He's a Jewish rapper/singer working through the medium of Jamaican-style reggae: I thought you might like it for that reason alone.
My mother was cremated, her insistence.
A wise choice for the environment.
She had this thing about being buried and the worms eating her, she used to actually wriggle (in disgust) at the thought of it.
I think in this day and age, everyone knows this is true, yet they do it anyway.
Not for me, I'll be burnt and my ashes can be scattered, or I might have a burial at sea: build raft, set it alight, let the sea take what's left of me.
So, as per her request, she was cremated.
Again, a wise and respectful choice.
And then we were given the urn.
This seems to be the point where many find things confusing: they're ashes, not a person, not even an entity.
Which makes quite a lot of environmental sense to me and call me a heartless atheist bastard but I don't really think that there's anything at a grave.
I rarely visit graveyards at all unless I have a reason to be there. Last graveyards I visited were: the Jewish museum in Prague. I met three individual people I knew from Dublin who were also visiting the site. That was a strange coincidence, especially as one of them was utterly spiked on cocaine and still enjoying the previous nights' partying.
I loathe coke heads just as much as graveyards and lying Jews.
The other was Ruooalahti cemetery, which also has a large plot for Russian Jews, but that wasn't what I was looking for. I went to see Alvar Aalto's grave and to take rubbings of the details on his gravestone. It's a hobby I had when I first started reading Helsingin Sanomat (pretty much the national newspaper of choice) because I found the deaths and memorials section very interesting. I noted that many Finnish persons lived for almost one hundred years, both sexes. So I'd go to the graveyard and look around for unusually long lives and then take a charcoal rubbing of their gravestone. I have dozens and dozens of them, all stored in my Mam's loft. I was thinking of framing them and selling them at flea markets in Ireland, Irish pubs all over (I made a killing on the reprinted/released copies of the 1916 broadsheets by picking interesting pages and putting them into large and stressed frames, then selling them to Irish pubs and their customers.
Nice money.
Funerals make sense of course and graves, statues, monuments etc. for certain people (not the common-or-gardener).. sure.
I think we're the first generation of Irish people who are moving away from the idea of burying the dead - and I hope it continues.
Graveyards are/will become, an environmental hazard. The graveyard where my Dad is buried suffered some years back from very heavy rains which caused a shift in the earth/mud which in turn caused many coffins to move under the ground with some/one at least popping up in a ditch at the lower end of the field. The coffin(s) had to be reburied and caused a massive stress for the immediate family.
Dead bodies in boxes six feet under?
No fucking thank you very grand.
Burn 'em all.
But after my mother was cremated, her ashes were buried anyway.
Makes little sense, but at least there isn't a corpse rotting away under the mud.
Taking up another plot in a graveyard.
They aren't cheap either.
Which didn't make much sense to me.
Same here.
It would've made more sense to me if her ashes were scattered somewhere meaningful and, you know, returned to nature that way
You can pay for a burial at sea license up here and have a proper Viking funeral: wooden raft, body wrapped in slowly combustible fabrics, the raft is towed by the regular motor boat and when you reach an allocated and licensed spot, the raft is left to float and set alight. The raft is designed to ensure that the fire which reduces the body to ash burns longer than the body itself. Once the body is gone, the raft soon follows.
Don't know how popular it is and I haven't seen one take place, but I like the idea. Everything is returned to nature.
'Donny, shut up. You're in over your head, Donny...' ..you're like a child who just wa... .. ..Dude, that rug really tied the room together.
