Give Me A Minute – The Case Against Cremation

I was thinking the other day. Yeah, I still do that on rare occasions. I was engaging in Thanatopsis. Look it up. There is a significant cost advantage to being cremated rather than put in a box and dropped into a hole in the ground. I saw somewhere that cremation is about 1/3 the cost. I walked around a cemetery a year or so ago to see if I could find the graves of my great grandparents. They’re the two people on the top of my website homepage. Turns out they don’t have headstones and the cost of having them made is a little more than I wanna spend. A lot more actually. I also found the graves of my great-uncle Fred and his wife. My grandpa’s brother. I look like him. They have nice headstones. It was interesting and almost adventurous as Kathy and I walked through the cemetery looking at the names, dates, and headstones. I got some great photographs too. It was a beautiful day.

I’ve walked The Freedom Trail in Boston and seen quite a few gravesites from the 17th and 18^th century. And having been to the UK a bunch of times, I’ve walked through some really old cemeteries there. I’ve been to Normandy. I figure that I need to be buried and not cremated. Being in nature appeals to me. My body will share the earth with kings and queens, the famous and infamous, the good and the bad, and those who died serving our country. I won’t be alone. The earth is man’s tomb. Cremation. That’s the low cost version of a good burial.