If you’re my age or younger, you probably haven’t thought about whether you want to be buried or cremated.
If you’re my 74-year-old-beloved-relative-who-will-not-be-named-here-for-fear-of-offending-him, you shrug and say you don’t know, you’ll let your wife decide.
But there’s so many things to take care of when somebody dies.
There’s so much grief.
There’s so much longing.
There’s so much you wish you had said to your loved one.
There are so many nights when you lie awake for hours wishing you had a second chance … and knowing that you never will.
The loved one is in a quieter, gentler place. But you, the bereaved, are stuck in a hurricane of sadness and self-doubt and regret and longing that goes on for months or years or maybe even decades.
So if you, while you are alive and healthy and strong, make some simple preparations, those preparations will help the people you leave behind, who hate you for being gone, who love you fiercely and maybe feel they didn’t tell you so often enough, who let life’s petty anxieties get in the way of listening when you called them on the phone.
My mom wanted to be cremated. Cremation is easier and cheaper than being buried. She didn’t want hoop-la. The no nonsense of cremation appealed to her, I think.
We chose an urn made out of pink Himalayan rock salt to put my mother’s ashes in. My brothers and I agreed on it right away. Every rock salt urn is unique. It was natural but it had pizzazz, just like my mom. We know she would’ve liked it.
Related Posts:
Be extra kind to your mom, because you only get one, warts and all
On having a hard time getting back to work
My mom (right) and her mom with Carl Sagan at their wedding. She was 19 years old.
A recent picture of my mother, Lynn Margulis, who died very suddenly and unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage on November 22, 2011.
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