Our neighborhood cemetery started out as a family cemetery, mostly for pets, and grew from there. Since 2008 it only contained one human. But the Gulch has experienced a rash of deaths in the past few months, and…
…now there are four*. There’s talk of expanding the fence.
S&L have become the de facto keepers of the cemetery since they bought the property, and they decided it was time for a neighborhood “celebration of life” from which I just returned. Had to reschedule it from yesterday afternoon because the thunderstorms didn’t cooperate. S joked that it was a trick to get some of us heathens to come to church on Sunday.
—-
*Since I’m not the most socially up-to-date person in the world I was struck by the novelty of three out of three recently deceased people not only being cremated but also being buried in multiple places. All these people had families elsewhere, and only part of them is interred here. It’s probably super common and I’m just clueless.
Only part of them? Ive had to deal with human ashes more than once now and I thought they should be interred or dispersed in whole. Im not up on the protocol i must confess.
It used to be a not-infrequent thing to bury someones heart at a different place than their body…sometimes for sentiment, sometimes for logistics. Notably author and poet Thomas Hardy had his heart buried with his first wife, and his remains buried in a tomb of famous poets.
And, of course, there’s the classic scene from ‘Legends Of The Fall’ where Brad Pitt’s character sends his brothers heart home to Montana from the WW1 trenches after a particularly brutal episode. ( https://youtu.be/j48GDZKZTUo?si=s3Kzk_y8Pshjp20x )
My late MIL was cremated and part of her ashes went into a niche next to her first husband’s, while the other part went into the Pacific Ocean.
Told my son. Spread half in a nice body of water and half in a nice woods.