Ashes to Ashes

Because I'd rather think about death than Trump. It's so much happier.

Jennifer Beman wants to spend her death where she made her life, in her adopted home town of Takoma Park. Like others who have their cremated remains unofficially scattered in the Maryland city’s back yards and public parks, the 54-year-old likes the ashes-to-ashes idea of lingering eternally in her local ecosystem.

But Beman and a group of like-minded neighbors are going a step further than the kind of DIY ash-tossing that has grown common as cremation rates in the United States have doubled over the past 15 years. They are asking their city to set up the country’s first municipal “scatter garden,” a patch of memorial commons where residents could commingle in the soil of their burg — and where families could return to remember.

I've always thought graves were a big waste of real estate. The Taoists say to leave a small footprint when you go. My desire has been to have the ashes spread on either the compost heap or the garden. 

According to U.S. Funerals Online, you can have your departed shot into the sky as a firework, made part of a coffee mug, incorporated into a tattoo or squeezed at super pressure into a fake diamond.

Authorities mostly hold a don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitude toward the widespread practice of depositing ashes in national parks, forests and other public places. The remains — three to five pounds of calcium phosphate that has been baked at nearly 2,000 degrees — isn’t considered a toxin.

Yes, the compost pile beats being a coffee mug. Can't imagine drinking coffee out of a cup made of someone's cremains even if it is only calcium phosphate. 

Link to a great post at Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

Let’s convert cemeteries into forests!

Absolutely!