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Old 12-20-2022, 09:53 AM
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Post What Happens When You're Cremated?

What Happens When You're Cremated?
By: Aaron Gell - Men's Health News 07-07-17
Re: https://www.menshealth.com/trending-...when-cremated/

Some interesting facts and insight to how cremation works and where your ashes end up.

Photo link: https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod...g?resize=640:*
Nepturne Memorial Reef

We all want to know where we go when we die.

There are ways of finding out: You can pray, visit a psychic, flip a coin, or just wait and see. It might be the secret you carry to your grave, if a cemetery is your forwarding address. If you go the cremation route, you can move into an urn on your kin's mantel, or you can talk to Jim Hutslar. He can tell you exactly what happens after you die.

You'll find this square-jawed sailor piloting his World Cat 330 out of the Miami Beach Marina and past the fortress-like celebrity paradise of Fisher Island before heading southeast offshore. The 60-year-old Hutslar has made this trip many, many times. (He stopped the dive tally last year at 3,000.)

Captain Jim is the cocreator and guiding light of the Neptune Memorial Reef, an undersea mortuary a little over three nautical miles from South Beach. Hutslar's guest of honor on this near-cloudless afternoon is the late John McEver. John was a good guy—a Marine drill sergeant, corporate executive, Rotary Club president, and father of three—who died in December of congestive heart failure and Alzheimer's at 87. The family gave his ashes to Hutslar, who put them in a mold and affixed a plaque on top. Today he's adding brick-shaped John McEver to his Atlantis-styled necropolis 40 feet below the sea. The ceremony is attended by an apprehensive journalist (me) who's making his first post-certification dive.

I have reason to be nervous. As the craft approaches the buoys bobbing above the reef, I check my borrowed pressure gauge and regulator, noting the conspicuous lack of a secondary air source. "I carry a 'pony,'" Jim tells me, pointing to the mini-tank he keeps for emergencies.

I think of a favorite maxim of McEver's, relayed to me by his widow, Karen: It's not fun unless they make you sign a waiver. "You couldn't separate John from the saltwater," she'd told me the night before, choking back tears. He'd been a Florida boy, grew up in Orlando, catching snook along the Intracoastal Waterway. He joined the service in World War II and then stuck around for Korea, turning maggots into Marines at Parris Island. Karen introduced him to diving and he loved it. One time—must've been 27 years ago—Karen speared a massive jackfish. Too massive. But John just grabbed the thing (that was the kind of guy he was, even at 60), wrapped it in a bear hug, and eventually hauled it up to the dive boat. "I laughed my butt off," Karen recalled. "It makes me smile to think of him down there," she said.

Indeed, this liquid necropolis may be the least gloomy graveyard on earth. In the milky blue quiet that envelops us, Hutslar finds John's spot on the reef, squeezes out a bead of epoxy, and gently affixes the capstone to the barnacle-covered structure. We are far from alone: A few barracuda swim past, along with some bluehead wrasse, an array of parrotfish, and a pair of resident stingrays that Hutslar has named Lucy and Desi. There are worse places to spend eternity.

For centuries, laying a loved one to rest was a no-brainer. Religious authorities and somber, soft-spoken old men handled the details; friends and relatives went along for the ride. Mostly that meant interment, the old dirt nap. Burial is still the easiest way to go: All you need to do is show up in a dark suit and shades and sprinkle a handful of dirt into the grave.

But over the years, cremation has been gaining ground once ceded to graves as the most popular postmortem disposition, even at big, suburban cemeteries. Why? Spiritual hygiene, some say. Barbara Kemmis, executive director of the Cremation Association of North America, explains its rise in popularity: "People were opting for the aesthetics of being purified by fire rather than the unhygienic burial practices of the day." Put in those terms, it seems like an obvious choice. But while burial is a time-honored ritual—an end in itself—cremation is merely a way station. Simply put, it's an industrial process, a means of transforming all you are into a substance that's safe and easy to handle, homogeneous, lightweight, and everlasting. What you do with the remains after the funeral director hands them over is up to you.

2nd photo link: https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod...g?resize=640:*

And while the decision affords a certain creative license, it's also a sacred responsibility, one many of us will face at some point. As a son, a partner, or a friend, you may one day be handed a few pounds of this gravelly human aggregate, all that's left of a person you once loved—still do love—and be expected to do something with it, something unique and meaningful, maybe a ritual of your own invention that will bring peace to the dead as well as the living. If you've ever been a best man, that responsibility was child's play by comparison.

Meanwhile, a warning: These remains are not ashes, not quite. They're nothing like the butt-powder in a barroom ashtray. They're coarser than you expect, grittier, more real somehow, the end result of subjecting a human body to heat of up to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Water vaporizes. Flesh and internal organs burn away. If you want the quickest weight-loss plan of all, just step into the crematory of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. The first and perhaps last thing you notice is the sound, the roar of burning natural gas. Five ovens are hard at work rendering the day's allotment of (one hesitates even to say it) corpses into crumbly fragments of bone. One body takes longer than an hour, after which the oven is allowed to cool. Then a worker uses a long-handled broom to sweep the remains—composed mostly of calcium phosphate—into a metal bin, places them in a pulverizer, and grinds them into dust. "We treat them with tender care," says Jimmy Bolbat, a thoughtful-looking man with a brushlike mustache and a thick outer-borough accent, whose shift coincided with my visit. "They were humans."

Cremated remains are remarkably versatile. Legally you can't do a lot with an embalmed body aside from bury it. (Nor, one hopes, would you wish to.) Ashes, however, offer nearly limitless possibilities. When former Air Force member CJ Twomey took his life at 20, his devastated mother apportioned his remnants into small sachets and sent out a call on Facebook, enlisting friends and strangers alike to sprinkle his ashes around the planet. Before you could click "like," CJ ended up resting in more than 800 different locales and counting, from Antarctica's South Shetland Islands to Cambodia's Angkor Wat.

Keith Richards made global headlines when it was reported that he'd snorted his father's cremains. He later clarified that he'd been joking and had actually sprinkled the ashes beneath an oak tree. Last year the tattoo artist David Rich arranged to have the ashes of a friend scattered in the mosh pit at a succession of death metal shows; and in October an opera devotee strewed his friend's remains in the orchestra pit at the Met during the second intermission of Guillaume Tell, prompting a terror evacuation.

"What is accomplished there?" wonders Richard Moylan, Green-Wood Cemetery's president. "It's one thing to do it in nature. But in a place where it's going to be vacuumed up? Forget it."

Such are the wages of the choose-your-own- adventure approach to modern grief. The only rule may be that there is no rule; the line separating the sacred and the profane is now as variable as the individual quirks and personalities of those we seek to honor. As Ron Hopper of East Yorkshire, England, lay dying of liver cancer in 2015, the former marine engineer asked his buddies Cliff Dale and Paul Fairbrass to scatter his ashes at the lake in Thailand where they'd all gone fishing the year before. Then Fairbrass proposed what some would consider an unthinkable alternative: What if they made the ashes into bait? Ronnie was not one for false pieties. He thought the idea was hilarious. His wife endorsed the idea. Back in Thailand, the resulting bait balls, which were dubbed "purple Ronnies," attracted the affections of a 180-pound Siamese carp, which Dale and Fairbrass reeled in after an epic three-and-a- half-hour struggle, one that John McEver would surely have applauded.

Talk to enough survivors who have gone to similar lengths, and it becomes abundantly clear that granting a loved one's final wishes is actually more than just a tribute to the deceased. Instead, it's an affirmation of our own life force. Dead men don't scuba. They don't go to Disney World next, or sneak onto the mound at Fenway Park, or hike the Grand Canyon—all highly sought-after scattering sites. But we, the living, can still do all those things on their behalf, which may just be reason enough.

Russ Towne's biological father had long dreamed of playing a round of golf at the famed Pebble Beach golf links. He never made it. That meant his son, who was just a toddler when his dad had walked out on the family, was charged with fulfilling his request that his ashes be scattered on the fairway. One of the world's most exclusive golf courses, Pebble Beach does not allow human remains to be dispersed on its premises. Russ did a little surveillance and decided that he might get away with scattering the ashes surreptitiously, a practice known as wildcatting.

As he staked out the perimeter with his wife, a clay urn under his arm, the Mission Impossible theme played in his head. Russ and his wife strolled through one of the resort's restaurants and positioned themselves as close as possible to the 18th green. As his wife distracted the security guards, Towne unleashed a cloud of powder, letting a strong breeze carry it toward the final hole.

Carrying out a parent's final wishes can sometimes bring a circle-of-life closure to a difficult relationship. Justin Dorsett's father "didn't know how to be a dad," Justin told me. After losing his job and his family to alcoholism, he spent his final days alone in a small apartment, watching Nascar and occasionally hitting up his kids for money. Still, Justin and his brother, Chad, didn't hesitate to carry out Pop's wish of having his ashes scattered at Talladega. The management generally denies such requests, but the brothers got lucky: A back-office staff member agreed to the idea, and one day in 2014, they walked onto the infield and released a cloud of dust. "It was kind of emotional, because we'd had a few issues in the past," Chad admitted.

As often as not, such tributes are justifiably more about the living than the dead, about finding a way to go on when the sense of loss feels all but unlivable. Johnny MacDougall was a Miami Marlins fan—a towheaded 9-year-old, big-hearted and endlessly inquisitive. On January 11, 2015, he lost his balance and stumbled to the ground. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital, where Johnny died of a brain aneurysm. His devastated father, Dave, recalled a pact the two had made during a game, when the boy was just 5. Someday, they'd promised each other, they'd make a pilgrimage to every Major League Baseball stadium in the country.

After Johnny died, a plan took shape in his mind. He parceled out the boy's ashes into tiny portions, loaded his younger son, Tommy, into a vintage VW bus, and spent the summer visiting ballparks, depositing Johnny's remains at each, just a pinch at a time, when nobody was looking—always during the seventh-inning stretch.

Dave said the quest gave him purpose and a way to connect with Tommy, who needed it more than ever. "I want to show my son that no matter how difficult or how long it takes, it's important that you do things like this." Besides, Johnny would expect it, Dave thought. He was brought up to do what you say you're going to do. Any day now, when school gets out for the summer, Dave will pick Tommy up in the bus and they'll head to Baltimore. They still have 15 ballparks to go.
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Personal note: All I tell my family is to have me cremated
no show and tell presentations - in fact nobody will most
likely show up to see a box of ashes.
-
With my ashes take to my VFW post - see what ever they
can do with my ashes. A hole in the groiund with my Brother's
is all I ask - nothing else. No formalities - no blessing's.
I"ve been blessed by serving - raising a family - while
other's were not so lucky. Simplicity only!
-
I heard an old poen years ago it went like this:
-
["When I'm gone bury me deep
make it simple make it cheap
and when you pass me where I lie
piss on me - I'm always dry.]
-
My wife will be cremated and buried with her Mother.
-
Me - Like I said I don't care where I go - ashes and all
- but I would like to be buried at sea or a local memorial
- or whatever my daughter's want to - as long as
it's cheap - no out of pocket expense's. The VA may
cremate me (? not sure) and then send them a box of
ashes - and from there on - do what with them
or what I want - is meaningless again and no out of
pocket expenses.
-
Amen to that! - For my prodigy its time to move on
along with the living - that's all I ask of you.
-
Dad
__________________
Boats

O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
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