In "Letter to a Funeral Parlor," when Davis objects to the company's use of the portmanteau word "cremains" in reference to her father — before his death, the company had called him her "loved one" — distress over vocabulary stands in for mortal rage.
This suggests that people like the idea of being in nature but don't feel that they have to be actively contributing to its renewal — ashes, or "cremains," have no nutritive value.
When I first put the partial cremains of my father in a Tupperware sandwich box and placed it on my writing desk, that was the joke I felt like telling.
There the four — and the scheming Swede — will remain for the next few days as fireballs from outer space transform most of humanity into untidy piles of cremains.
Her cremains will be scattered across Long Island Sound by her family.
My father loved this dog, frequently confusing her name with those of his three children, and when she died at a fat old age, it is possible he might have entertained the notion of having her cremains nearby in an appropriate container, say a bronzed, three-gallon ice cream tub.
My adaptation centers on "Cremains," a story about a young man trying to cope with the death of his mother, but it also takes from nine other stories to create one narrative that incorporates many characters.
In a seven-step process, a company called Cremation Solutions will turn a few ounces of cremains into a diamond; depending on color and carat size, the cost runs anywhere from $2,500 to $25,000.
For anywhere from $1,000 to $12,000 (not including the cost of cremation), Celestis Memorial Spaceflights will launch "a symbolic portion" of your loved one's cremains (less than would fill half a lipstick tube) into earth orbit, onto the lunar surface, or into deep space.
We passed part of a silk-lined coffin that once housed a cremains sculpture made by Roy Penix and a half-collapsed, ornamented homeless shelter made by a Minnesota artist named Dustbin Turner, whom the catalog quotes as saying, "Everyone deserves real art and should live around real art — not just the fat cats".
I watch us wamble down Water Street between The moment and the mortuary, somehow Reassured that when we end up at the Point To await the first clumsy hints of dawn, I'll have remembered why our gritty cremains, Mine and yours, Will be kept out of sight.
