experience for me.  The sun was shining. Birds were singing. The ground sat open in wait. The strangest part of the morning was deciding who would ride in what vehicle with whom to get to the cemetery.

I don’t know how it is in large cities, but in my hometown we still ascribe to the funeral procession. The hearse takes the lead, with family cars behind it, and other cars behind them, safety lights flashing. It’s a slow crawl through red lights and stop signs. Life paused in breathes as we wound through town, picking back up in our wake.

Afterwards we gathered at a family member’s house for food and conversation. When my Grandma died, we gathered together in their house, filling the new void with friends and company. But with the second loss, we let someone else hold that part for us. I think it would have been too much, to see so many people populate a house whose future emptiness we were still coming to terms with. At the same time, I can see how it would have been healing, to bring life back into the house.

And then it was over. We stayed up late and talked. We shared stories and family secrets together at the kitchen table. A few days later my mom and I went back to his house. We walked through an emptiness that suddenly felt massive. The gravity of reality hit us, but now we had time.

We didn’t really know what Grandpa would have liked or would have wanted if he’d been able to choose, but we knew him well enough to make the best choices. And it prompted us to sit around the kitchen table and begin to discuss our own desires after our eventual deaths. It’s important to know what you want, what you don’t want, and what you don’t care about one way or the other. It’s important to share that with the friends and family that may be left to take care of those details. Both because it’s smart and because it’s kind.

What do you want done to best honor the temple that was your body? You might not care, and that’s all right. Don’t feed into the industrial machine death has become, simply because you think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Question everything. And then call around to your local funeral homes and see how close you can get to what you want. 

Cremations in History

A columbarium in Oakland.

There is archaeological evidence of cremation in the Stone Age, around 3000 B.C. in both Europe and the near East. During the late Stone Age, the act of burning the dead spread across Europe and into western Russia. In the Bronze Age, 2500-1000 B.C., this practice found its way through the British Isles and the land that would be known as Spain and Portugal. Cremation was an elaborate Greek burial custom between 1000-480 B.C. that peaked in the time of Homer, around 800 B.C., when the country was ravaged by war. They would cremate the bodies of fallen soldiers in open fires and gather up the ashes and bones for burial when they returned home.

In Iron and Viking Ages, cremation was the practice used for the majority of funerals in Sweden. Around 600 B.C. Rome took to cremation and it became the standard method of disposing of the dead. More elaborate rituals evolved around their cremations, with days-long feasting and pyres 30 feet tall. Between 27 B.C. and 395 C.E. buildings called columbariums were erected to inter the cremated remains of the dead.

Early Christians considered cremation a pagan ritual and by 400 C.E., when the Roman Emperor Constantine had chosen to follow Christian beliefs, earth burials replaced the practice of cremation within the Empire. Six hundred years later, Iceland finally converted to this new religion. From that point on, in Western culture, cremations were extremely rare until the 1800s in Europe. They were performed only in times of emergency. Cremation was popular under Buddhist influence in both China and Korea until the 1300s, when Neo-Confucianism brought burials to the forefront of practice.

In 1656, when the Black Death crossed the European continent, 60,000 victims were burned in just one week in Naples. Two years later, Sir Thomas Browne of England promoted cremation as an acceptable means of honoring the dead. The first recorded cremation in Britain occurred September 26, 1769, but it was an illegal one. Honoretta Pratt was burned in her open grave at St. George’s Burial Ground. A plaque was later placed there saying that she believed the vapors of all the dead bodies were harmful to the populous so she asked that her body be burnt, that she might lead by example so others would follow. During the French Revolution, in the late 1780s, freemasons and anarchists promoted cremation as a means of reducing the church’s role in the funeral process.

Hinduism mandated cremation, in order to dispose of the body and free the soul into the next life or rebirth. Open funeral pyres were and are common in India. It was also a common practice to burn the widow of the deceased alive with him on his pyre, known as suttee. It is an English term derived from the word sati, which is what the wife of the deceased was called. There are documented accounts of suttees as early as the first century C.E. In Hindu belief, a sati was the opposite of a widow. Widows were bad because if they had been good wives, their husbands would not have died. For a woman to immolate herself as a sati was a way of winning back honor for her family. Often the eldest son would be the one to set the fire. In the early 1800s, in one year alone, 400 suttee deaths were reported within a 30 mile radius of Calcutta. It was outlawed by the British rule in 1825, though regular cremation for the deceased remained.

Everything changed in 1873, when Professor Brunetti of Italy exhibited a practical cremation chamber at the Vienna Exposition. A year later, Queen Victoria’s Surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson, founded the Cremation Society of England with fellow colleagues. In 1878, the first European crematoriums were built in Woking, England and Gotha, Germany. It wasn’t until 1885, seven years later, that the first official cremation took place in the UK, in Woking, for Mrs. Jeannette C. Pickersgill. The next year 10 more bodies were cremated.

Cremation was still illegal in Japan in 1876, when Dr. Julius LeMoyne built the first U.S. crematorium in Washington, Pennsylvania. There were only two recorded cremations occurring in the U.S. prior to 1800. The second crematorium opened in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1884, owned and operated by an established Cremation Society. By 1900, there were 20 crematoriums operating in the U.S. including Buffalo, New York City, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Dr. Hugo Erichsen founded the Cremation Association of America in 1913, when there were 52 working crematoriums and over 10,100 cremations performed that year.

The Roman Catholic Church renounced cremation, although it wasn’t against church dogma. It is perhaps because of how strongly the Protestants advocated for cremation, both as a means of limiting the church’s influence on funeral processes and as a call for a need in burial reforms at the turn of the century. The Church softened their position in the 1960s and allowed for the practice to be chosen without penalty.

In 1970, only 8% of dead were cremated in America. In 1975 there were over 435 crematoriums in the country and 150,000 cremations were performed. In 1999, cremation accounted for 25.39% of deaths, with over 1,468 crematoriums now in use and 595,617 services performed. Six states had a cremation rate of more than 50%: Arizona, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, and Washington. At this point, cremation had become a universal means of disposing of the dead in Japan, just one hundred and thirty years after it was illegal.

In 2001, the National Funeral Directors Association reported that, depending on additions to the service, the average cremation cost between $300-$3,000, much lower than the average cost of a burial funeral, which was listed as $6,130. There are now over 2,100 crematoriums in America and over 900,000 cremations are performed a year. Cremation occurs widely in at least 31 countries around the world: 97% in Japan, 75% in Switzerland, 70% in Great Britain, 65% in Scandanavia, 38% in Canada, 37% in America, 2% in Ghana, just to name a few.

Most opposition to cremation is religious in nature, specifically Orthodox Judaism and Islam. Most other religions allow for its members to choose what method of body disposition is most meaningful to them. In cremation, the body is placed into a durable container in the chamber and heated to 1,600-1,800 degrees. After two and a half hours, all that remains are bone fragments, called cremains. After they cool, the crematory breaks them down into fine particles through a mechanical process, after which they are placed in an urn or box. What we call ashes are actually these powdered bone fragments.

It is illegal to cremate more than one body at a time. Most funeral homes have to contract out to a third-party crematorium, which incurs an additional transportation fee, though it is possible to deal directly with the crematorium in these cases. Some funeral homes have the facilities to perform them on the premises. It is possible to be present when the body is placed in the cremation chamber. If a body is being cremated, but a viewing is desired beforehand, a casket can be rented for the viewing from the funeral home; you do not have to purchase one. After the cremation, the remains are yours to do with what you wish. You can put them on the mantle, bury them, inter them in a columbarium, or scatter them in a location preferable to the deceased. Cremations are becoming more popular in the US, as they cost about a third less that average funerals.

The reality is we can’t all choose cremation. It’s possible that part of the end of cremation in the Roman Empire had a little something to do with the resources of timber expended in their elaborate pyres for each person. In the modern age, we use gas and energy to fuel the cremation chambers; resources that are finite. Not to mention that 573 lbs of carbon dioxide are released into the air for each cremation, as well as .8-5.9 grams of mercury from dental work, and toxins from bodies that were embalmed first. Seventy-five percent of the mercury dissipates into the atmosphere but the rest of it falls back to land and settles in the earth and ground water. Multiply 573 lbs of carbon and .8-5.9 grams of mercury per person by the current U.S. population of 315,398,368 people... I can’t imagine there’s enough forest left in our country to transform that carbon dioxide into oxygen. Cremations release 1,000-7,800 pounds of mercury in the U.S. every year and we use enough energy in cremation in a year to travel to the moon and back 85 times.

Still, I cannot ignore the number of people I know who have no financial choice but cremation when a loved one dies, or the many cultures who are attached to the process. After the tsunami ravaged Japan in 2011, their crematoriums could not attend to the number of dead, which was over 19,000 known deaths with several thousand still listed as missing. Bodies were buried in shallow graves but families, who saw that as a desecration, were stealing the bodies of their beloved during the night and burning them in open fires in secret. But where will the line be where we have to put the cost of our choices to the earth beneath us ahead of our religious, spiritual, and aesthetic desires?