It was whilst watching BBC television that the legacy of our funerals struck me. A firm who uses drones to scatter cremated remains were discussing how they do this. A video showed the drone spewing out a cloud of cremated remains up in the sky. It was shocking, seeing this cloud of ash drifting who knows where. Is it socially acceptable to spread anything like this from the sky?
I used to handle and was familiar with cremated remains, which arise from the body and coffin. Much of the calcified bone will fall rapidly, as it is gritty and heavy. The dust, most of which comes from the coffin, is light. This will drift and I cannot believe that it will not add particulate matter to the air that we breathe. Fine particulate, the dust, is especially a hazard to children’s lungs. As you can imagine, I am opposed to sending such material into the skies. It is like releasing balloons at funerals, the remains of which have choked farm and wild animals.
The problem of what to do with our bodies has been with us for all human existence. The pagans exposed bodies to birds for perhaps 4,000 years. That was possibly the only earth friendly way to dispose of our bodies without pollution. The birds also consumed our carbon. It was the Romans, who highlighted this practice to define paganism and changed our funerals. Burial, and cremation for those who could afford a pyre, became a sign that you had become ‘civilised’.
Today, with burgeoning populations, what to do with our bodies is an ever-increasing dilemma. The Indian skies are polluted by open-air cremations with the often partially burnt bodies placed in the Ganges. Worldwide, cemeteries are taking land needed for crops or cremation is polluting the sky. It appears that our beliefs, all dated from times ignorant of global warming, must be maintained.
The reality of the past is often quite different. We interred bodies in rural churchyards for close on 2000 years. Graves were not marked and burials went, one on top of another, for much of this time. This was because Christian gravediggers were pragmatic, even if the practice was unspoken. Then, in Victorian times, burial and cremation became potentially profitable business. And business, like the drone disposals, is rarely concerned with ethics. If you can sell it and it makes money, then proceed. Unsustainable memorial sales were crammed into our cemeteries.
The cremation pioneers intended to change this. You were cremated and an entry was placed in the Book of Remembrance. No subsequent memorial legacy was to be passed down to future generations. Consequently, the first cremations simply ignored the cremated remains. These were just the ash, a waste substance and were interred unmarked in the grounds around the crematorium. Most of these grounds, called the Garden of Remembrance, were far too small for the quantity. Even I had noticed, in the 1960’s, that when you came across previously burial cremated remains, after decades, they were still a solid mass. They will not dissipate into the soil. That was because we ignored the fact that they were full of salts and had a high ph., perhaps as high as 11. Neither of those factors can be tolerated by plants. Consequently, we are now aware that all Gardens of Remembrance are toxic, polluted land.
Both crematorium owners and funeral directors realised, from about the 1960’s, that if ashes were commemorated in some way, income was generated. In marketing terms, they were ‘added value’ in the cremation process. Consequently, crematorium grounds are full of memorial schemes whereby the bereaved buy a plaque, a rose tree or even a teak or stone seat imported from the other side of the world. A drone disposal is just another example of added value. The marketing skill is to promote the idea that ashes have spiritual or personal value to the bereaved. In the past, as I have described, they had no value. Neither was the body, interred in a churchyard prior to the 1700’s, ever marked by a memorial. It was our ‘envelope’ and the Christian soul had left it.
The cost, of course, is the impact these memorials have on future generations. The big memorials are a real hazard if they fall. The smaller ones just collapse and lie on the ground. Vast numbers of recumbent, abandoned, cremation plaques litter our churchyards. They force our successors into an onerous clean-up simply because we did not consider the legacy.
In the Neolithic period, people marked their existence with standing stones, sometimes these have strange symbols on them. We look at these and have no idea of their significance. However, now, with our vastly increased numbers, it would be impossible to accommodate such ‘memorial’ schemes. Consequently, as modern people we need to change the way we look at death.
I got to this point because I spent 45 years caring for abandoned memorials simply because business and people saw it as a right to place them. However, none of those people paid the true cost of maintaining the memorial. Consequently, I spent large sums of council money on memorial safety schemes, money that would have been better spent on social services. As it was, I never managed a cemetery that we could afford to make truly safe. The result is that I have asked Ann not to mark my grave other than in a way that enhances the environment. The point is, once she dies there is nobody to visit my grave, indeed, should I even assume that that she will visit my grave?
The moral of my story is that nobody’s memory is more important than the world we leave behind. Perhaps our only true memorial is the money we collect at the funeral for a charity or the memorial seat we place in the village. We should not, knowingly, create damage or future costs to mark our demise.
Article by Ken West
Stonehenge Pensioner
