- Mrs. Z and Iare traditional folks, so we'll go with burial in our church cemetery, which abuts our neighborhood. Both our mothers are buried there, and my dad will be one day, so we bought our own plots. It also overlooks our high school football field, where I've been PA announcing for the last quarter-century. Maybe I'll have her cremate my microphone hand and put a small urn up in the pressbox.
But, she has carte blanche to burn or preserve. I did suggest she rent a casket for the visitation, then bury me in a cardboard box. Don't spend too much on it, it'll all corrode eventually. Same advice to our sons if they end up handling it.
- As a Christian, I'm not concerned about how my physical body is disposed of after death, since the conscious part me (soul) will be in heaven, not on earth, and I won't know about it for a while. The Bible says God will eventually resurrect that body and give it back to me, so I'm trusting He can find the pieces and put them back together when the time comes.
- From a biblical standpoint, I haven't read any mandate for disposal of a body, other than to be respectful. Cremation or burial, doesn't really matter. My secular understanding of biblical times was that some Jewish tombs were "recycled", so that several people might end up being buried in one - they just wait for the body to decompose, push the residue off the burial stone into a small pit, and re-use the stone for the next one.
- Hearing "cremation" makes me think of the Family Matters episode when Carl accidentally dumped the contents of Aunt Clotilde's urn into a trash bag, thinking it was from the fireplace. He had to do some fancy stepping explaining that to Harriet.
- I appreciate visitations, been going to a lot of them lately, both for friends and classmates, but also their parents. Those of us who go joke it's the only time we get to have a class reunion, but I think it's important the survivors know their mates care about them.
- I can think of two funerals where the open casket shouldn't have been done - one was my first grandfather in WV. He was fine during the visitation, but they opened him up two days later at the church service and his face had turned yellow. The other was a co-worker killed in a whitewater rafting accident a decade ago - her face was beaten to a pulp by the rocks, but the family insisted on open-casket. I was dismayed. In life she was a beautiful lady, but the face in the casket looked like a grotesque, stuffed rag doll.
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Wait a sec - what smell???? Are we talking small-town funeral homes where they don't know to embalm? Wow. Honestly, I've never noticed anything, uh, odd in any parlor I've gone to - thank goodness!
