Cremation

creamcrackers

Sorry for your lost.

A burial is like buried treasure, it's a nicer way to think about it rather than thinking your being eaten by worms etc
I lost a friend a few months ago and she was cremated and i also found it diffiult to understand why someone would consider going this way, at the end of the day that is what was her last wish, her ashes was placed within her daughters grave so i still can visit and take flowers and chat to her which is nice.


Take care

Broomstick

I'm sorry your Grandad has died. Saying goodbye is so hard and I reckon the more you love someone the harder it can be. Here's my random thoughts.

I wonder if it would help to go and say goodbye to his body? Here's how I personally see things. It might make you feel more secure that his body is just an empty shell that the grandad you knew has left behind. It won't be the living person that is being burnt, just the body, just the physical container, that he lived his life in - a bit like a chrysalis or something. He has no more use for it in the same way that a butterfly has no more use for the chrysalis once it's begun the next stage of it's journey.

Might it help to write him a letter or a poem and tuck it in the coffin so it gets burnt with him? Something that says you know 'he' has gone and that the him that was him (his soul?) is safe - or whatever... ?

Might it help to visit the crem a couple of days before the service and say your goodbyes quietly on your own in the gardens there so that when you go to the service in four days time you will feel a bit more in control and a bit less worried?

Might it help to see if you can have a garment that he used to wear to cuddle, or to wear yourself, through the next few chilly months? Is there a scarf or gloves or jumper that will remind you of him and make you feel snuggled in his memory? Nobody else need know. When my gran died I really liked wearing the hand-made, long winter socks she'd knitted me - it made me feel closer to her.

B x

Bloomin_Freezing2

So sorry for your loss. I posted on this forum a few years ago when my grandad died. My thread was about I could not make up my mind whether to visit him in the chapel of rest or not. In the end I decided not to go and still feel that I made the right choice. My grandad was also cremated. At the service I was even more glad that I hadn't seen him, as although I could see his coffin, that's all it was to me, an empty coffin. I fear if I had visited him I would be picturing him in the coffin- something that I would not have been able to cope with.

I did however visit the undertakers before the funeral and take a few things along for grandad to take with him. I took his flat cap (he never left home without it), his football scarf, his favourite photo of him with my nanny (who passed away 25 years earlier) and a letter that I had wrote to him telling him how much I loved and would miss him.

I think the best you can do is to talk and tell your family how you are feeling. Could you even visit a vicar and speak to them, maybe they could help you?

onlyroz

Cremation is a much cleaner way to go, IMO - and then you get to be scattered in a place that meant a lot to you when you were alive, rather than mouldering in the ground.

Hermia

I want to be cremated. Partly it's for practical reasons as I live in London and there are no spaces in any of the graveyards. My grandmother had to be buried in a graveyard 3 buses away in an area she had never even visited. I just think that when land is scarce it should be given to the living.

I also think burial is rather yuck. If you read what happens to a body after death it's just disgusting. Whenever I stand at a new grave I imagine what stage of decomposition the person is at. I think being cremated just sounds so much cleaner than rotting away.

pusscat

I am sorry for your loss.

My Mum died some years ago – her battle was very intense and involved a lot of medical interventions that sadly failed - at the end her body had been ravaged so badly that it was simply a worn out shell – whatever made her “her” had just gone and the mess of a body she left behind was to her (and us) just like a butterfly emerging and leaving the old battered casing behind as it set off on it’s new life. In one way she actually saw her body as the thing that had let her down in this earthly life and she knew that where she was going to that she would not be needing it.

To us the cremation was just a way of getting rid of the old clothing, my Mum was not in that coffin, she is soaring up over the rainbow along with the bluebirds, flying free, with no pain and no suffering in a way that she could not do whilst she was still tied to that shell. Her ashes are buried in the family grave but that is just a headstone and a “formal place” to remember, I remember her every day in a different way – today it is by writing this post to you, yesterday was when I made gravy with the Sunday lunch – in the way my Mum taught me….

Puss
xx

Hermia

onlyroz wrote: »

Cremation is a much cleaner way to go, IMO - and then you get to be scattered in a place that meant a lot to you when you were alive, rather than mouldering in the ground.

That's a good point. My dad's ashes were scattered in the grounds of his favourite park, my uncle's ashes were taken to India and I know someone whose ashes were scattered on a football pitch. There is a more freedom to put the person somewhere that meant a lot to them with a cremation.

loulou123

So sorry for your loss.

Personally i would choose being cremated, as i think the idea of bodies being in the ground is more creepy then my ashes being spread somewhere i love. As i am also non-religious i personally feel it would be a little hypocritical being burried in a church yard.

I have been to both types of service (cremation and burial) and i also prefer the service of the cremation, and think that the burial service is more morbid and very drawn out in length which makes it even more upsetting.

xoxo_2

Thanks for all the replies.

I can't say it's getting easier to understand it but it is helping to have another perspective of it, so thank you to everyone who has replied xx

property.advert

I tell the missus to check my pockets for money and then just chuck me out with the garbage. Once you've gone, you've gone. Doesn't matter what happens to the carcass.