Scattered
Our home in Japan was Navy quarters, a snug, one story, two bedroom detached house high on a ridge overlooking Tokyo Bay. Bordering the property next to the house was a stone wall nine or ten feet high, and beyond the wall a Japanese cemetery. We often heard mourners on the other side of the wall, and got the fragrance of incense they burned at graves where cremated remains were interred. At the foot of the ridge was a Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple, apparently curators of the cemetery.
The idea of cremation was new to us, and a bit startling. We were told that cremation was the law in Japan because of dense population and land scarcity. But in the half century since then, cremation has become widely practiced in America. A funeral director recently told me that most Episcopalians choose cremation these days, a statement consistent with my experience as a priest officiating funerals.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s we used to visit my grandmother’s grave in St. John’s Cemetery, Pensacola, where her children also are buried,
and I grew to love the quiet, beautiful, shady place because of my memories of her and the stories she had told me about Carrie and Alfred. Those visits faded as years passed, though I sometimes stop by when driving on Garden Street, the cemetery just a couple blocks north. Hurricane Ivan changed its peaceful beauty into a place of desolation hardly recognizable to one who remembers how Historic St. John's Cemetery was sixty five years ago and more.
Last month my family scattered ashes at sea, and it occurred to me that burial practices reflect family desires and customs as well as social convention. In some places it was long traditional at Memorial Day, once called Decoration Day, to visit the cemetery, clear away brush and weeds and decorate with flowers. If visiting and flowering the grave of a loved one is cherished family tradition, a cemetery with gravestone may be best, either a conventional tombstone over vault and casket, or a columbarium holding ashes. It gives friends and loved ones a place to visit and hold on, pray, converse. Even make amends.
On the other hand, a disadvantage may be that a grave does extend a physical foundation for holding on, even clinging indefinitely instead of letting go. All my grandparents are buried at St. John’s Cemetery in Pensacola,
and family used to take flowers to graveside on occasion. Linda’s grandparents are buried in Birmingham and in Tuscaloosa. Her father, who died in 1970, is buried in Phoenix, Arizona. But starting in our parents‘ generation, the practice in our family is cremation. When Linda’s mother died in 2001, we took her ashes by AmTrak to Phoenix and buried them at her father’s grave. My father’s ashes were kept in the columbarium at Holy Nativity for eighteen years since 1993, waiting for my mother’s ashes; upon her death in 2011, we honored their wishes to have their ashes mixed and scattered at sea. Cremation and scattering in various places is what I have specified for my own final arrangements.
My personal preference is cremation, which honors God’s pronouncement to Adam, “dust you are and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19), and the liturgical words, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Moreover, my view of a general resurrection is more cosmological than eschatological, and does not require a corpse waiting impatiently in a tomb. And not having a place to go, take flowers, sit, visit and weep may be helpful in the long run by giving survivors no choice but to let go physically and move on emotionally. It may be a kindness that there are memories to cherish and grief to live through and let heal with time, but no grave to visit and hold on.
A memory, judged harshly at the time, but innocent, naive and ludicrous in recollection, is of a young man who was a junior (first year) in my seminary class at Gettysburg. The seminary had a drive to get everyone to register on their drivers license as an organ donor. Everyone in the class did so except this one man. He refused, saying he wanted his body to be complete and ready for God at the Resurrection. It struck me as absurd and utterly selfish, a sin. Furthermore, to any extent hope for the resurrection is part of one’s faith, re-membering should be no problem for God -- about whom Revelation 20:13 speaks of even the sea giving up her dead, resurrected for Judgment Day.
As to final arrangements, there is no best way unless one lives where custom, law and culture are merged and long established. To each her/his own.
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
TW+
Death poem attributed to Mary E. Fry, but origins uncertain.