a headstone for her ashes

[verushka70]

So I get a letter from the cemetery. About the possible headstones we can get, ranging in price from $300-800. Or a brick in the garden by the cemetery office for $75. I understand it's a business, but this? It's...

You'd think I would be past this, right? My father in 2005. My step-father in 2007. My mom a month ago. You'd think I'd be used to this by now.

I don't know, it just seems... I have no words for it. Putting a price on everything related to death is so weird.

When the eye bank called me a couple hours after she died, I said to the guy on the phone, "You are so lucky I'm an ER nurse." Which took him aback. But what I meant was, as an ER nurse, I hate notifying ROBI/Gift of Hope when people die, because I know that they will be contacting family members to ask about organ donation at the worst possible time in these people's lives. And I know most of those people are going to say No, because they're in shock and they're horrified. But, as a nurse, I'm okay with that stuff. I've seen a lot of deaths. And I knew my mom wanted to donate her organs, but she couldn't, because of the chemo. But eye parts they can still use even with chemo -- at least, the corneas, because they're not vascularized, they have no real circulation.

So that was dealable.

But this? Putting a price on everything?

I know it's against code and all, and a public health hazard -- ok, the nurse in me knows all that. But I don't understand why you can't just bury your loved ones where they lived and fuck all this organized capitalism around death. I mean, that's where all our old pets are buried.

But she wanted to be cremated and interred on top of her mom's grave, so that's what we did. And they've found ways to make that just as expensive as a regular funeral and burial. Sons of bitches.

Comments

[grey853.livejournal.com]

Funeral and/or memorial arrangement, which preys on the grief of others, is big business. We're talking billions every year. It's one of the most offensive things I've ever run across over the years. They take advantage of people at their lowest point, making them feel guilty if they don't buy the most expensive memorial for the lost loved one.

I'm so sorry you're having to deal with all this.

I bought a cremation package and told my sister that by the time I pass it'll be paid for. If I go early, there's an insurance to cover it. She shouldn't have to do anything but call people and have a simple memorial. I'm hoping that helps her through it.

I wish there was something that could help you through this difficult time, too. It's just such a heavy emotional blow on top of already being battered by the loss.

[verushka70.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It is an evil business. It sounds weird but I couldn't help thinking about The Big Lebowski and them picking up Steve Buscemi's characters remains in a coffee can. If I could pre-arrange that for my own death arrangments, I'd frakkin' do it, just to screw this evil business out of as much profit as possible. Or the way my friend, R--- did it. He didn't even get permission from the cemetery; just bought a bottle, put some of his mom's ashes in it and a picture of her, dug up the sod and dirt on his grandmother's grave, put his mom's bottle in, and covered it back up. I was like, good for you. Going the legal, permitted route with their permission and an urn vault and everything is a frakkin' overpriced scam.

[grey853.livejournal.com]

It really is. And you better believe that the funeral business lobbyists have been sure to push for laws that make it nearly impossible to have a reasonably priced funeral or burial. It's ridiculous and, as you say, evil.

[rubberbutton.livejournal.com]

Talk about your soulless vultures. D:

I hate notifying ROBI/Gift of Hope when people die,

Yeesh, that would be fucking grim.

I've always said that I want to be cremated and then have my ashes flung by the handful at people I didn't like. It's cost effective! Though probably a health code violation.

[verushka70.livejournal.com]

I can see your point -- you'd literally be getting in their hair -- but I'm not sure I'd want my last earthly bits and pieces with people I didn't like, although the potential long term effects of creeping them out might almost be worth it! I mean, it's not like I'll still be inhabiting them. Would be cost effective, too, as you point out.

As to the health code violation, well, there is that scene in The Big Lebowski where the wind whips Donny's ashes into The Dude's and Walter's faces (and hair, and facial hair)... Which always reminded me of the way the wind off Lake Michigan forced me to be the recipient of a lungful of my old dog Riffraff's ashes after she died and I went to distribute them off the end of Pratt Pier in Rogers Park, where I had taken her many, many times in the last year or so of her life, on a foggy, stormy night (not a good one to pick, turns out), and a gust of wind on the end of the pier basically flung her ashes back at me as I dumped them into the lake. Maybe it was the lake's way of saying, "Hey, I get enough stuff dumped on me! Put your dog's ashes on the beach where they'll blend in with the sand!"

I had a crackpot chemistry teacher a million years ago at UIC (not the University of Chicago, but the University of Illinois at Chicago) who was -- I was told -- the laughingstock of the chemistry department because he believed there was life on other planets that orbited other stars in other galaxies around the universe. This seemed, when he expounded on it on our very first day of class, at least as plausible as the freakazoid development of life on this planet... I mean, why not? But what really stuck in my mind was the lecture where he told us that everything on the Earth had coalesced from stardust, from the births and deaths of stars, from the birth of the very universe, which meant that all of us -- "we're made of stardust! that's what we are!" He was very emphatic.

And even though it was very Crosby, Stills and Nash, I always thought, well, when they cremate me, I guess I'll just going to go back to being that frakkin' stardust. Blown into someone's hair and nose, probably, if they're throwing me in Lake Michigan. While ordinarily I'd say "Bury me in my yard with my pets," that's just not likely to happen in any urban areas, so looks like it'll be cremation.