When I first started working as a funeral director it was 1984 on Long Island, New York and the funerals were very traditional. I worked in a funeral home that served mostly Italian Catholic communities. That year we did about 350 funerals in two locations: business was good.
Four sets of calling hours were the norm at that funeral home and on the third day, off to the church and on to the cemetery. Everyone was embalmed and viewed. Flowers came by the truck load. It was all pretty routine and the funerals were not very complicated. Profits were good! Cremation was some of new fad! Nothing was biodegradable. The funeral home offered 38 full-sized caskets and just 1 cremation urn. It wasn’t till many years later I would realize that those days during my first years in the early 80’s were some of the heydays of funeral service in this country.
As funerals became more and more complicated and complex, profit margins shrank and funeral directors hoped for the return of tradition. I was often accused by the “Boss” of complicating funerals and creating more work. Meanwhile, I felt that I could never do enough for the families I served. Looking back, I just listened well and acted more like an event planner then funeral director. Now this attitude is all the rage. Wow, I was actually ahead of my time!
These days funeral professionals are wearing more and more hats. As the baby boomer generation arranges funerals their parents, many come to the funeral home with preformed ideas they got the night before on the internet. Some have done so much research and garnered so much advice, that they don’t even think they need a funeral home’s help at all. The last thing most want is a traditional funeral. How much for a direct cremation is the one thing funeral directors dread to hear, yet it is now often the first question asked.
Where did funeral homes miss out on this development? I’m not exactly sure, but I do know that the style of being an order taker at the arrangements was the beginning of the end. Listening is the most important trait of a funeral director, as I was taught in school. It’s still important, but I think engaging people in conversation can sometimes work better. It’s not even enough to just point out all the new options available today. I think you really need to be able to convey the value of the options in a way that people can relate to. It’s time to be proactive and create new traditions. The American funeral needs our help. Simply going along with change won’t save the funeral profession. I hope that the funeral profession will rise up to the needs of the new Americans and help them celebrate their lives in ways that are meaningful.
It’s not about the products, it’s about the experience. It’s about how the experience makes clients feel. People still want to show how much they care. They are more spiritual then ever and they want to participate in the event. Lets help them do it well. The result will be new heydays for funeral service. Let the products support the services.
How can funeral homes add value to the services they provide? How can one funeral home stand out from the competition? When people ask each other, “how was the funeral?”, what is the response, what is thought about before the response. “The Funeral of Course” Translation – the ceremony and how it made them feel.
Most of the other stuff is just the mechanics and fluff of the funeral, yes I said fluff. Was your funeral home a good janitor of the dead, how nice the funeral home and staff looked and acted. Were they helpful and considerate? They better be! I hope they offered allot of guidance and options as well. All these things are important, but what do the people remember “The Funeral of Course”! Who does the funeral? I should say who officiates the funeral, We don’t. The funeral directors gave the funeral to the clergy many years ago. The funeral home just facilitates and organizes it in most cases. The ceremony and the way it makes people feel is the real value. Priceless!.
So how do we as funeral professionals take back the funeral?, one word “CELEBRANTS”. Become one or team up with one. Either way get involved with celebrant style funerals and you will be one step in the right direction with saving the American funeral. Unlike clergy, celebrants want your help. They want your involvement and they will work with you. Most important, a Celebrant style of funeral will reflect a positive light on your reputation to do funerals right!. I took an course from the Celebrant Foundation and Institute. They taught me more about funerals in a online six month course then I learned from two years of mortuary science and working twenty years as a “Funeral Director”.
The Funeral Celebrant’s mission is to create a ceremony that reflects the wishes, beliefs, cultural background and values – religious or non-religious – of your loved one and your family. You have complete choice of and final approval over the ceremony. Nothing is imposed on you.
Above all, a Celebrant funeral reflects the wishes of the family and the deceased. A Celebrant funeral honors death and celebrates life. Some of the teachings of the Celebrant course includes:
Funeral Ceremony Structure
Ceremonies for Committal of the Body
The Eulogy
Interviewing Clients and Working with Families
Special Issues: Ceremonies for Infants & Children, Violent Deaths, Suicide
Comparative Funeral Rituals
Performing Funerals
Working with the Funeral Industry
Ceremonies for Animal Companions
Ceremonies for the Terminally Ill/Pre-Need Funeral Ceremony Clients
Healing, Survival, and End-of-Life Celebrations
It is proven that providing the services of Celebrants will result it many pre-arrangements.
With almost half of all Americans choosing cremation and more then 60% of them choosing scattering as a final disposition, the sky is the limit! Or the garden, the sea, the mountains, or the golf course depending on people’s preferences.
It’s a good thing so many Americans are choosing cremation for their dearly departed. The new options for memorializing ‘ashes’ would make some of them turn in their graves.
By Tai Moses
Americans are Scattering to The Wind....
WE WERE SCATTERING my father’s ashes. Ostensibly, that’s what we were doing. None of us had ever scattered ashes before, and no instruction manual came with the plastic urn (which in its army-green rectangularity resembled a C-ration box), so we were proceeding at an awkward clip.
First off, we didn’t have adequate ash-scattering paraphernalia. Always have the right tools for the job, my father once told me. I had stopped at a supermarket and bought a sleeve of paper cups. Now we all stood around gripping them with sweaty palms, wondering who would be the first to open the C-ration box and scoop up his or her portion of cremains.
Our lack of familiarity with ritual, especially the rites and ceremonies connected with death, added to our unease, and it occurred to me later that this might be one reason why so many people skip the scattering and keep the box in the closet.
Awkward as the aftermath may be, the choice to cremate is becoming increasingly popular as our living reality shapes our dying habits. Families whose members were once laid to rest in the same patch of ground for generations have lost their attachments to the land, as well as to the past. Possibly somewhere in Romania, there is an abandoned Jewish graveyard that holds the ancestors of my father’s family. My father was born in Brooklyn. His mother is buried among strangers in Staten Island and his father’s grave is somewhere in Southern California. His sister’s ashes were scattered near San Francisco. America is our family burial plot. In his book The Undertaking, poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch observes that “One of the obvious attractions of cremation is that it renders our dead somehow more portable, less ‘stuck in their ways,’ more like us, you know, scattered.”
TODAY, Forty Percent Americans choose cremation for themselves or their loved ones. In California, Arizona and Florida, where most of the residents originally came from someplace else, people are cremated at twice the national rate, and among the nomadic population of the Bay Area, more than 70 percent of the deceased are cremated.
Until last year, California was the only state in which it was illegal to freely scatter ashes. State law allowed for cremated remains to be buried or scattered in cemeteries, brought home or scattered at sea at least three miles offshore. The relaxing of the law–ashes can now be scattered on land and at sea as long as they’re 3 miles away from the shoreline–has resulted in a sort of entrepreneurial free-for-all, with people thinking up increasingly creative things to do with human remains.
Karen Leonard was research assistant to Jessica Mitford, the funeral industry gadfly who wrote The American Way of Death. Now executive director of Redwood Funeral Society in Sonoma County, Leonard finds the cremation trend a positive one. Americans, she says, are under less pressure to abide by the manufactured rituals of a funeral home.
“Now people have the freedom to do whatever they want,” she muses. “The nice thing about cremation ashes is, unlike a body, you can do a number of things. There’s only one thing you can do with a body. A lot of people divvy up the remains and everyone gets to create their own rituals, which makes it incredibly individualistic and personal.
“I’ve been to some really far-out memorials,” Leonard continues. “Anything you can think of can be done. That’s all because we’ve been able to break the funeral industry’s stranglehold over cremation.”
Formerly the most no-frills method of committing human remains to eternity, cremation has become the vehicle for some unique procedures from the beautiful to the bizarre, depending upon one’s taste. And as sometimes happens when people become unmoored from convention, their newly fashioned customs take on elements of the absurd. Our ancestors would be spinning in their urns if they knew what was being done with their cremated brethren.
In the past year alone, the U.S. Patent Office has granted 41 patents involving human cremains, among them inventor David Sturino’s football helmet-shaped crematory urn. In his patent application, Sturino argued that even in death, people want their individuality to show: “If given the opportunity, it is believed that many individuals would choose to identify their cremation ashes as those of a football fan for eternity,” he wrote.
The indusrty has gotten creative in their cremation urn offerings. Some “alternative remembrance” urns double as jewelry boxes, picture frames, jewelry to hold ashes and clocks. Others can be fashioned on a customer’s specifications; one customer, whose husband had been a bowling fanatic, asked for an urn that incorporated a bowling pin. Lynch wrote that one of his clients had him place her husband’s ashes in an empty whiskey bottle, which she then had wired as a lamp. “He always said I really turned him on,” she explained.
DEATH IS BY NATURE untidy. It begins and ends with clutter, physical and psychological. The beauty of cremation is that it reduces people to a size positively Lilliputian and makes them eminently transportable. Still, practical problems do arise. This must have been what Douglas Casimir was thinking about when he dreamed up the dissolvable urn (U.S. Patent #5,774,958), which negates the necessity for mourners to have any contact with the ashes during scattering. Relatives can simply heave the biodegradable scattering urn, ashes and all, into the deep and it will dissolve, relegating the remains to the water.
As Casimir commented (perhaps from personal experience?), “When the urn is opened and ashes are sprinkled upon the sea, the wind often causes the ashes to blow about and the ashes sometimes get blown upon the deceased’s relatives who are sprinkling the ashes, thereby causing an unpleasant experience for those involved.”
A dissolvable urn would have been of great help to Dave Eggers, author of the recent memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The sad slapstick saga of what to do with his mother’s ashes is a motif that runs throughout Eggers’ book. He finally decides to throw the cremains into Lake Michigan, all the while torturing himself with the fear that he has made the wrong decision, that this last gesture to his mother–the scattering, the lake–is somehow not enough, is inadequate.
Upon opening the cardboard box, he finds to his consternation that the ashes look like cat litter or “little rocks, pebbles, Grape-Nuts, in white and black and gray.” Then he spills some of them on the ground and tries to kick them into the water with his foot, but, “Should I really be kicking my mother’s ashes? … I stand up quickly and throw, this time some of the cremains sticking to my palm, which is now sweaty … Should I throw them all in one place, or redirect the throws each time? Should I hold on to some for later, to deposit elsewhere?”
Desperately, he empties the last ashes from the bag into the lake, “like shaking a goldfish out of a Baggie. … This is what it’s come to–winging her remains into the lake.” Now with the introduction of scattering tubes, the process is much easier
"Life Tree's"
LIKE MANY PEOPLE who die suddenly, my father had left no instructions for what he wanted done with his remains. We decided to put his ashes under a eucalyptus tree along the Santa Monica path where he had often liked to walk. He would become part of the tree, its soil and roots, its limbs and leaves. Now the people at the “Life Tree Farm” have made it simple for all those attending a memorial event can get a tree to plant as a true living memorial.
I was in charge of doling out the ashes. Everyone ended up with uneven shares and I noticed people sneaking furtive peeks at one another’s cups. I confess, I was glad of the chance to see my father’s ashes, even to touch and smell them (they’re odorless). They were undeniably his–the box was stamped indelibly with his name–and in the feeling of unreality that followed his death, they provided a much-needed focal point. Sure, I recognized the painful absurdity of the whole procedure. It even got tiresome to keep alluding to how entertained my dad would have been by the bumbling farewell we gave him. One would think our little scattering ceremony was watched over by a grinning Cheshire father, his face etched with a permanent expression of mirth.
One by one we emptied our Dixie cups under the tree. Everyone had a different system. My brother shook the ashes energetically out of his cup; I turned mine upside down and let the ashes fall in a blurred stream onto the ground.
I expected them to sift ethereally away into fairy dust, but they just sat, lumpen and gray atop the leaves. It looked like someone had just cleaned out a Weber. The next day, and the next, the cremains sat there. Finally, a week later, it rained, and they began to disperse into the soil.
MY SON PASSED away four years ago last week and his body was cremated. He asked me before his death to put his cremains into a volcano. This sounds strange but his reasoning was sound. He said he did not want to be put in the soil because worms and insects would eat him and he did not want to be put into water to be fishfood. He wanted a volcano so he could become part of a rock and stay on the earth for centuries. Do you know of any active volcano where this is possible?”
The question comes as no surprise to the discussion list moderator of the website VolcanoWorld (http://volcano.
und.nodak.edu/), who has himself “had similar thoughts about becoming part of a volcanic rock.” He directs the bereaved father to Kilauea in Hawaii, where he believes it would be possible to pour ashes directly onto molten lava, where they could harden with the rock.
For many, co-mingling one’s remains with the natural world brings a sense of symbolic immortality. Volcanoes would probably be more popular among the dead if they were as accessible as, say, the ocean. A majority of people request that their cremains be put in the sea, scattered from private planes like the one owned by Scott Dixon of Ashes by the Bay in Monterey. “It’s an increasingly popular trend,” he says. But for ocean lovers who want their cremains permanently entombed in a lasting monument, there are other options.
A Reno, Nev., company called LegaSEA makes an oceanic time capsule that doubles as a memorial urn. The LegaSEA memorial, fashioned of bronze and glass, is deployed from a boat into international waters. There it descends to the seafloor and rests for eternity, or until it’s discovered by future generations, “making one’s life the subject of archaeological interest possibly thousands of years into the future.”
Another ocean option comes from Georgia-based Eternal Reefs, Inc., which will “turn your loved one’s ashes into a living coral reef.” Eternal Reefs mixes cremains into concrete to create artificial reef modules, made to last 500 years or more, which are placed in locations around the world where the reef could use a little help. Loved ones can be on hand when the reef balls are deployed and can also charter a dive boat and visit the memorial reef later. Once the modules are put in place they’re there to stay, creating new habitats for sea life.
Options like this make the dead not only more interesting, but useful. In some cases they can even be decorative. An outfit called The Ancestral Tree causes the dead to practically rise from their ashes: its “Eternal Bonsai” are planted in a mix of soil and human cremains. The process raises thorny questions, however. What if the tree/person gets sick? Imagine the attendant emotional trauma if the bonsai succumbed to some miniaturized arboreous affliction.
Without tombs or headstones, those mute reminders of mortality, how do we remember our absent, ashen dead? Human beings like dates. They serve to frame a life, the way a picture frame encloses a photograph of a beloved. Undertaker Thomas Lynch recalls how a friend’s widow asked him to scatter her husband’s ashes in a favorite fishing spot. But when Lynch paddles downstream, ashes by his side in a Stanley thermos (less conspicuous than an urn, the widow thought), he finds he can’t fulfill the request. Instead he buries the cremains, thermos and all, under a tree on the riverbank. “I piled stones there and wrote his name and dates on a paper, which I put in a flybox and hid among the stones. I wanted a place that stood still to remember him at,” he writes.
The need to create something to help the living remember the dead inspired Mill Valley architect William E. Cullen. Cullen, president of Relict Memorials Inc., invented and patented a process that turns cremated human remains into granitelike tablets. To the tablets he affixes bronze plaques inscribed with names and dates. The tablets contain the integrated remains for hundreds of years, and since they weigh only 20 pounds or so, can be moved easily from one location to another.
Cullen perfected his technique on roadkill, and eventually made his first Relict for–and from–his son’s cremains. “I needed some sense of my son’s presence,” he explained. “To scatter his ashes would be as though he had never existed.” The younger Cullen’s Relict is in the memorial garden of the family’s church.
Recently the media reported that a Kentucky bookbinder and printer was mixing cremains with pulp to produce the pages of bound volumes called “bibliocadavers.” But when I called Timothy Hawley Books in Louisville, the eponymous proprietor laughed sheepishly and explained that it was a jest that got out of hand. “I’m a bookseller,” Hawley said. “I just put some stupid joke in the front of each of my catalogues.”
Nonetheless, Hawley’s hoax generated enough serious interest to indicate that there’s a real market out there for bibliocadavers. The process was reported in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s. Hawley was also contacted by a woman in Wisconsin who is starting a business doing different types of memorializations and wanted to use him as an independent contractor. She already had several customers lined up who were interested in becoming bibliocadavers. Hawley had to turn her down.
“It wouldn’t even work,” he said, “because of the paper chemistry–the ashes would not bond with the paper pulp.”
Maybe not, but what about another element of a book? Mark Gruenwald, the late Marvel comic-book writer, came up with an artistic use for his earthly remains. As per his request, he was cremated and his ashes were combined with ink and used to print a special edition of his comic book series Squadron Supreme. “He remained true to his passion for comics, as he has truly become one with the story,” his widow wrote in the book’s foreword.
Cremation ashes have even joined the ranks of interactive multimedia. Ohio-based Leif Technologies makes a “Viewology cremation urn” that not only holds the ashes of the deceased but is equipped with a flat screen monitor with a video slide show and biographical narrative about the departed.
THE ETERNAL ASCENT Society is one of many companies that have flourished advertising their services on the web. Eternal Ascent claims to hold the only patent in the world “for cremated remains put inside a very large balloon and airlifted to the heavens,” says Joanie West, 62, president and owner.
Three years ago, West and her husband, who own a balloon and gift shop in Crystal River, Fla., began marketing the process she describes as “a beautiful way to enclose a memory.” Cremains, or a portion of them, are deposited inside a biodegradable balloon which is inflated in a specially designed acrylic chamber. Balloon and chamber are transported to the release site, where the mourners have gathered. When the balloon is released, West explains that it ascends five miles into the atmosphere, freezes (it’s 40 degrees below zero up there) and fractures into millions of pieces.
“You look up and you see a rainbow or a sunrise or a sunset or a cloud and you think of that person,” says West. The Eternal Ascent Society has been so popular, inundated with requests for services from people all over the country, that West and her husband are preparing to sell franchises in other states, with California first on the list. “California should be a wonderful place,” says West. “They’re ready for it.”
For many people, even the sky isn’t the limit. In fact, some of the spectacles one can purchase seem to be attempts to bypass the unpleasant business of bereavement. Death doesn’t have to be a sorrowful event, they imply; it can be entertaining–a Deathstravaganza!
Celebrate Life!, in Lakeside, Calif., makes specially modified fireworks shells (patent pending) for cremains dispersal over the ocean, accompanied by a musical theme. You can almost hear a note of pleading desperation in the text of the company’s brochure: “What if instead of a hole in the ground there was fire in the sky?”
Celebrate Life! has all sorts of pre-packaged pyrotechnic celebrations that are customized for deceased individuals, veterans, children and couples. There are even special “ethnic” celebrations. “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” comes with a display of green fireworks and a rendition of the Irish-American ballad.
The ultimate send-off comes from the Houston, Texas, firm Celestis, Inc., “the world’s leading provider of post-cremation memorial spaceflight services.” It costs about $5,000 to have Celestis put your loved one’s cremains–or a vial containing a symbolic portion of them–into orbit around the earth. After several years, the Celestis memorial satellite re-enters Earth’s atmosphere and vaporizes, “blazing like a shooting star in final tribute.”
In 1997, Celestis made headlines when it successfully launched a portion of the cremated remains of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and counterculture icon Timothy Leary into low earth orbit aboard a Pegasus rocket.
BUT SHOOTING STARS, fireworks and gigantic balloons bring only temporary respite from the emptiness of loss. As the writer Richard Brautigan said, death can’t really be camouflaged: always at the end of the words, someone is dead.
Later the day of the scattering of the ashes, I heard myself utter this melodramatic sentence: “I buried my father today.” The inadequacies of language–after all, I hadn’t buried him. We had left him, or what was left of him in his reduced circumstances, somewhere outside in the gathering dusk in Santa Monica. In fact, we had unwittingly violated the part of California law that stipulates scattered ashes should not be distinguishable to the public. I conjured a scene: A jogger kneels to tie her shoe and sprints off with some of my father’s ashes in the tread of her Nikes.
For a long while I toyed with the idea of getting a plaque on a cremation monument bench for him, someplace I could visit, something solid and immutable, with writing on it. A “Beloved Father,” a favorite quotation, some dates. A chunk of real estate. In the end, I settled for a sort of renewable relic: a scrap of the eucalyptus tree. I went back and plucked a leaf, and when time reduces it to dust, I will go back and get another one.
Why are so many ashes being left at the funeral home? Here at Cremation Solutions, we believe that the funeral directors who are making arrangements are not going into enough depth with families as to the final disposition of their loved one’s ashes. The question is WHY?! Do you see rooms full of caskets waiting for families to make a decision? Of course not. It would be illegal and a health hazard. With urns of ashes though, funeral directors tend to be lax in finding a home for them. Then, they get bothered as the urns of ashes pile up. If they would just talk about the ashes and all the options available, such as cremation or keepsake jewelry in addition to traditional urns, as well as doing a little follow up with the family, we believe that the storage problem can be avoided and the survivors granted the piece of mind they need deserve. When cremation ashes are left in urns at the funeral home it can cause unresolved grief. The longer you wait the harder it becomes to deal with. As time goes on, what could have been a ceremony turns into disposal.
With more people being cremated rather than buried after death, ash-scattering ceremonies are gaining in popularity. But what happens when it doesn’t go according to plan – or if no-one collects the remains?
There is a moment in the film The Big Lebowski where the Dude (Jeff Bridges) and Walter (John Goodman) take their late friend Donny’s ashes to a cliff top. Walter insists on saying “a few words”, then scatters Donny’s mortal remains from a giant coffee cup.
But prevailing winds mean that Donny, instead of ending up in the “Pacific Ocean, which he loved so well”, ends up all over the Dude.
For a meaningful, solemn occasion to be unexpectedly blown off course is a real and increasing phenomenon. We want to say the right words, in the right place, at the right moment and with all the right people in attendance. But it doesn’t always go according to plan.
Adam Heath, a funeral director from Sheffield, has noticed a shift in how the bereaved treat ashes during his 30-year career.
“It used to be that everyone was scattered at the garden of remembrance [at] the crematorium,” he says. Now, as fictional depictions of ash-scattering are more common, they prefer to take the ashes to a location with personal significance for the deceased. “They would like to be able to do their own thing, too.”
Although some 70% of Britons will be cremated, few specify what they would like done with their remains. Those left behind have to make an educated guess.
“One minute he’s your dad, then the next you’ve got this urn – plastic and disappointing,” says Sally, of Bristol. “You want to do it poetically, like in the movies, but there’s always more of it. And, in the end, you’re like ‘Oh, just tip him out.'”
Kevin Browne, bereavement services manager for Broxstowe Borough Council, says it is part of our national psyche to be surprised by ashes.
“We’re so British, we don’t talk about death, do we? People aren’t aware of the options they’ll have – they haven’t given it any thought at all.
“On TV you just see a token gesture [amount] being scattered – a couple of egg cupfuls. The quantity and weight seem to catch people off guard.”
And that’s if the ashes are even collected.
Funeral directors up and down the country have a room of unclaimed ashes. These can range from tens to hundreds of ashes, some of which date from the late 19th Century. Uncertainty about what to do with these remains is certainly a factor.
Scattering the Ashes of GandI
Gandhi’s ashes – held in secret for decades by a family friend – were scattered in 2010. Many families wait a considerable length of time pondering just the right way on how to scatter ashes. Ashes do not belong to anyone, in the same way as a person cannot belong to another under British law. Ashes will be returned to whoever made the funeral arrangements, not necessarily the next of kin.
Nor do funeral directors press the issue with the recently bereaved, says Heath.
“It’s important, to arrange someone’s funeral, to get some insight into their psyche, to get what’s right for them at the time. But what they want to do with the ashes, collecting them or not, I don’t want to take sides or pick a fight.”
Until recently, there was scant advice for funeral directors on what to do with unclaimed ashes.
In December, the National Association of Funeral Directors published guidelines stating that unclaimed ashes must be stored for at least five years, with efforts being made to locate the rightful recipient, before a funeral company could dispose of them. This includes scattering ashes with a scattering urn in a garden of remembrance or at a beauty spot. Some scattering urns will convert into a memorial birdhouse where life will continue. Always get the landowner’s permission when scattering – or interring them.
Douglas Davies, of the Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University, says even Britons who are not religious want to mark a loved one’s passing in a way that reflects that person’s values and preferences.
“In the Christian idea, people thought you would gain a new identity in heaven. But with a decrease in this idea, this ‘looking back’ [at a person’s past] came on – and there were the cremated remains as a symbol.”
Sasha Baron Cohen "The Dictator" Scatters Ashes on the Red Carpet
But death and human remains can have shock value, as the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen showed at last month’s Oscars ceremony. Carrying an urn emblazoned with the image of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, he began scattering the ashes on the red carpet, claiming this to be the dying wish of the leader – who, incidentally, had portrayed himself as a film buff. Security did not take kindly to the gesture.
But fulfilling one’s identity through their ashes is what many hope to do. Famously, journalist Hunter S Thompson’s ashes were fired into the sky – as per his wishes – in a giant firework, paid for by his friend Johnny Depp.
Others want their ashes turned into cremation jewelery or even cremation diamonds . Many get comfort by keeping the ashes home in a simple cremation urns – or perhaps scattered from a specially designed plane.
So the choice is yours. Or at least, it should be.
Cremation jewelry comes in all shapes and sizes, including traditional style necklaces, dichroic glass, rings, and even custom cremation crystals and diamonds.
Cremation ashes are traditionally scattered, buried or kept in an urn, but sometimes it is helpful to have a small keepsake with which to remember loved ones. Such an object can be very helpful throughout the grieving process and beyond. Our Cremation Jewelry for Ashes is designed so as to preserve the memory of a loved one in a very real and beautiful memento. We offer a variety of necklaces and pendants, all of which either have inner compartments meant for ashes or actually incorporate the ashes into the piece itself. The jewelry only requires a bit of ashes, so the rest of them can be scattered, kept in an urn or buried.
We are proud to offer a wide selection of cremation jewelry keepsakes, with a variety of shapes, styles and materials to choose from. Some examples include Traditional Collection, which features religious symbols, and our Nature Inspired Pendants, which aim to emulate by the beauty and joy found in the natural world around us. We are even able to create a unique diamond using cremation ashes. Regardless of style, all of our jewelry is elegantly and tastefully designed, ensuring a dignified future for a loved one’s ashes.
Since our Cremation Jewelry for Ashes is designed to help the bereaved cope during the grieving process, its functionality is not limited to cremated remains; our pieces can also be used for other items of emotional significance such as hair, flower petals or dirt.
As with all of our products, we hope that our Cremation Jewelry for Ashes provides some comfort to those coping with the death of a loved one. Incorporating ash into the pieces helps to preserve a soul’s beauty, and speaks to emotional and aesthetic considerations simultaneously, all the while giving the bereaved something to remember the departed by. Although the grieving process is never easy, such a talisman can be a helpful touch.
Cremation monuments are monuments that hold ashes inside. Cremation monuments look like the assortment of monuments, memorials or headstones seen in a cemetery. However, they are either hollow or have been bored out to have a special space inside to hold ashes or cremation urns.
Cremation monuments are usually made of granite and come in a variety of colors depending on which granite quarry the stone was harvested in. The granite we use to build our cremation monuments comes from both inside and outside the USA and they are custom built to order and engraved to your specifications.
Cremation monuments start at the individual size. Meaning a monument that holds the ashes of one person. The monuments are made in many styles and sizes, to hold the ashes of couples or whole families, called estate sized cremation monuments. Very large cremation monuments are called columbariums. The individual spaces inside are called niches. Most cemeteries allow cremation monuments as long as they are sized to fit on your plot.
Cremation monuments are gaining popularity for use on private land, such as in home site gardens along borders and pathways. One reason is that the monuments can be moved if needed. Today’s Americans do not visit cemeteries like our past generations did. We are a more mobile society that are likely to move for numerous reasons. This makes a movable monument more appealing to today’s survivors because they can be relocated with relative ease.
People are more and more interested in natural objects, green living and nature. That is why we offer an assortment of cremation monuments that look like natural boulders, stones and tree stumps. Set in a garden you cannot even tell that some of them are anything but stones and boulders.
Cremation Solutions also offers a variety of bench style cremation monuments. They look nice by the garden and serve as a dual place of rest. With advances in engraving and laser etchings, cremation monuments can be designed with the ultimate in detail and personalization. Even photo’s and portraits can be set in stone that capture every detail.
Cremation monuments can serve as an alternative to scattering ashes. One of the most popular places to scatter ashes is on our own property and cremation monuments can easily be installed on our own property. No permits are necessary and you save on the cost of purchasing a cemetery plot. It’s also nice to have a place right at home to visit and reflect.
If you are planning on purchasing a cremation monument to hold ashes, you should first decide on the location in which you plan to install it. Some cemeteries have size restrictions and regulations. For larger cremation monuments it may take heavy equipment to get it to your desired location, so you need to be sure that it is possible.
Cremation Solutions will arrange the engraving, shipping and even find you a qualified contractor. We can also work with your own contractor to guide them on the proper way to install your monument. Larger cremation monuments require a cement foundation. The foundation needs not only the right sized footprint but also needs to go deeper then the frost line in northern climates. Cremation Solutions has experience setting up the installation of cremation monuments country wide. We look forward to helping you find the right cremation memorial for your family.
“Just scatter my ashes and have a big party” We hear it a lot these days. Such celebrations of life are easy and parties are fun, right? It should be easy, but without some thoughtful planning, survivors are faced with many unanswered questions.
Often the scattering may be put off because of all the unanswered questions (“Do I need a scattering urn?”, “What’s the best way to scatter ashes?”, etc.)and the ashes can end up on that top shelf in the hallway closet indefinitely. Helping people learn how to have a creative and meaningful scattering ceremony is a large part of the reason that Cremation Solutions exists.
Scattering ashes outdoors is on a piece of land with significance to the deceased is often selected by their families.
Families are grateful to learn that they can create a meaningful event and still follow the persons request to “just scatter me”. Scattering ashes is often the final act of love that survivors can participate in. Scattering is nothing less than a committal service, it is an event that should contain ceremony and ritual. It is important for family and friends to experience a meaningful and memorable final tribute.
People who choose to have their ashes scattered do not consider scattering to be any less respectful or meaningful than any other disposition option. In fact, families that have scattered are experiencing a higher level of satisfaction. They consider scattering to be a more natural way to return loved ones to the earth. Scattering also allows families the flexibility of choosing a site that is personable and has special meaning to the deceased and the survivors. Sites with natural beauty or familial significance are also often selected.
Ash scattering is becoming fairly common in North America with more than half of all cremated Americans and Canadians choosing the scattering of ashes. In fact scattering is now the most common disposition of cremated remains in the United States and Canada. And the number of people selecting cremation continues to grow, not only in North America, but also internationally in such areas as Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
However, funeral professionals are the only ones that aren’t catching on. Most funeral professionals consider scattering a dirty and unprofitable choice of final disposition. They will eagerly help with a burial, an interment, or the planning and creation of funeral and memorial events, but when the choice is to scatter, they will help you as far as the door!
Some of the more progressive funeral homes now offer special urns for families that choose to scatter the ashes, but that’s about as far as it goes. Cremation Solutions was started when our founder, a funeral director for over twenty years noticed how those who choose to scatter have been so neglected by the funeral professionals in general. He created Cremation Solutions to be an informative and authoritative source of information for those choosing to scatter.
Here are some things to consider when planning a scattering ceremony. Hopefully a funeral or memorial event will take place before the scattering ceremony. Planning these events are what funeral professionals are really good at. Even if you’re not having public viewing and or visitation, you should still give survivors the chance to gather and celebrate the life that was lived. This helps survivors not only with the healing process but also to continue important relationships with each other and to support those who really need it.
For the scattering ceremony you should consider first if you want a public ceremony or will it just be the family gathering. For a public ceremony, you might want the scattering to follow the memorial event, just like when a procession follows to the cemetery for committal services.
Will more than one person scatter the ashes or will there be a chance to share in the scattering of ashes?
Will the gathering be at the place of the scattering or somewhere else, either before or after?
Will there be more than one scattering if there are relatives or friends in another part of the country? If people know the date and time the scattering will occur, they can then take that time to honor the memory of the deceased in their own way.
As the popularity of scattering ashes has grown, new options for remembrance have been created. Three popular product types that relate specifically to families that desire to scatter are scattering urns, keepsakes, and keepsake jewelry.
Families often scatter ashes over water during scattering ceremonies.
Scattering urns can be displayed at services, creating a focal point and sense of reality. Urns allow the cremated remains to be easily disbursed while adding dignity to the process. The location of the scattering sometimes determines the style of scattering urn to be used. The most popular location is over water and there are many water soluble urns that are specifically designed for this purpose.
The second most popular location is on the family property. Birdhouse memorial urns are a great option for these families because they are scattering urns that will convert into a memorial birdhouse, providing comfort for the years to come. Some scattering urns can be kept as an art piece or provide a place to keep mementos of the deceased or be used as a vase.
Because scattering is irreversible, keeping some of the ashes can be very important to the family that chooses to scatter. If families relocate, they can be left with feelings of abandonment. Keepsake urns and jewelry help provide the comforting knowledge that part of the earthly remains can always be kept close. They come in many sizes and styles and can usually be ordered match the style of the scattering urn. Keepsakes can be used to contain the ashes as well as jewelry, hair or other mementos of the deceased.
Scattering is not new a new practice: it has been happening for over a thousand years, but it has lost much of its ritual, most of which never made its way into modern times. Research tells us that today’s families still want meaningful celebrations of life with ceremony and personal memorable tributes.
Many families are hiring or consulting with funeral celebrants to help create and a more meaningful and memorable event. Funeral celebrants are ceremony specialists who have a sound background in the history of ritual, ceremony and funeral traditions in many cultures and religions. Funeral Celebrants have been drawn to this work by a strong realization that every life has meaning and deserves to be celebrated and celebrated well. Many have experienced grief themselves. All are convinced that funerals can be a valuable source of healing. Nothing can take away the grief, but a genuine, well prepared tribute may ease the pain. Whether your family is secular, religious, spiritual or interfaith, or if you simply wish to express yourself in a manner of your own, choosing a Celebrant can help to create a meaningful, memorable, fitting end of life tribute.
If you have any question about scattering ashes, cremation urns, scattering urns, or anything else, please feel free to contact Cremation Solutions for further info.
Throughout history, people have planted trees to commemorate a loved one’s life and have used nature as a way to connect with the natural cycles of life. With their impressive stature, strength and endurance trees are the perfect symbol of a living memorial that lives on after our loved ones have passed.
Life Trees provide an environmentally friendly way of remembering loved ones that will last for years and imbue their memory with natural beauty and strength.
Introducing Life Trees, an affordable, green friendly sympathy gift. A more natural way to remember and share the memories of a loved one with those attending the funeral service or who are unable to attend.
Trees not only mark a life well lived, they also create a space of comfort and healing. Recent studies have shown that patients in hospital rooms with a view of trees heal faster and school children learn better when exposed to green spaces. Trees help us to experience our natural heritage and connect with our deeply held spiritual and cultural values.
The Life Tree Farm professionals have now taken the concept of living memorials and created an easy way to get the tree seedlings in just the right style to suit your needs. Both for families and to share with those in attendance, Life Trees are a way of remembering and memorializing the decedent’s life. When a living tree is not practical, alternatives are available like seed packets or a tree planting program. With the tree planting program the Life Tree Farm does planting for you in the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont. Families are given a letter of appreciation and a handsome certificate of acknowledgement to commemorate the tree planting.
Life Trees are available in every state, year round. The tree seedlings come in five tasteful styles, nurtured in its own earth within a beautiful keepsake bag. The keepsake bags are available in a large assortment of rich fabrics and colors. The trees are further personalized with ribbons and a custom message, or select a message card with a poem or quote in our catalog. It also includes the name and dates of the decedent. On the back of the card are planting and care instructions. Hundreds of combinations of the tree memorials are available to meet a wide variety of styles and budgets for families to choose from.
Life Trees are affordable. They can cost as little as a sympathy card & have far more value.
Funeral homes can now offer Life Trees. The families you serve will be able to honor a life with a beautiful tree that will live on in the decedent’s memory. The trees are customized and usually shipped within 24 hours of the order. The Life Tree program includes all the marketing materials needed to start offering the Life Trees in your facility. Synthetic tree samples are included to display in your facility.
If you are interested in a different way to remember a loved one’s life, be sure to check out our wide selection of cremation urns, keepsake jewelry, and memorials at Cremation Solutions.
Cremation urns come in all shapes, sizes, and styles from classic ceramic designs to more modern motifs to completely personalized urns like the Barack Obama one above. This urn can be customized to be shaped like anyone's face.
Purchasing a cremation urn is not something most people do many times during their life. When contemplating the perfect vessel to hold our loved one’s ashes for eternity, there are many factors that come into play. One of the first things to consider is where the cremation urn for ashes will be placed or kept and will they be kept at all or divided between family and friends. Today most people are choosing to scatter the ashes in one or more especially meaningful locations. In this case you may wish to use an urn that is specially designed for scattering the ashes. The location and method of the scattering will further influence the style of scattering urn needed. When the choice is other then scattering you should consider where the urn will be kept. We are always just a phone call or email away if you have any questions.
Some popular choices are:
Scattering the ashes back to nature in a place of natural beauty or special meaning.
Burial in the family cemetery plot or on a home site.
Placed in a columbarium niche in a cemetery or other location.
Kept at home indoors or outdoors, i.e. in the garden.
Placed inside a cremation monument.
Turned into cremation jewelry, art or an ocean reef
Once they have decided on the disposition of the ashes most people try to match the design of the cremation urn with the style and or personality of the person or pet. Sometimes you just see a design and say that’s it that’s the one. Certain designs somehow remind us of the life and how it was lived, what they wore, how they decorated, hobbies, careers, etc. Many cremation urns can be further personalized with engraving, photos, or a nameplate. One of the reasons Cremation Solutions offers so many cremation urn styles and designs is because we are all unique in this world and we consider urns to be sacred as life itself. Picking an urn for cremation is not a choice to taken lightly, so we endeavor to provide you with a wide selection that includes cremation urns both small and large made out of bronze, wood, biodegradable material, glass, marble, and more. Whatever style of urn you are looking for, we have it.
Cremation Urns in the Home: Whether the urn is to be placed on a mantle, shelf, cremation urn stand, in a cremation urn cabinet , or in a “Life Alter” at home you may want to consider the matching an existing décor and taste. Do you want the cremation urn to look like an urn? Some people prefer the urn not look like an urn at all. Many choices of urns blend into the décor or can be a piece of art with inner chamber to discreetly hold the ashes while serving as a center piece of art.
Cremation Urns in the Yard: People may choose to keep the ashes outside of their home. This is a nice option for those who might be considering to scatter the ashes in the yard, but because scattered ashes are not recoverable and people move and properties change hands, there are outdoor options that can be moved. First of all you can bury the urn in your yard. In this case you should use a cremation urn vault. An urn vault is a protective box that holds the urn inside that is sealed to be air and water tight. They are made to stand the elements and can always be dug up and moved if needed. A memorial stone marker is placed above the urn vault as both a memorial and location marker. Another favorite of Cremation Solution customers is our natural stone memorials which are large stone and boulders that have a special inner chamber to hold the ashes. These natural markers can be placed in gardens and along walkways and paths. Some simply look like a stone and some have the options of adhering a memorial nameplate.
Examples of cremation monuments for the yard or garden. These rock solid memorials will keep your loved one's ashes safe and secure from the elements.
Cremation Monuments are another outdoor memorial option. These are actual monuments like the ones in cemeteries, only they can be opened up to have an urn placed inside a special inner chamber called a niche. They are made of granite and come in many styles and colors and can be sized to hold individual cremation urns and even whole families in estate sized cremation monuments. Names can be engraved and photos can be laser etched to further personalize the monuments and if you move the monument can be relocated as needed.
Cremation Urns in a Cemetery: You may already have a family burial plot in a cemetery. Almost all cemeteries will let you bury urns on your gravesite. Most have regulations as to how many urns can be interred in a single grave and the depth of the burial. Urn vaults and markers are sometimes required. Cemeteries may have other options too. Some have columbariums. These are structures, usually made of stone, where you may purchase space for placement of the cremation urn. This space is called a niche. It’s like a mausoleum for urns instead of caskets. Some are indoors and some are outdoors. Many new cemeteries are also installing what is called a scattering garden. These are gardens or walkways that people can scatter the ashes in. The ashes are usually scattered on the ground and then raked into the earth. A central monument is often in place were the names are engraved of all who have had their ashes scattered.
Cremation Urn Options: Many people who choose to use a cremation urn will also set aside a portion of the ashes for other memorial options. Ashes can be shared among family and friends to create individual memorial options such as cremation jewelry, cremation diamonds or crystals and small urns called keepsake urns. These precious keepsakes are kept or worn by survivors and have become very popular because of the comfort they bring.
Cremation jewelry is nothing new, for years people have used lockets to hold a small amount of ashes or hair. The concept of holding onto something personal of a deceased loved one adds special meaning to the jewelry. Although most cremation jewelry can still hold hair or flower petals and earth, most people choose to have the jewelry hold ashes.
Cremation Jewelry comes in a wide variety of shapes and sizes; it's easy to find a design that fits the memory of your loved one perfectly.
Cremation jewelry became more widely available in the early 90’s when it was first marketed through funeral homes. Because Cremation Solutions is a web based company, we can offer a much larger selection then funeral homes. Our overhead is lower so we may offer better prices on our cremation jewelry. Cremation Solutions not only carries our own line of cremation jewelry but also work with several US based artist so we can offer our customers with a wide variety of hand crafted cremation jewelry custom made in the USA.
Most of our cremation jewelry is easily filled by the customer. Each piece comes with simple step by step directions to ad a small amount of ashes to a hollow chamber in the jewelry. A small screw is removed and a mini funnel guides the ashes into the chamber. Then just put the screw back in the jewelry piece, a drop of glue can be used for a permanent seal.
We have recently added a cremation jewelry piece to our fingerprint jewelry line. It combines the popular use of a person’s fingerprint on a pendant, but also has an inner chamber for cremation ashes. Some of our jewelry is made with the ashes being a part of the piece. With cremation jewelry beads and glass pendants the ashes are added to the jewelry while in a hot molten state. Cremation crystals and cremation diamonds are actually created with elements of the cremation ashes. When this type of cremation jewelry is ordered, we mail you a kit to safely mail some ashes directly to us.
One of the reasons cremation jewelry has become so popular is the continued growth in scattering ashes. People like the idea of our physical elements being returned to nature but also like the idea of retaining some of the ashes to always hold a part of the earthly remains close to themselves. Cremation jewelry and keepsake urns are the perfect solutions to satisfy both needs. Even when not scattering, cremation jewelry can and comfort and a sense of closeness that survivors need.
Thumbprint Cremation Jewelry lets you remember your loved one by keeping a unique imprint them by you side.
Jewelry for ashes give us a sense of connection that other jewelry just can’t provide. It’s being able to hold something sacred and very personal close to your heart and a sign of our continued love and devotion. Cremation jewelry is something that is often shared among family members that also reinforces the bond between surviving family members. For example a group of grandchildren will feel and be more connected when each is wearing a pendant containing grandma’s ashes. When cremation jewelry also takes the form of a religious or spiritual symbol, it can help reinforce our beliefs as well as ad a sense of being.
When I was a funeral director and cremation jewelry was first introduced in the 90’s, I must admit I was a skeptic and did not think many people would want jewelry that contained ashes. Yes, I thought it was a gimmick to help increase sales. My mind was soon changed after the first few families received their cremation jewelry. When I ran into one women in the supermarket she confessed and thanked me for the now very special piece of jewelry she now always wears as a pendant. Like myself, she too was skeptical even when she made the purchase. Now she says the cremation jewelry somehow makes her feel closer to the memory of her lost son. She picked a dolphin because he loved the ocean and she scattered his ashes in a favorite fishing area. Her two daughters also wear a cremation jewelry pendant in memory of their brother.
Since then I have heard hundreds of similar stories of peoples experience with cremation jewelry. I now have reverted to a favorite philosophy when introduced to new memorial choices, and that is, if it feels right then it is the right thing to do.
It’s not about the products, it’s about the experience. It’s about how the experience makes clients feel. People still want to show how much they care. They are more spiritual then ever and they want to participate in the event. Lets help them do it well. The result will be new heydays for funeral service. Let the products support the services.
will work with you. Most important, a Celebrant style of funeral will reflect a positive light on your reputation to do funerals right!. I took an course from the Celebrant Foundation and Institute. They taught me more about funerals in a online six month course then I learned from two years of mortuary science and working twenty years as a “Funeral Director”.
To learn how your funeral home can offer the services of a certified Celebrant, Contact The Celebrant Foundation and Institute. Email: information@celebrantinstitute.org
