#cremation

[prokopetz]

Do you think cremation places bother to clean the giant blender between "customers"? When they grind up your desiccated bones to produce fake ashes for your loved ones to scatter, are said loved ones also getting little bits of everyone who's come before you?

[mortmicpodcast]

For that little funeral director in training

[disease]

WEEPING ANGEL PINK-WINGED URN IN THE LIGHT URNS | 13 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 11 3/4″

[hypnogogyc]

Dancinggg

[studioswitchum]

I have been ill. Hardly able to put some hours on this project.

UPDATE

I have noticed this post is getting a lot of attention lately. He is since completed and delivered. If you are interested, here are pictures of him finished at Tumblr

and at my personal Instagram

[imkeepinit]

[intheobituaries]

Do you like my sweater? :)

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Even to the last, Bruno Richard Hauptmann drew a crowd. This was the “Gallery” that watched and waited outside the Fresh Pond Crematory in Queens on April 6, 1936 as a simple service was held for the executed Lindbergh baby slayer and the body cremated.

Photo: Associated Press via Der Spiegel

[softgirlll-withanziety]

Why is life so hard.

[moonbasetycho]

[ancientorigins]

Multiple new discoveries have been made along a major Roman thoroughfare in Nîmes, including a new Roman road. The finds include beautiful glassware, turned a stunning iridescent blue and gold by the passage of centuries.

[bostworld]

[veg-hotwings]

I'll never shut up about this.

[that-gay-jedi]

Sorry to be both random and morbid but like. I don't want to go into the cremulator (bone blender) after cremation, not because it sounds gruesome, but because the end product is so much LESS gruesome than unblended bone-ash that I think it actually reaches a pathological level of death denialism.

It seems so extreme to me that we add a whole extra step to make our remaining matter smooth and uniform and prettified before returning it to the bereaved. When I'm reduced to a jar or box of fire-crumbled bone chips, I want to LOOK like a jar or box of fire-crumbled bone chips. That's not concrete dust or icing sugar, it's skeleton bits. Bone. Former vertebrate. Former person. Not a thing that was never alive, but a thing that has died.

Personally I've only held cremated remains after cremulation, but it seemed to me that last step had destroyed their connection to death. The inoffensive powder no longer said "I am a dead thing." I *wanted* to be clutching a bag of uneven, partially charred bone fragments. I still wish I had.

Removing the elements people may find disturbing about cremated but uncremulated bones also removed their ability to bring comfort, presumably the entire reason for urning them instead of spreading them in the first place. How can you tell this is what's left of someone you loved if it isn't macabre in some way? If you don't acknowledge mortality, you can't acknowledge that any of the dead ever lived.

Without artifacts of the bones' former functional purpose and of the fire which stripped away the flesh (a rounded edge here that must have been part of a ball joint, a particularly big or small fragment there) there is no visceral sense that this was ever part of something alive, that somebody once used those bones to sit and stand and move. There is no sense that when it was undeniable the person you knew and loved no longer did or said or thought any of the things you knew them for (because they no longer did or said or thought anything), you let go of the body that they no longer inhabit. There is nothing to drive home the reality of death, and nothing to connect their death as an event in your life to the future without them you now face.

The anonymity of cremated bones relative to the restoratively treated face of an embalmed corpse doesn't bother me, because both are still very obviously remains of a once-living thing. We do lose our individual identities in death. But the unrecognizability of the fine powder left after cremulation does bug me, because the loss of the realities of death is more disturbing than those realities could ever be. It fast forwards past every unconfortable stage during which the deceased is neither an object nor a living being, straight to a mere keepsake.

Don't smooth away the rough edges. Not of life, and especially not of death.

[birds-are-really-nice]

“You can’t be trans because 100s of years later archeologists will identify your skeleton as your AGAB”

Then may I recommend a new method of transition post death called ‘cremation’

[pulvisarturns]

Pulvis Art Urns helps with finding the right handmade cat urn, by offering a variety of designs and colours for your furry pet friend.

Focused on the profound design and aesthetics of these magnificent creatures, our team developed a range of unique ceramic cat memorials, suitable for keeping at home or in a garden.

Find more at: Cat Cremation Urns | Pet Urns for Cats | Handmade Cat Urns (pulvisurns.com)