Cremations Happen in Groups

Many People do not realize that when they are cremated, they are often cremated together with many people all at the same time.  We all often have images of body and a wooden coffin going into something that looks like a furnace, and then someone handing a loved one can earn full of ashes.

 The truth is that a single person even in a single coffin doesn't generate that many ashes.  Typically cremation centers cremate a group of people altogether.  It's more efficient and at the end of the cremation you don't really know who's ashes you have intermingled with your loved ones because a person's body just doesn't generate much in the form of ash.

I was  just reading about a widow in England  whose husband was cremated without her authority.  Actually the funeral home came to her the day after they cremated her husband asking her to sign a release.

The funeral home was supposed to clean them properly care for the body before they cremated it.  After all, there's nothing more important than having your body clean before it is burnt to ashes.  In addition to not getting approval for the cremation before it took place, the funeral home either stole a very expensive prosthetic leg or they incinerated the leg as well.

Link to SR.com: Widow sues funeral home over husband's cremation

The Widow is of course litigating the matter and also claiming that the funeral home did not give her the ashes of her husband, even though she does not state the reason in her lawsuit.  She is probably correct about the ashes, those ashes are probably from a group of people.

In Georgia in the early 90's there was a scandal when a company that incinerated corpses was found to have negligently stopped burning people up.  Their incinerator had broken down and they had a backlog of bodies to burn, so they just kind of gave up.  They dumped the bodies out back in the woods and in a pond and really any where they could fit a body, kind of like they do in the catacombs under Rome or Alexandria.

In a way its ironic that many times we know more about the processing of the ancient dead than we know about the recent dead.  Many people don't want to know the details and are sometimes shocked by the reality.  The ancient Egyptian pharohs are studied and studied for millenia.  We dig up their mummies and analyze the wealth that they were buried with from their slaves to their pillows and even their charriots and river barges.

We don't think to ourselves that there is any benefit in a burial with our laptop, or our Golf Equipment although we do sometimes take a sentimental pet or ring to the grave with us.  Truthfully, at the end of the day we now believe that you can't take it with you, so in many regards the widow in England has every right to be concerned over the loss of a $7,000 prosthetic leg.  Maybe she needs the money, or maybe she wants to donate the leg to someone, but the waste of the prosthetic is a tragedy.  The mixup over the disposition of the body was negligent, but society probably pays a little more attention to these things than we need to do.